Donald Trump, Our Embarrassment In Chief

    Good Lord, has there ever been a more embarrassing time to be an American?
    That overseas tour that was supposed to be Donald Trump’s big opportunity to appear Presidential before the world?
     Fail.
    That video of him shoving aside the Prime Minister of Montenegro and planting himself front and center, his extra-wide girth displacing everyone else in the group ?

     Then straightening his lapels and striking that ridiculously pompous Louis the Sixteenth pose?

     Cringe worthy. 

     Did I say Louis the Sixteenth?

    No, make that Frank Drebin, the bungling and unfailingly inappropriate police detective in the “Naked  Gun” comedies.

...who's always causing embarrassing international incidents.

     Here, if you haven’t already seen the video of Donald Trump pushing the Prime Minister, look at it now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrTOlNDMTvg

     You can’t unsee that.
     Look at the European dignitaries around him – are they chuckling? 
     Sigh. Well, if they weren’t then, they are now. Everybody is.  Good Lord.
     But that video-recorded debacle isn’t even the biggest or worst embarrassment perpetrated upon our country by our … choke…gag… President.
   Far worse was Donald Trump’s intelligence spill a few weeks back during his meeting – inappropriate in and of itself – with a couple of high-ranking Russian foreign ministers, among them  Sergey Kislyak, who it appears already has his tentacles reaching  a little too deeply into the White House and the Trump dynasty.

     But couldn’t that scene between Trump and Putin’s people likewise have come straight out of a “Naked Gun” episode?  Say, “Frank Drebin meets the Russians?”  Can’t you see it?    Detective Drebin– played by Donald Trump, who does the part in real life better than Leslie Nielsen did on screen -  has been entrusted by U.S. intelligence  with some sensitive top secret information, but while trying to show off and one-up his adversaries he accidentally blabs what he was supposed to be protecting to the people he was supposed to be protecting it from.

  The surprised Russians exchange happy glances while Drebin’s’s  (Trump’s) staff members slap their foreheads.  Funny stuff, no?

     Except in real life.  In this case Donald Trump’s behavior was worse than embarrassing ; his big careless mouth may have blown the cover of an Israeli operative working deep in ISIS territory, jeopardizing not only the life of the operative but our trust relationship with an important ally.
     And yet in terms of a recent national embarrassments, perhaps the pièce de résistance was the announcement  made last week by infuriated British officials after the terrorist bombing in Manchester that the  United Kingdom would no longer share intelligence with the United States after classified photographs and police evidence on suspects was leaked by from the American intelligence community to the press.
   How mortifying for us as a nation that our intelligence agencies, once considered the gold standard, have been devalued to  junk-bond status. How sad for us to suffer such a down grade in world standing that we, who once sat at the head of the table no longer even deserve a place at the table as far as at least one of our closest allies is concerned.
     And though Donald Trump has denounced the leak of the Manchester bombing evidence by American agents and has promised to find and punish the leakers, the responsibility for that offense lies squarely at his own feet.  The White House has been leaking like a sieve since the beginning of the Trump administration, Trump himself being a prime offender.

     If there’s no responsibility, no competence, no discretion and very little maturity, even, at the top, there will a lack of those qualities within the ranks below.  Donald Trump’s staff and subordinates can’t be trusted to be discreet, closed-mouthed and protective of their President because they harbor no respect for, no admiration or fondness of, and therefore no loyalty to him.  Or, now it seems, to their own mission under his presidency.
    And, unfortunately for us Americans, when a country is being governed by a low comedy dog-and-pony act, the citizens who elected the Ring Master will also end up looking like clowns.