(Post is based on a play on words where 45, as shorthand for Trump, the 45th president is also South African slang for penis).

Reacting to the productiveness of his considerably younger predecessor, the 71 year old 45 has committed to using the withdrawal method with multiple partners, in an effort to prevent any unfortunate accidental offspring. It is, however, the least reliable method when the objective is to avoid unintended consequences.  He is particularly wary of encounters involving multiple partners. The Transpacific Trade Partnership offered the allure of exotic Asian beauties, creating an urgency which demanded rapid withdrawal. Even though 45 was wrapped in a sheath of conservative climate change denial, he was still quick to pull out from the International Climate Accord, as well. There the tantalizing choice of available partners was as numerous as the world is round.

For the most part,  Trump has been quite active on the international scene. He will pull out of UNESCO, the United Nations educational, cultural, scientific organization, completely next year, although the US contribution had been withheld since 2011 in protest for the admission of Palestine to the UN. in the instance, Trump partnered with Israel. The State Department has also cited the failure of UNESCO to expel Syria from the human rights committee after the civil war was begun in 2012.

In his haste to quit international intercourse, 45 has left the field wide open to the country Steve Bannon has called our biggest threat, China. China has been aggressively building its solar industry and installing solar energy farms to power its economy at a rapid pace. The Chinese are poised to be the world’s leaders in alternative energy sources, despite the presence of extensive coal deposits which have powered their industrial development. The presence of choking air pollution in their industrial centers and large urban areas has prompted the intelligent shift to solar energy; that and the prospects of potential markets as the rest of the world is committed to switching to alternative energy sources. The Make America Great Again President is too busy looking in the rear view mirror to see the road in the front windshield ahead. The politics of coal for his Trumpophants has blinded him to the simple fact that power and business companies are switching to cheap gas, solar and wind power sources as the prices continue to drop. The politics is more important to him than the future well being of the country, including the air we breathe and the rise in sea level threatening our shores. Presently, there are more than three times as many jobs, 260,077, in the solar industry than in coal, 87,000. And it’s only downhill from here, even with the Energy Department “entitlement program” extended to power companies to keep them using coal unless those incentives are large enough to make the use of coal more profitable than cheaper alternatives.

China is salivating to slip cozily into the place abandoned by the US next to our Pacific regional partners. The TPP was designed to secure trade relationships with Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries in direct opposition to Chinese influence. Trump continues to nudge partners out of bed with behaviors that demonstrate he is a fickle partner who bites when least expected. Now China stands lusting after an empty bed with the covers turned down with a chocolate on the pillow.

As 45 is nearing his climax with NAFTA, he is gearing up to slip out again, by proposing provisions that Mexico and Canada have strongly opposed. Of course backed into this campaign promise by just shooting off his mouth and finding that it resonated with some in his audience of the self designated forgotten, it was integrated into Trump’s America as “victim being taken advantage of” narrative. But Trump’s appeal is always an emotional one, never grounded in an understanding of any situation, let alone the complexities of trade between the three countries. The AmericaFirst president ignores established supply lines in the automobile industry organized around the strengths that each country brings to the production process. American automobile companies have assembly plants and the manufacture of specific components in all three countries. The termination of NAFTA would disrupt these supply lines with tariffs, thus costing jobs under the president who often claims he’s creating huge numbers of jobs. Agriculture is among other industries who could lose out if NAFTA disappears. These are negotiations in which each side will propose more than what they hope to get, but Trump’s art of the deal is firmly based in the bully tactic of walking away, as much of his rhetoric and past performance demonstrate. He really thinks that he has no skin in the game.

Worried about depleting his seed, 45’s threatened withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal has much to do with demonstrating that he’s not flaccid outside of direct international interaction. He wants to repeat his domestic pied piper role on the international scene with mean talk about the edge of the abyss. He believes that the rest of the world must kneel before him and follow. Of course the Iran Nuclear deal is an international one that is effective because of sanctions applied by multiple countries, not just the United States. It makes no sense to explode a treaty that has effectively prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon on the pretense that it contains sunset provisions in ten more years; why not wait til then to renegotiate. This  nonsense is being perpetrated by people who were not in the room when the treaty was negotiated, now upset that the treaty doesn’t extend to other Iranian international activities that were never part of the negotiations. 45 pretends that if he strokes his balls, he can bully Iran into renegotiating with him. A pretense, because, although Trump’s mind often seems muddled, those moves would contradict 45’s need to withdraw from the world and leave it to fend for itself.  

One other international withdrawal has slipped under the radar for all but Christian conservatives. Under the tyranny of evangelical conservatives, always decrying government intervention in their lives but aggressively pushing the hand of government into all of our bedrooms, the Trump administration within its first week quietly reinstituted the Bush (43) Rule that will no longer fund medical programs internationally that offer abortion services in any country. Where programs operate in multiple countries, if they perform abortion in any one country, they can no longer provide services in any country, even those where abortion is illegal. This will seriously damage global initiatives to improve the health of women and infants. To actively support unplanned pregnancies and unwanted children which sentence mothers and children to abject poverty, malnutrition, and death seems extraordinarily unChristian. They have also curtailed funding for condom distribution in international HIV programs.

It’s patently obvious that 45 has also ventured to insert himself into women. . . reproductive health issues. Nowhere is that more evident than the executive order to eliminate health plan coverage of contraceptives from employee health plans forany whim the employer can think of, as long as it has some rhetorical connection to moral or religious language.  Always hyperfocused on hysterical evangelical anti-abortion forces that stand to increase the number of abortions performed in the US, conservative Christian zealots implanted in the administration have terminated domestic programs in comprehensive sex education, replaced contraceptive programs with abstinence only counseling, and reintroduced women’s health educational information that is not supported and sometimes contradicted by established scientific evidence, extending even as far as the CDC website. They have also substantially increased funding for falsely advertised programs that offer “pregnancy counseling” without associated nursing or physician personnel designed to bully women into continuing pregnancies rather than consider abortion services through medical misinformation. One of the big lies they propagate is that abortion has a higher death rate than pregnancy. This is patently false because abortion is over 25 times safer than having a baby. The maternal death rate in this country is 26.4 per 100,000 births, higher than any other developed country and at least 15 other countries. Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures performed with a death rate of less than 1 per 100,000 when performed before 12 weeks, as 90% currently are.  In the last few years, improved education and access to contraceptive services, notably expanded through required Obamacare coverage of contraception, has driven down the number of teen pregnancies and the number of abortions in the US.

No doubt spearheaded by Vice President Pence, a fanatical enemy of a woman’s right to determine her own reproductive course, a recently leaked administration memo presents their intention to emphasize “natural contraceptive methods” dependent on abstinence or withdrawal in government information and programs,  right in line with 45’s inherent personal propensity. They have begun implanting the falsehoods of the “forced childbirth movement” in government health documents. The new HHS draft strategic plan for 2018 has added to its mission statement the phrase “protecting Americans at every state of life, beginning at conception.”  [Of note, I see no reason to use the name the movement chose to dress up their nefarious purposes. They are by no means “pro-life”; they don’t oppose state executions. I had thought to return to “anti-abortion” movement, the original moniker, but I find that “forced childbirth” suits them better. See a future blog post]. The religious construct that life begins at conception, much like creationism, was fabricated as a political idea to build the anti-abortion moral majority movement in the 1980s with no basis in science. More recently, it has been broadened into the concept of fetal personhood used in court challenges.Many advocates of the forced childbirth movement object to hormonally based contraceptives, including Plan B which no doubt will go unmentioned and perhaps unstocked in Title X funded family planning programs as the HHS deputy assistant secretary who oversees Title X grants believes that Plan B is an abortifacient that destroys human life.

Always one to keep the public guessing, there is no telling what 45 will be wiggling out of next. Only Twitter will tell.

When General Kelly speaks, it is always careful with quiet gravitas. So when he stepped to the White House podium to translate what 45 had tried to say to the family of Sergeant La David Johnson, the youngest of the soldiers killed in Niger, he delivered the kind of message they deserved to hear. It’s a shame that he wasn’t the one to make the call. For the grieving wife and his family to hear condolences where Sergeant Johnson was referred to as “your guy” without ever using his name just added insult to the injury. 45’s “he knew what he signed up for” no doubt lacked the poignancy of Kelly’s remarks when he shared his thoughts with Trump about what to say before making these kinds of calls. Trump probably shouldn’t make them, the written word may work better for him or at least the recipients. We have only to look at the Donald telling storm survivors in both Houston and Puerto Rico, to “have a good time” for examples of his ineptitude in situations with regular folks. His remarkable lack of empathy compounded by his limited vocabulary is not ideal for situations that call for comfort. Didn’t Trump have a staff member nearby with the sergeant’s name? Dare we suggest that the Commander in Chief would have been more respectful if the soldier had been white?

Trump, unimpeded by concern for others, shoved Kelly into the line of political fire. In the past, he has insisted on withholding the loss of his son from public scrutiny and yet, called out by Trump he stepped up to mention his son’s loss in defense of his Commander in Chief. Kelly is probably accustomed to it and ever the good soldier serving his country, he delivered. He went on to describe details of what happens to the body of a soldier when it is recovered and transported back to the US, how difficult it is for a family to hear the news and the importance of support from soldiers with whom he served.

What General Kelly seems to have missed with all his gravity are the feelings of the family. It should have been their moment and their feelings should be respected. If Ms Johnson felt offended, that should be acknowledged and Trump should apologize but maybe in a letter. But that can’t happen, because the Donald never apologizes. No doubt, the family must have been further disappointed when 45, like the dick he is, chose to take a swipe at his archenemy, Barack Obama, as part of his defense of his actions. To say in one breath that only the Donald calls Gold Star families unlike Bush and Obama and then in the next breath to say he didn’t know what Obama did, ask General Kelly begs the question of why he brought it up at all. After Charlottesville, he told us that he likes to reserve his comments until he has all the facts, so how did it go so wrong? The president’s just a hot mess! And so disrespectful of American troops without even taking a knee.

Still, for Representative Wilson of Florida, no doubt mistaking her comments for resistance, to inflame the situation with her remarks guaranteed to evoke the sting of the Trump rattler was equally in poor taste. She tossed the family like a political football. They may have wanted to quietly settle in with their loss unilluminated by a glaring public spotlight. Perhaps they want to avoid it altogether. Wilson, as a long time family friend present in the car during the call, may have been expressing her own anger but perhaps there was a better forum or time. I have to agree with General Kelly that “at least that should be sacred.” And yet, one can’t help but think that it’s his boss that has politicized everything. It is president Trump  who devalued Gold Star families, among many other things, like truthfulness, civility and honoring women to name only a few.