Trump and his team are trashing the White House before they leave

Having money doesn't equate to having class and occupying the White House doesn't necessarily mean it's main occupant is worthy of that stature.  Many are the stories where athletes, celebrities and others come into riches only have their once overlooked antics slowly reveal themselves to be obnoxious obscenities against civility as their world crumbles around them. The many foibles, missteps and boorish behaviors that once were kind of cute and semi-permissible during a carte blanche lifestyle backed by a carte blanche bank book, but when the tables are turned, not so much.

For the hordes of us far removed from inner workings of that tabloid world, a more reasonable parallel as to the exploits of President Donald Trump and his lame duck presidency lie in the housing bubble that burst in 2005-06. Prior to the Great Recession that followed, lax financial background checks allowed for mortgages to become easy to obtain with many afforded the opportunity to upgrade to a home far beyond their financial means. When the proverbial shit hit the fan in 2007-08, angered homeowners whom the bank foreclosed on trashed their domicile in a final act of revenge. 

That parallel is what we're seeing now with soon to be ex-President Trump running roughshod over norms while figuratively trashing the White House and the democratic principles it was built upon.

Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, yet he still screams fraud even as his attorney's lose (or withdraw) filing after filing in the courts. Despite relentless cries of a stolen election the Trump campaign has presented no evidence that there was mass voter fraud with a judge in Pennsylvania calling one of their lawsuits, "Frankenstein's Monster," being "haphazardly stitched together." U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport, PA, a Republican, forcefully rebuked those legal attempts as “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.”

"In the United States of America, this [claim] cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state," he wrote.

Less than a week later, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals in PA blasted the Trump legal team. Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee who wrote for the three-judge panel, stated, "Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. The Campaign never alleges that any ballot was fraudulent or cast by an illegal voter."

While Trump and his campaign legal team are trying to sow doubt on a mass scale within the electorate, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took back $455 billion of unspent credit protection from the Federal Reserve that was designated for five emergency lending facilities authorized by Congress in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Security (CARES) Act. Those facilities will close on December 31. 

“It is clear," said House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) said in a statement, "that [President] Trump and Mnuchin are willing to spitefully destroy the economy and make it as difficult as possible for the incoming Biden Administration to turn this crisis around and lead the nation to a recovery."

Mnuchin is a part of President Trump's lame-duck cabinet and this decision was made in the midst of major surge in the pandemic with the likelihood of a "surge on top of a surge," according to medical experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci who has been the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease for over three decades.  

With Trump and his team hammering democracy and Mnuchin putting a crimp on a potential quick financial coronavirus response, another cabinet member did a farewell tour of Israel and some of the Middle East recently. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu who said the visit was, "a very intimate and productive conversation overlooking the walls of Jerusalem, and it reminded me of how deep and profound your tie is to the Jewish state." Netenyahu heaped high praise on Pompeo, President Trump and others like Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for taking the state of Israel to "unprecedented heights."

"Thanks to President Trump, the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved its embassy here," he said. "Thanks to President Trump, the United States recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thanks to President Trump, the U.S. pulled out of the dangerous nuclear deal with Iran, placed crippling sanctions on the Iranian regime, and eliminated the mega-terrorist Qasem Soleimani."

Pompeo was all too willing to brandish a U.S./Israeli bond while attacking Iran and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah party. "For far too long, Hezbollah has enjoyed near-total freedom of movement through UNIFIL’s (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) mandated areas of control, and with Iran’s support, has built up an arsenal of weapons, fired missiles into Israel, dug attack tunnels underneath the Lebanon-Israel border, and more. The United States cannot abide by these actions against our trusted friend."

Just over a week after that meeting, Iran's top nuclear scientist, Moshen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in broad daylight in what was said to be an ambush. The perpetrators are unknown although Iran is accusing Israel of the crime. 

The Trump administration has never hidden it's dislike for Iran, which included sanctions and the tearing up of the Iran Nuclear Deal put together by the previous administration. Very recently the President mulled military action against them with Times of Israel reporting on Wednesday that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were "preparing in case Trump launches a parting strike against Iran." On November 17, a week prior, it was reported that the President was said to have "asked for advice" from his advisers about a possible strike against Iran. According to the BBC, "[the meeting] took place a day after the global nuclear watchdog said Iran's enriched uranium stockpile was 12 times what was permitted under a 2015 nuclear deal."

Although there is nothing yet that ties Israel and the U.S. to the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, circumstantial evidence (at least in the case of Israel) seems to point in that direction and it presents a major foreign policy problem the incoming president will need to face.

In 39 days President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn in as President of the United States and he'll have a quagmire of raging issues on his hands beginning with a once in a century pandemic that the U.S. is smack dab in the middle of. The human toll is significant right now and will get worse before it gets better while the economic fallout could be fierce as a Biden White House will grapple with a potential Republican-led Senate at odds with a Democrat-controlled House over a $2.2 trillion stimulus package. Add in Mnuchin's decision to take back $455 billion of credit protection with the closing of emergency lending facilities and what we have are the equivalents of shovels of cement being tossed in the White House toilets by a President who's being evicted from his house by the electorate.

While his cabinet is busy cementing the toilets, the Trump Campaign's legal team led by Rudy Guliani, Jenna Ellis and, until recently, Sydney Powell have been on a rampage of disinformation taking a sledgehammer to the walls of democracy. Pompeo's trip had the U.S. overtly cozying up to Israel just before  the assassination of Fakhrizadeh which could end up being the latest salvo in the Trump onslaught, something that's akin to throwing M-80's into the sewer system of a home.

In 2016 candidate Trump won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote (which spurned a fruitless investigation of voter fraud) and went from reality television personality/tabloid hero to President which represented a multi-step rise in stature and responsibility that he was never able to handle. What we've seen throughout is tenure in office is an display of condescending, low-class sensibilities that were embraced by his rugged base and brushed aside by those who benefitted most from him being in office. The crudity with which he presented himself while representing the United States, and the free world, was brushed aside while things were going swimmingly, but once Covid-19 hit, the "Trump just being Trump" curtain was raised and the gig was up. 

With the spotlight fading and the personal kingdom he built around himself crumbling, Trump's numbered days are revealing an exit that will be anything but graceful and he seems to be hell-bent on inflicting as much damage as he can before he leaves. Just like those who lived in a house way beyond their financial and intellectual means and upon forced removal, showed what little class they actually had.