By the second week of the new administration, I was alarmed at the growing number of Trump people who seem to be involved in “this Russian thing”—even though it is a hoax—as the commander in chief still calls it.
We haven’t had an administration with so much contact with Russians since they were our allies in the war against Nazi Germany.
The most bizarre aspect of the revelations is how the Trump people can’t remember their contacts and secret meetings with ambassadors, oligarchs, lawyers, professors, business commissars, and even Putin’s son-in-law, all of whom have ties to the Kremlin.
How could they all forget?
In all my years as a respected scholar of presidencies I have never witnessed an administration in which so many cabinet members and advisers had come down with, to use the clinical term, the forgotskis.
The forgotskis is a contagious disease, a malady that some said was brought in to the Trump campaign by his top military adviser, General Flimflam Flynn (from Rhode Island, America’s most corrupt state), who not only forgot to mention his rendezvous and phone calls with the Russian ambassador, but also was an employee of the Russian TV network RT and on the payroll of the Turkish government as a lobbyist, while neglecting to register as a foreign agent.
The first sign that the forgotskis had struck the upper ranks of the new administration was the president himself.
First, he forgot he knew the man who claimed to be the president of Russia. It turned out he wasn’t just a citizen named V. Putin auditioning for a job as doorman at the Trump Arms Hotel & Golf Club, which the First Realtor is planning to build or lease and refurbish on the site of the Lubyanka, the former KGB headquarters and prison, where, on a clear day, it is said, you can see Siberia from its basement.
Then the man who is the greatest master of bait and switch ever to sit in the Oval Office forgot that his former campaign manager (Paul Manafort) was a friend of the Russian ambassador who might have helped him get the job running the election campaign of the corrupt pro-Russian Ukrainian president.
The saddest case of the forgotskis in recent memory hit Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had so many forgotten involvements with Russkies that he has had to revise his story three times. So far. He reminds me of those characters in Roger Corman horror movies who wake up not remembering a few hours or three days in their lives.
Before his next grilling by Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, the AG should have taken the new miracle drug Prevagen, as they say on TV, clinically shown to help with mild to severe memory problems using jellyfish brains, as I gather, with possible side effects of creating the spine of a jellyfish.
Further evidence that there is cause for alarm about the disease of collective amnesia is the strange performance being put on by the commerce secretary.
In the process of hastily ramming through anointed billionaires for the Trumpian cabinet, the Commerce Committee forgot to ask Sleepy Wilbur Ross about his part-time job as vice chairman of the Cyprus national bank, which specializes in laundering rubles and dollars for Russian oligarchs including President Putin.
While hailing himself for divesting eighty investments that made him the “king of bankruptcy,” a pretender to the crown already held by King Donald the Insolvent, Ross remembered just this week that, da, he still owns a sizable chunk of a transoceanic shipping company (Navigator Holdings), which transports Russian natural gas in partnership with Putin’s daughter’s husband.
He should also be on Prevagen.
And let’s not forget the commander in chief’s right-hand son-in-law, who may have set a record for the administration in forgetfulness. Jared neglected to list from 30 to 101 contacts with Russians when applying for top-secret security clearance.
The last time the Russians were so involved in the inner workings of our government, during the FDR and Truman (Democratic) administrations, according to the Venona project, USSR intelligence agencies had 349 Americans embedded as spies. CIA alone had fifteen to twenty. Alger Hiss was on track to become secretary of state until he ran into Whittaker Chambers and the pumpkin papers.
“No collusion, no nothing. Investigate Hillary,” Honest Don assured us for the nineteenth time as he left for Northeast Asia one weekend.
The forgotski affliction, to be fair, was rampant beyond those who dealt with formulating the new To Russia with Love foreign policy. The new treasury secretary (Steve Mnuchin) in the “Greatest Cabinet Ever,” as POTUS dubbed it, forgot to mention the $100 million he had stashed away in the Bahamas. The secretary of health and human services (Tom Price) forgot he had a portfolio of health care industry investments, and also forgot he had expended more than $1,000,000 in department funds for personal travel on charter flights and military planes in only his first (and last) 231 days in office. The energy secretary (Perry) was heading the department whose name he forgot during a national TV debate. The HUD secretary (Ben Carson) forgot the people he referred to as “immigrants” were also known as slaves.
What worries me most, though, is the press ignoring the Russian ambassador’s dilemma.
He’s been sending in voluminous reports about all the good work he is doing in subverting the American electoral process, a goal of Communist policy since the 1920s.
After just finishing a three-hour lunch with caviar and vodka, an informal state dinner with the samovar and balalaikas, he needs to write a full report of a good meeting of minds, what was said verbatim, etc.
And then what happens? He has been sending in all these voluminous reports every week to the Kremlin, noting that he spent such-and-such amount of rubles on this and that incoming officials of the Trump administration.
But then they all deny ever meeting him!
Wait a second, his bosses at the Kremlin are probably shaking their heads, is this guy making it all up?
With every “No, I never met the guy,” the ambassador is seeing his promotion fly out the embassy window. His chances are ruined!
This is terrible. If he can’t show photos shaking hands with the different incoming Trump cabinet people, his next assignment might be counting trees in Siberia.