Scooch over, Harvey and join Sandy, Katrina, Andrew and (here insert your personal past hurricane nemesis) on the long couch.
As the Repubs learned yesterday, there’s no political storm quite like Hurricane Donald. (Here we cue a fabulously appropriate folk song that figures in my novel “Water Music” – “The Wind and Rain” – beautifully realized by the band Crooked Still.)
He blew through Washington D.C., cutting a three-month deal to raise the debt ceiling with Dems Nancy Pelosi and “Chuck Chop” Schumer, the Minority Leaders of their respective Congressional Houses, leaving the repudiated Repubs to wonder in the manner of hurricane survivors, “What the hell just happened?”
Mnuch (as in Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin) and Senate Majority Leader Mitchie McConnell were miffed, while Ayn Rand-reading House Speaker “Paulie PowerPoint” Ryan was piqued or roiled – depending on your alliterative preference. At which point, Ivanka “The Closer” Trump came into the Oval to signal the proceedings were over and cement everyone’s consternation.
Then Hurricane Donald blew west to North Dakota for an adulation fix with none other than Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp – whom he pronounced to be “a good woman.” Oh, boy.
What gives? Methinks Hurricane Donald has been experiencing a bit of blowback from his own bluster after rescinding DACA and leaving these undocumented kids, who did not choose to come to America, hung out to dry. And he can’t waste time on a debt ceiling standoff and the possibility of the government running out of money with the Harvey cleanup underway, Irma raging in the Caribbean and Florida in her crosshairs and Jose looming. If there’s one thing a president can’t afford, it’s looking bad in a hurricane. And if there’s one thing a narcissist can’t stand, it’s being unloved.
Now Hurricane Donald is saying that if Congress won’t fix the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Dreamers, program, he’ll revisit it. Good. And if he wants to slap Chuck’s back, all the better.
Here it is worth reminding everyone of the immortal words of Benjamin Disraeli, one of Queen Victoria’s prime ministers, who said, “There are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.”
As sometime The Donald bromance Vladdie “Rootin’ Tootin’” Putin pointed out to a reporter, rather coquettishly, he and his on-again, off-again BFF aren’t each other’s “brides.”
They’re “statesmen” trying to do the best for their countries.
And themselves.