We’ll see. I’ll press on with the memoir\u00a0for now, but after taking a week off from blogging I find I miss it. The question is, what to put on the front burner, the memoir or the blog? Magic 8 Ball says “check back later.”<\/p>\n
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Gym again this morning. The wall TVs were all set to Fox, but only one had the volume on, and it was loud enough to hear from one end to the other. I was on one of the leg machines when Fox\u00a0started playing a Trump speech. I hate the way he talks. I hate what he talks about. I hate his voice. And I guess I’m not alone\u00a0… a younger guy asked everyone if it was okay to turn the volume down, and the other two or three of us said hell yes, and then he turned it off altogether.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to use the Trump administration’s vocabulary, but obviously the transcripts<\/a> of Trump’s telephone conversations with Australian and Mexican leaders were, well, leaked. If you\u00a0were a foreign head of state, would you\u00a0now be willing to speak on the phone with the president of the USA? Of course not. You might not even be willing to speak with him face to face, unless there’s no one else within earshot, and even then you’d wonder if your conversation was being taped somehow. These kinds of leaks, no matter how\u00a0hard you want to see Trump fail, are\u00a0not a good thing.<\/p>\n So who’s doing the leaking? Someone close to the man. Someone with access. Someone in a position of trust. Someone who wants to bring Trump down. Here’s an AP photo from January, taken during Trump’s telephone conversation with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull:<\/p>\n Who was in the room (besides the photographer who took this shot)? Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn. That’s where I’d start my witch hunt (damn it, Trump, stop putting words in my mouth).<\/p>\n As for Trump’s obliviousness during those calls, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. He lives in his own reality, impervious to outside voices and events. I think he really believes his own bombast: the size of the crowd during his inauguration, the imaginary congratulations from the president of the Boy Scouts, the millions of fake “voters” who marked their\u00a0ballots for Hillary Clinton. He thinks he’s leading. He probably thinks the military has already shown the door to trans servicemen and women. It’s becoming obvious, even to his supporters, that no one’s on the bridge. How much longer can this go on?<\/p>\n Speaking of links: on Wednesday a teenager opened an emergency escape hatch<\/a>, climbed out and slid off the wing of a jetliner that had just landed at San Francisco International. I jokingly tweeted\u00a0that copycats are coming: when I drove school buses a few years ago, teenaged boys would sit in the back and egg each other on until one would open the emergency door and jump out. My joke was nothing compared to Steven Slater’s one-word tweet: “Amateur” (it helps if you remember who Steven Slater<\/a> is).\u00a0<\/p>\n This morning, though, I see\u00a0there’s more to the story<\/a>: other passengers on the flight said the kid seemed emotionally distressed, and he’s now being evaluated at a mental health facility.<\/p>\n![\"8235080-3x2-940x627\"](\"https:\/\/farm5.staticflickr.com\/4359\/35975530620_6b3bbf2625_z.jpg\")
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