We are surprised to discover this box labeled Radioactive Human Feces contains uranium-laced people poo
By @HeerJeet “Nothing prepared us” vs. “he said he was gonna” pic.twitter.com/I8Dnu7DyJb
— Rob Major (@RobMajor4) April 3, 2017
The LA Times published the first of a four part series on the Abuser-in-Chief yesterday. Meh.
It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”
Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck.
If you don’t count all of the warnings, they had no warning.
Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.
The LAT’s combination of We told you so! and We didn’t know! will be funny once I get over the urge to shout at my computer. However, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen such sentiments expressed, I just think people who hold them should take a second to explain the basis for those hopes. Take the last slim hope: That this disgusting lying fuckwad who has had a lifetime of disgusting lying fuckwaddery rewarded with the most powerful position in the world, would take a look at the Desk Resolute and think I guess I’d better stop being a disgusting lying fuckwad.
Who the fuck acts this way? If instead of being a 70 year old asshole who’d just been put in charge of an entire country, tRump was a 17 year old asshole who’d just been given a shiny new Lamborghini, no one would bet a dollar on the car making it to its first scheduled oil change.
This is as good an example as any of why tRump is white supremacy’s greatest spokesmodel. The man is a waking nightmare. He’s a stupid, vain, mean white man who lies with the abandon of someone who knows he’ll never get in trouble for lying.
He struggles to complete a thought. He barely struggles to control his id. But people keep cutting him breaks he doesn’t deserve and holding out hope that this time, finally, he’ll behave. And then when he does something like speak in complete sentences for an hour, they stand up and applaud.
What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.
And yet it took the LA Times 70 days to reach the conclusion that maybe things aren’t going to work out that good.
On Inauguration Day, we wrote on this page that it was not yet time to declare a state of “wholesale panic” or to call for blanket “non-cooperation” with the Trump administration. Despite plenty of dispiriting signals, that is still our view.
Isn’t there a game were people take turns writing a sentence or two for a story and then reading the results? That’s how this piece reads. Trump is horrible! But let’s wait and see what he does. He’s already done a lot of stupid and destructive things. OK let’s wait and see.
The role of the rational opposition is to stand up for the rule of law, the electoral process, the peaceful transfer of power and the role of institutions; we should not underestimate the resiliency of a system in which laws are greater than individuals and voters are as powerful as presidents. This nation survived Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon. It survived slavery. It survived devastating wars. Most likely, it will survive again.
Where to start? Currently we have a system that put tRump in the White House even though the voters clearly wanted someone else in there. The system may well be teetering on complete clusterfuck. Knowing it is resilient in its fucked state isn’t a source of comfort. And on the topic of the power of the vote, if anyone thinks Republican governors won’t be working hand-in-glove with Jeff Sessions to disenfranchise more people, please get in touch to learn about a fantastic deal I have on a lightly-used unicorn.
Part the Second – Why Trump Lies, is much better. As the title indicates.
