Article content continued

“I’m not in the job of having evidence,” she said Monday.

If Trump didn’t mean Obama when he said Obama, why did he say Obama? And, in that case, who was he calling a “sad (or sick) guy?” Some kind of generic occupant of the Oval Office named Obama? Is Trump suggesting that there can be a vast array of “sitting president(s)” out there who might have been responsible for wiretapping him, while not specifically wire-tapping him?

It’s a colossal, hundred-car, flaming train-wreck of a presidency, and it’s only a few weeks old. The world is now unequivocally aware that, somehow, it has to get through the next four years in the knowledge that the White House has no credibility whatever, that nothing Donald Trump says or tweets can be taken at face value, that the current U.S. administration is the equivalent of a kindergarten class when teacher has left the room, and that those of us living outside the U.S. will have to deal with it.

It is a problem with monumental implications. The U.S. wants China to play a greater role in controlling the hare-brained dictator of North Korea, but who in Beijing would be fool enough to enter any sort of agreement with the U.S. when there’s a real danger Trump could wake up one Saturday and tweet all the details to a waiting world? Trump’s unreliability puts the world at enormous risk. His lack of discipline means U.S. assurances aren’t worth the data usage eaten up to tweet them. In dealing with Russia, European allies have to factor in the knowledge that Trump’s word is meaningless, his grasp of international politics simplistic, and his naivete an open invitation to Vladimir Putin for exploitation.