The Founding Fathers got a bunch of stuff wrong – their deification is white male privilege taken to the nth degree.  And that’s from a person who decries the misguided revisionism that says we have to judge slave owners by the values of our time, not theirs. So yes, we’re grateful for their boldness and the thoughtfulness and vision that went into so much of their legacy, but they weren’t infallible by a long shot and they never claimed any such godlike quality.  One thing that was a no-brainer was declaring that a chief executive can have no ties to foreign nations and cannot accept any gifts or titles from them.  They didn’t have cars, automatic weapons or women they had to respect but they sure had seen the consequences of those pesky “foreign entanglements” and the constraints of foreign policy that corruption can cause.

Like for example if a country is a human rights nightmare, as bad as the worst countries in the world in that regard, but our policy towards them is constrained by powerful financial ties.  Our foreign policy towards Saudi has been deranged since they discovered oil there.  We’ve castigated other countries with less blood on their hands as part of evil empires, and an axis of evil, and conspired for regime change.  Not Saudi.  Beheadings just go with the territory.  Moral relativism is evil, but all that oil and cash, well, let’s engage in real politik here!!

From FDR on we’ve been willing enablers of horrors in Saudi and other Middle Eastern nations that have always, always blown back on us.  The Iranian revolution  and the kidnapping of Americans was all about the CIA coup that dispatched a democratically elected nationalist president for a corrupt western puppet like the Shah.  9/11 was literally carried out by Saudis that hated America for supporting murderous dictators.  So we’ve been putting financial factors ahead of democracy and morality in Saudi for a long damn time.

Trump takes it to a new level of galling hypocrisy and venality.  The chief executive, his family and especially his son-in-law are dependent on Saudi money for their complex and mostly obscure private businesses.  It’s bad enough to base foreign policy on our thirst for oil, to cover up for a corrupt and inbred royal family because the first family didn’t disentangle their business interests is a new low.

His likening the implication of the Saudi Prince in the Khashoggi murder to the Kavanaugh affair, claiming that both are unfairly being labelled “guilty until proven innocent” means that the president has upped the ante from covering up the sexual assault of one arrogant frat boy for the murder of a human being by the worst dressed frat boy of all time.

This is why you do not elect a business man.  This is why you do not elect a businessman who will not put his finances in a blind trust.  This is why you do not elect a businessman who will not release his taxes.  This is why you do not elect a businessman with murky foreign ties.  This is why you do not elect a businessman who was helped in his election by foreign countries.

Sure we’re getting all these tax cuts and the infrastructure is coming and Americans are so happy that therapists are retiring early, but I assert that there may be a downside to Trump.