a madman

Saturday, March 11, 2017

a madman

#45 is the nightmare we figured he would be.

When the president is a madman

by Mark Morford

Trump points to which White House visitors he'd like
to have arrested and/or killed for not taking a flattering enough picture of him

He is inept and incompetent. He is petulant and hugely disorganized, sloppy by multiple definitions, his harried, frustrated staff ever in a state of confusion, a mad scramble for footing that’s never to be found.

He is temperamental, raging, a truly unstable old man-child with terrible impulse control, tweeting, replete with tyyppos and ALL CAPS, one moment about how former president Obama “wire tapped” his hotel, and then, apparently bored with that extremely serious but entirely unfounded criminal accusation, choosing, less than an hour later, to blast Arnold Schwarzenegger’s low ratings on Celebrity Apprentice, the President of the United States whipsawing between whiny emotional sneer and nutball right-wing conspiracy theory like a glue-sniffing ‘tween.

There is no accounting for it all, except to suggest mental instability, a savage derangement wrought of too much power swallowed too quickly into a bloated orange fleshball completely incapable of handing it; there is no compass of any kind, nothing to prevent the President of the United States from drunk-texting America in a spazzy, demon-haunted pre-dawn fury.

Is he bipolar? Schizophrenic? He never released his medical records, so it’s impossible to say just how many demons afflict him at any given moment, but lo, they are legion. He is most certainly enormously paranoid, given his panicked outrage at the recusal of Jeff “Forrest Gump” Sessions and his tweets about wiretaps; he doubtlessly knows the Feds are closing in on him, is surely aware that multiple intelligence agencies around the world are gathering all kinds of rock-solid intel on his vast, treasonous corruptions with the Russians (among multiple others), and it’s only the lead-booted, totalitarian power-suck of the GOP coupled to various madcap distractions – immigration bans! Guantanamo Bay! Gutting your health care! Campaign rallies in Florida! – that keep it all from collapsing in on itself. For the moment.

One thing is clear: Trump hates this job. He hates the press corps, the various protocols, the lack of freedom, the “acting presidential” thing, all the people he has to pretend to care about. He even hates the White House itself, spending fully a third of his short time as president at his eminently tacky golf resort in Florida.

The president, watching Fox News at 3AM
in a paranoid delirium, just before
tweeting about bad hombres and sluts.

He holds a special place of hatred for democracy itself: for the courts, federal agencies, regulations, investigations, congress. Witness: Trump (at Bannon’s behest) has deliberately left hundreds of vital positions unfilled across multiple federal agencies, countless vital junior-level diplomatic and administrative roles essential to a functioning country, from the State Department to HUD to the Treasury, all in a calculated attempt to destabilize the basic workings of government and create a power vacuum that Bannon will fill with flying monkeys and moral cyanide and, apparently, copious amounts of vodka.

He remains obsessed with Obama, with Hillary, with the New York Times, with Fox News and right-wing talk radio conspiracy theories spun of the nation’s most laughable – but now bizarrely dangerous – fake-new imbeciles. He eats only junk food, watches “the Sunday shows” to see how they’re talking about him, believes whatever Fox & Friends says, disregarding his own access to the best intelligence in the world.

He’s all about appearances. Despite employing the world’s shlubbiest neo-Nazi alcoholic as his top adviser, despite wearing ill-fitting suits and applying copious shellack to his paper-thin raccoon hat, despite drenching all his properties in gold leaf, garish marble and giant chandeliers, he is perhaps most obsessed with thinking it all looks classy, when it actually looks like Hugh Hefner did some meth and crashed into Liberace at Disneyland.

It’s all just madness, really, barely controlled, intensely shoddy and deeply weird, to a degree that the media can barely keep up (though they’re getting better), Europe is preparing for the worst, and the despicable Republican party lets him inflict whatever horror he wants, lest it restrict their ability to gut health care, cut taxes for the rich and cram through their shockingly poisonous, unpopular agenda.

Meanwhile, the resistance is working, in fits and pockets, to push back, as the Democrats are gaining voice and finding their spines as fast as possible – which isn’t nearly fast enough, given how we are living in one of the most volatile, dangerous moments in history – and we haven’t even had a serious crisis yet, one in which Trump & Bannon will surely leverage to bash all criticism, invoke a police state and, who knows what else, shut down the press, create a state-controlled media, arrest and beat all protesters? It’s all more than possible. Don’t believe it? You’re not paying attention.

One thing is certain: We will, should we survive this cancerous blip relatively intact, look back upon this period with nothing less than deep shame and mortification, the time when America went off the rails, when, after moving carefully, thoughtfully, calmly a number of steps forward, the most fearful, uneducated and paranoid among us hurled us a lifetime of steps, a vicious punch in the face and a vile grope of the crotch, backwards.