Today is Bastille Day in France. The significance of that for Donald Trump is two-fold.
First, until just the other day in Brussels, he had never known what it is, and when French President Emmanuel Macron explained it to him in simple English, Trump did actually get the basic point about ordinary aggrieved citizens storming the bastions of a repressive government.
And that’s the script that Trump followed during his less than calm visit to the UK over the last three days. He arrived in the UK and performed there as the angry anti-establishment candidate that he was in 2016 and, although he was not aware of it (but we were) he assaulted the British political establishment in the same way the revolutionaries in France did in 1789 when they stormed that ancient prison and killed its governor.
Just as the attackers of the Bastille killed its governor, our very own Disrupter-in-Chief stabbed Prime Minister Theresa May in the back during a recorded interview with The Sun, which is one of the many papers owned by his close personal friend Rupert Murdoch. The following day, he said nice things about May at a joint press conference and denied what he had said in the recorded interview.
Associate solitary reporter Dana Packwood met with May after Trump said that one of her chief rivals, recently resigned Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, would make a great PM.
May told Packwood that Trump’s slam against her and the UK deserves a resumption of the War of 1812 (as it is known in the US and Canada, though in the UK it is usually described as a minor part of the Napoleonic Wars).
When Packwood told associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones what she had just learned, Jones told Trump, who immediately left his golf course in Scotland to tell Defense Secretary James Mattis to launch an anticipatory attack on our closest ally.
Back in the USA, the White House announced that Trump has appointed Bill Shine to be his communications guy to replace Hope Hicks, one of the many Trump staffers who has sensibly quit. Shine was banished from Fox News over — you guessed it— sexual improprieties. Shine, of course, denies the allegations — a familiar pattern for Trump and Co.
At the Trump-May news conference, Trump refused to take a question from CNN, calling it fake news.
Simultaneously, Shine held a news conference, without the permission of Chief of Staff John Kelly, to announce that he, Murdoch, and Trump have established the Fake News Association, which Shine will be running. Its purpose, Shine said, is to put all news organizations that have ever said anything negative about Trump on a blacklist, with all press privileges revoked. So far, Fox News and Breitbart are the only organizations which are allowed to attend White House press briefings or Trump’s news conferences.