White House offered gold toilet seat for decor :
Self-proclaimed ‘billionaire’ United States President Donald Trump, unsatisfied with the opulence of the White House, asked the revered Guggenheim Museum, New York, for a famous Van Gogh painting on loan for his official residence but, all he was offered was a 18-carat gold toilet seat! After a week of new controversies around the Russia conspiracy that eclipsed his lack-lustre performance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Donald Trump returned home to reports of this latest humiliation by a critical American elite.
Equally humiliating were reports by some news media that some in the elite business and political audience at the WEF event had booed rather than clapped when Trump had repeated his usual ‘fake media’ accusations and named specific prestigious Western publications.
Time magazine, Washington Post, The Guardian (UK), The Independent (UK) and many other news outlets reported last week that the American ‘first couple’ had, earlier last year, asked the Guggenheim for its prized Van Gogh painting titled “Landscape With Snow,” featuring a man and his dog. TIME said that Museum Curator Nancy Spector, who is a known Trump critic, had e-mailed the White House’s Curator last September to say that, instead, the Trumps could borrow the18-karat toilet art work installation , titled “America,” created by avant-garde sculptor Maurizio Cattelan.
The art installation, valued at over US$ 1 million, is an actual working toilet seat and, had been used by Guggenheim visitors in a museum restroom until mid-September. The shiny gold toilet, is, according to the Guggenheim, artiste Maurizio Cattelan’s critique of American society’s decadence.
The Museum told the news media that it had yet to hear the White House’s response to its generous offer of interior décor for America’s ‘first residence’.
This, and other minor news sensations about the American First Family, however, was overshadowed completely by the latest bombshell involving the far bigger scandal of the Russia conspiracy. Much of the top leadership of his presidential election campaign in 2016 are already under direct investigation in this connection by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and some now face criminal indictment.
At least one top Trump Administration official, namely, short-lived National Security Adviser General (Rtd) Michael Flynn, has already pleaded ‘guilty’ to related charges and is now ‘collaborating’ with the FBI investigation. Trump’s first election campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is already facing charges pertaining to tax evasion and receipt of tainted monies from foreign entities, some deemed hostile to the USA – such as money from top sources within Ukrainian government which was, at the time, pro-Moscow.
Today, there are at least eight top-level Trump administration officials under direct investigation by the FBI. They are being probed in connection with the Russia conspiracy or related issues, such as hiding relevant information from the FBI, and failure to disclose contacts with foreign powers, specially Russia, yet seen as America’s main global rival. A second line of investigation is into the alleged attempts by the President to block the FBI’s Russia probe.
As with any other functioning state, attempts to block official probes of crimes, are regarded as abuse of power and ‘obstruction of justice’.
Donald Trump is already under investigation for ‘obstruction of justice’ after he allegedly attempted to influence previous FBI Director James Comey when Comey first initiated the Russia probe and, subsequently, fired Comey from his post of Director.
The latest revelations by big US mainstream news outlets is that barely a month after he fired (without genuine reason, some say) FBI Director Comey, Trump, in June last year, actually ordered the summary dismissal of the newly appointed ‘Special Counsel’ Robert Mueller. Mueller, a recently retired head of the FBI had been appointed to take over the Russia probe after the departure of Director Comey.
America’s legal elite, notwithstanding their President’s attempted grandstanding at the World Economic Forum in Davos, are now heatedly debating whether the Mueller revelations clinches an ‘obstruction of justice’ case by this further evidence of malicious or criminal intent. Under US law, what is needed for an indictment is evidence of deliberate ‘intent’ to obstruct the course of a judicial or criminal probe.
US commentators are now saying that the evidence of ‘intent’ to obstruct a criminal probe is mounting. Meanwhile, the FBI is likely to ask to question the President at some point in the next two weeks.
Some commentators in America and elsewhere are now arguing that the more concrete evidence of crimes is thrown up, the closer Donald Trumps gets to facing either impeachment or calls to resign. Thus, America has a ‘lame-duck’ President already – hardly the ‘leader of the free world’.
With all these treason and abuse of power investigations under way, the American President can no longer muster the same credibility and ‘brand’ attraction that previous US leaders have done when they attended such powerful international fora.
On Al Jazeera, Deutschewelle, France 24 news channels and many other news outlets, commentators scoffed at the American President’s rather vacuous speeches and statements in Davos. According to these news agencies, the American President, this time round, was hardly taken seriously.
This was because of his reputation for lying and, therefore, inability to keep his word. In any case, Trump, typically, did not make any coherent or significant commitment by the US toward any international or multilateral policy for tackling the many common global problems.
When, in his Davos speech, Trump bombastically claimed that the previous evening he had met 15 European top businessmen who had committed ‘billions’ in investments in the US, European commentators laughed it off. They pointed out that none of 15 business magnates who had dined with Trump had later admitted to making any such investment commitments.
Thus, even as his legal and political problems in the US worsen, the rest of the world is beginning to dismiss Trump for the insignificant political actor that he is – insignificant, that is, in comparison to past US leaders and current other world leaders like Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi. The diminution of American is well under way.
Not only is Trump to blame for that. The Republican Party of America, who chose him from among nine other potential candidates, to run for the presidency, is, perhaps, even more to blame. How history will judge one of the world’s most famous and influential political parties depends on how the Republican Party deals with the growing problem in their hands.
And, to add to his humiliation, Mrs. Melania Trump refused to accompany him on his trip to the World Economic Forum. News media speculation was that the First Lady’s boycott follows her extreme embarrassment after news reports that her husband had, some years ago – barely a year into their own marriage – carried out an affair with an American porn film star and paid the actress some US$ 130,000 for her to keep ‘mum’ about the dalliance.
Can one be surprised that one of America’s most refined centres of art, the Guggenheim, offered Donald Trump a toilet seat as house decor?