On Friday evening, June 22nd, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party of seven others were asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, without being served. The owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, politely ejected Sanders after restaurant staff expressed discomfort at serving the premiere spokesperson for the Trump administration.
A bizarre sidebar emerged in the migrant family separation story on Thursday, June 21st, when First Lady Melania Trump made an unannounced visit to a detention center for minors in McAllen, Texas. Both when boarding her plane in Washington, and again when disembarking upon her return, Mrs. Trump wore a green jacket emblazoned on the back with the words “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” in white graffiti-style lettering.
Two Trump-related stories came into focus in mid-June, just as the President celebrated his 72nd birthday. On the day of, June 14th, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood gave Trump a rather unusual present, charging his charitable organization, the Trump Foundation, with state and federal charities law violations extending over a decade.
Meanwhile, controversy mounted over the Justice Department’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration, which has been the cause of children being separated from their parents and held in detention. The debate came to a crescendo over the Father’s Day weekend,
On Tuesday June 12th, 2018, US Representative Mark Sanford (R-SC) lost his primary bid for reelection, in a hotly contested race which went to his rival, state representative Katie Arrington, who had been endorsed by Donald Trump. Although Sanford had an 87% record of voting with the White House on the issues, he had also been deprecating about some of the Commander-in-Chief’s more egregious Tweets and statements, and Trump had trashed him in a fit of presidential pique.
If Donald Trump maintains his grasp on the US presidency for the duration of his upcoming solar year, then he will likely complete his first term in office. He may even win reelection. But looking ahead at the year on tap, that’s a huge “if”. This appears to be the pivotal year for Trump, the one that decides how the remainder of his life unfolds.
A few months ago I joked with a friend that the myriad bizarre stories coming out of the Trump administration had begun to read like something out of Chaucer – call them the “Trumperbury Tales” – stories which were individual, varied and specific, but tangentially related by a common venue, in the Oval Office. But the recent spate of presidential pardon-related stories seems to put us on a level playing field with the great medieval poet, in a direct comparison with Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale.”
