Why stop with Vladimir Putin’s election hack? Aren’t there any other messes Donald Trump can “move forward” from?
You bet there are. He can “move forward” from the nukes in North Korea, “move forward” from the complexities of healthcare and, while he’s at it, “move forward” from the decline in America’s longstanding role as leader of the world.
Amid all the headshaking in Hamburg, some of the newly emboldened Euros really were calling the G-20 summit “the G-19.”
There’s only one problem with all this “moving forward.” It doesn’t actually solve anything. “Moving forward,” the Trump version, is really just another way of saying, “Aw, forget about it.”
“I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election,” the president typed on Sunday in the Twitter equivalent of a shrug. “He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion.”
So there.
“Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!”
Instead of finding out exactly how Putin’s people worked to steal last year’s U.S. election, instead of discovering exactly how deeply the Trump campaign was involved, Trump now wants to set up a U.S.-Russian “cybersecurity unit” so the two powers can work together. Back home in America, that went over about as well as you might expect on both sides of the aisle.
“It’s not the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s pretty close,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. “This is like the guy who robbed your house proposing a working group on burglary,” former Obama Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on CNN. “It is they who did this.”
Oh, that.
Speaking of CNN, Donald Trump Jr. has now joined his father’s juvenile attacks on the “fake news” media. Exactly a week after Senior tweeted out a clip of him clotheslining a CNN-headed Vince McMahon, Junior spread a doctored video of Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun.” Only this time, the third-grader-in-chief is Maverick and the Soviet “bogey” is plastered with the CNN logo.
Let’s all try to ignore the irony of replacing America’s real enemy with a media brand. Maybe we can just “move forward” from these childish video pranks.
What’s next? Booger jokes?
Metro columnist Ellis Henican is a veteran journalist, best-selling author and frequent commentator on CNN and other TV networks. Follow him on Twitter @henican.
