Can there be any doubt? America’s foreign policy is being re-shaped by Trump’s business interests. First there was Putin, perhaps Trump’s most important “investor”. Whatever Putin does is OK, invading Crimea, corrupting our elections, and even poisoning defectors living in other countries. Now it’s the barbaric Saudis. Trump’s new motto is innocent even when proven guilty. If big money whispers low, Donald Trump can hear it loud and clear.
My guess is that Trump’s lavish praise for North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has to do with a secret agreement to invest North Korean money in a new Trump Tower in Pyongyang. Relations with Mexico would be much better if they had been willing to go along with Trump’s grand scheme for the Trump Wall. It would more than pay for itself as a tourist attraction. If behind-the-scenes negotiations for a new Trump tower and golf course in Beijing had not stalled, trust me, there would be no trade war.
Living in Trump Tower has its novelties (I can’t call them “advantages”): the most corrupt Presidential cabinet in our history; the perversion of several departments of the Federal government in ways that undermine their missions; pervasive, calculated, shameless lies that have created a deep fog of deception usually reserved only for one’s enemies in wartime; the routine incitement of hatred and even civil violence toward various political “enemies” (AKA fellow citizens); nepotism and personal “emoluments” (AKA conflicts of interest) on a grand scale; and so much more.
In fact, Trump Tower resembles nothing so much as the old-fashioned looney bin, cuckoos’ nest, mad house, insane asylum (choose your metaphor). The question is whether or not the inmates will regain their sanity and escape from this high-rise nut house.
Peter Corning
Peter Corning is currently the Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems in Seattle, Washington. He was also a one-time science writer at Newsweek and a professor for many years in the Human Biology Program at Stanford University, along with holding a research appointment in Stanford’s Behavior Genetics Laboratory.