Toon: As If There Had Been Any Doubt

The Corrupt Trump Administration hit the fan yesterday.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced his resignation. Mikes Pence and Pompeo scuttled off to Turkey to ratify Erdoǧan's ethnic cleansing of Kurdish Syria. Trump dealt himself a G-7 summit at his own $800-a-day Florida golf resort. And Acting White House Chief of Staff Slash Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney stood before the Washington press corps and admitted that the administration had demanded that the Ukrainian government dish up some dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden before it would release aid authorized by Congress.

"We do that all the time in foreign policy.... I have news for everybody. Get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy.... That is going to happen. Elections have consequences. Foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration."

In arguing that there was no difference between Obama administration concern that aid to Ukraine not fatten the pocketbooks of Ukrainian officials and letting the Trump reelection campaign's opposition research squad run foreign policy, Mulvaney was admitting the quid pro quo that the Corrupt Trump Administration had up to then denied.

AWHCoSSOoM&BD Mulvaney has since been desperate to let us know that he didn't mean what he said, which hardly comes as a surprise. It's very difficult for the apparatchiks to keep their lies straight when the guy at the top can't get his lies straight, either.

Q Toon: Brunei Blind

Within two months after Trump's U.N. Ambassador Ric Grenell told a German magazine that the U.S. was calling upon all U.N. members to decriminalize homosexuality — a policy nobody else in the Corrupt Trump Administration seems to have heard of beforehand — the southeast Asian sultanate of Brunei announced that gays in their country should be sentenced to death by stoning.

The response from the U.S. State Department was tepid at best.

Global outrage has greeted news of the introduction of the new law under the Syariah Penal Code (SPC). On Friday, the British government and European Union called on Brunei to abandon the law, while George Clooney called for a boycott of hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei in a column for Deadline.
After nearly 24 hours of declining to clarify its position, the State Department finally sent The Daily Beast a statement saying the U.S. was “concerned” about the new law, minutes after we published a story noting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the department's silence.
However, when asked by The Daily Beast, Pompeo and the Department of State declined to directly condemn, or state an objection to, the stoning to death of LGBT people.
The full statement reads: “The United States is concerned with Brunei’s decision to implement Phases Two and Three of the Sharia Penal Code. Some of the punishments in the law appear inconsistent with international human rights obligations, including with respect to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
“We have encouraged Brunei to ratify and implement the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which it signed in 2015, and to sign, ratify, and implement the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

At this point, the LGBTQ community's expectations of the Corrupt Trump Administration are pretty low — Ambassador Grenell's ephemeral trial balloon notwithstanding. My cartoon's premise that the Secretary of State took the time to speak with Mr. Trump about the news out of Brunei is giving both of them the benefit of considerable doubt.

At least we can be assured that Trump will take part in Mr. Clooney's boycott of Brunei-owned hotels.

This president has a policy of steering any government travel business only toward Trump-owned hotels.

Q Toon: Offer and Honor On and Off

CIA Director Mike Pompeo abruptly and at the last minute cancelled an address at Harvard, telling the university that he did so because classified documents leaker Chelsea Manning would also be a speaker this year. Manning, along with former Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and seven others, had been named a Visiting Fellow of Harvard's Kennedy School, which is a fancy way of saying that she would show up to spend a day meeting students and giving a speech.

The former Bradley Manning was convicted in 2013 of releasing confidential military and State Department documents and sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Obama commuted her sentence to seven years dating from the beginning of her confinement in 2010, and she was released from prison this past May.

Prefacing that his actions had nothing to do with Manning's status as transgender, Pompeo told the university, "I believe it is shameful for Harvard to place its stamp of approval upon her treasonous actions."

Douglas W. Elmendorf, Dean of the Kennedy School, quickly knuckled under to pressure from Pompeo and the right-wing snowflake squad. After protesting that the title of Visiting Fellow isn't technically an honor, Dr. Elmendorf announced that Harvard was withdrawing the implied honor anyway:

I now think that designating Chelsea Manning as a Visiting Fellow was a mistake, for which I accept responsibility. I still think that having her speak in the Forum and talk with students is consistent with our longstanding approach, which puts great emphasis on the value of hearing from a diverse collection of people. But I see more clearly now that many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific, so we should weigh that consideration when offering invitations. ...Therefore, we are withdrawing the invitation to her to serve as a Visiting Fellow—and the perceived honor that it implies to some people—while maintaining the invitation for her to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum. 

So Manning is still invited to come to Harvard and do what Visiting Fellows do; she just won't be a Visiting Fellow if she does.

For her part, Manning has turned down Harvard's invitation to be an Itinerant Person:

Manning said Harvard's decision signaled to her that it's a "police state" and it's not possible to engage in actual political discourse in academic institutions.
"I'm not ashamed of being disinvited," she said. "I view that just as much of an honored distinction as the fellowship itself."