Trump, Ivanka, Chelsea, witch hunt, cheese, strawberries, "Queeg balls" — and clear evidence that life imitates Bogart

It’s old and rather tiresome news that just when you think Donald Trump’s administration can’t get any crazier, it becomes crazier.

Recently, news emerged that the interminably long Trumpian opera buffa, now going into perhaps its forty-thousandth act, pulled yet another cuckoo clock out of its hat, and it’s a wowser. 

Talk about witch hunts!

In 2017, the State Department, then still under the command of Rex Tillerson, instituted an investigation. The investigators delved into who in the USA's  mission to the European Union in Brussels “liked” a tweet that Chelsea Clinton posted on Twitter, according to both The Daily Beast and Salon . 

The tweet actually got half a million “likes,” but the concern was that one or two of the "likes" — or maybe, God forbid, a dozen of them — might have been posted by U.S. Government employees.

All this started in July of 2017, when The Trumpster decided that instead of directly participating in the G-20 meeting of the world’s economic powerhouses in Hamburg, his daughter Ivanka should round out her resumé by attending in his place and perhaps sharing her learned economic expertise with the world's leaders and finance ministers.

For some reason (I’m sure the Trumpster can’t imagine what reason), this attracted a wave of criticism. So The Trumpster took to Twitter to defend his then-most-recent act of nepotism. In one tweet he wrote: “If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother, as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!”

Whereupon Chelsea tweeted back, “It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not.”

As previously stated, half a million Twitter followers “liked” that tweet, including some from the U.S. mission to the European Union. 

Fire in the hole!

Those "likes" must have ignited an explosion of paranoia. The Daily Beast tell us:

That kickstarted a weeks-long investigation, prompted by the secretary’s office, into who exactly at the Brussels mission had access to the Twitter account and hit “Like” on Clinton’s tweet, according to two former U.S. officials. (Full disclosure: Clinton sits on the board of IAC, The Daily Beast’s parent company.) At least 10 people were interviewed about whether they, as administrators of the account, had mistakenly or deliberately pressed the “Like” button. All of them denied any wrongdoing, those sources said. One individual familiar with the exchanges said the secretary of state’s top managers in Washington “wanted blood” and called Brussels numerous times demanding the name of the culprit.

Somehow, all this brought to mind The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, a movie derived from a novel by Herman Wouk, in which another seemingly insignificant affront to an authoritarian figure launched an investigation.

So now we have life, or at least the real life Donald Trump, imitating Bogart in search not of a cheese pilferer or a strawberry thief, but of a tweet-liker. You can’t make this stuff up, which I find to be a cause for hope.

Because if life continues to imitate Bogart, we may ended up with Trump at a Bogartian denouement, in which Trump, like Bogart, loses his shit during a public legal proceeding such as, say, a Senate impeachment trial. 

The the only significant difference might be that instead of using a pair of steel ball bearings as if they were worry beads, Trump will fiddle with his cell phone and its Twitter app. Go ahead, watch the scene here, but imagine that Humphrey Bogart is orange: