You’re Not Crazy

Next chapter. Now what will he do?

There was no briefing on Saturday. Friday’s briefing was brief and uni-directional. There was no question and answer period. I doubt we will see him today, Sunday. Someone got to him. You’re shooting yourself in the foot on the daily.

All we got from the President on Saturday was a tweet saying the press was mean and liars and he wasn’t going to play anymore.

“What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”

It sounded like an attack, but what we were really witnessing was a surrender, or at the very least a sudden retreat. He simply could not go in front of the press and face the questions that his Thursday performance had put in the head of every American citizen who had working synapses. He had proved himself far stupider than the average 5th grader and there was simply no way to hide it. There really were no clothes, and now everyone knew it.

The admnistration had tried, floating the idea that he was being sarcastic, trying to catch the press in a trap. That was so ludicrous on its face when watching the video of the event, which was unavoidable on Friday, that it was abandoned as soon as it left his mouth at the third Covid-19 stimulus bill signing. It became clear to his handlers that there was no walk-back to this.

This was analagous to Trump using less and less disguised coded hate speech directed toward minorities as he has done since his ride down the escalator, a perfect metaphor for our national descent, but finally he came out and just used the “n” word and let it all hang out. A revelation so total, so undeniable that even his supporters, with a very few pathetic defensive blocking moves as exceptions, went into hiding for a day.

A new narrative had been unleashed that he had no tools to combat, and he had set it loose.

But how would it be reported? This seems to be more challenging than it would seem on the surface.

What had actually happened? The President of the United States had proved with no room for argument that he was simply too stupid to do this job. He was a functioning idiot, able to feed himself but everything else would require supervision. How could this NOT be the plain reporting of what had been clearly witnessed?

It hasn’t been reported that way. Mostly it has been seen as a continuation of what has come before, the only difference being a slight increase in scale. That description doesn’t begin to describe what was revealed in one of the most tragic moments in presidential oratorical history.

Try to understand what I’m saying. The President suggested shooting household cleaners into the bloodstream should be studied for efficacy. He was completely serious. At 73 years old his intellectual preparation to lead the most influential country on the planet had led him to this. That same mind is being applied not only to our current crisis but to the economy, health care, immigration, foreign policy, justice, law and order, military decisions, and so on.

A tiny crack in the wall of a dam leaks a bit, and the leakage weakens the walls of the crack and expands it little by little until a moment of critical mass. At that point the wall fails entirely and suddenly, collapsing in a swift elimination of nearly all vestiges of the safety the dam represented, holding back the disaster that would surely follow without it.

The dam broke on Thursday, and the dam is now nowhere to be found.

So, do you report on the dam or the water? How do you stop the destruction that is released?

In some ways it’s already too late for that. In a brilliant piece written for the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole documents the descent of the United States into an international punchline thanks to the cretinism of our POTUS. While we had to wait for the dam to break before some of us took notice of a problem, internationally they have been watching the crack grow and widen for a long time. While the President revels in how the international community is holding us up on a pedestal as the Great Saviour, the truth is 180 degrees from that. We are a pariah, and deservedly so.

THE story is a madman is at the helm. That’s it. This isn’t a case that has to be made. The confirmation is complete. But the mainstream media, the part of the media that operates on standards and guidelines and ethical norms, will be so concerned with those things that they will not have a language available to them to rise to the needs of the occaision. The President’s defenders will have no such obstacles in their way to try to justify the unjustifiable by any means necessary. Intellectual consistency, honest reportage, proper sourcing and so on do not restrict right wing media at all. Fox has more than once gone to court to defend their right to air a story they know is factually incorrect, and they have won. Legitimate media is bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Ironically it is the ethical guardrails that dominate legitimate media that is going to prevent it from reporting the story they can plainly see laid out before them. Our President is unhinged, an existential threat to our country, incapable of performing the simplest tasks of his job, let alone the titanic challenges that come with it as well, and the most destructive challlenge that any president has encountered in a hundred years. His leadership kills people. Kids die in cages. Refugees of drug wars of our making die in the desert. The general population is culled by coronavirus at levels that could have been mitigated, should have been. This has been his leadership style for a lifetime, leaving businesses bankrupted, contractors ruined, women violated, wives humiliated, banks compromised. Death and destruction has always been the wake of the Donald’s voyage through life.

I am anxiously watching the press. Who will rise to the moment? Can they? Can they report that we elected a dangerously unbalanced menace? Not by subtle insinuation, but by boldly declaring the biggest story on their plate?

To our disadvantage as a populace, the guardrails will probably prevent it. They will predominantly be silent.

The only way that this point will be made is by the utilization of the 25th Amendment, for there has never been a greater justification for its being invoked. It is there to remove the President when he is no longer able to perform the duties of his office due to some incapacitation. That scenario has never been so plainly on display. Never even close. His mental capacity is a clear and present danger to the United States of America.

That’s the story.

It won’t get written, because the cabinet is a collection of sychophants that owe their very relevance to Orange Julius (Caesar) and will NEVER bite the hand that has fed them so luxuriously. The critical need to act on the danger represented by our President will be nowhere near as important as the continuation of their meteoric rise to power. If they exerted that power, the press would be released to report on why they might think this was necessary, and an honest discussion of the President’s competency would finally appear in the paper.

But that won’t happen, and it will be to our great shame. Without it, we will have a minimum of 8 months to survive him. If he wins the election, the demise of the country is pretty much assured. If he loses it might not be much better. November, December and January will be more of a risk to our country than Japan represented in 1941. Nothing defines the President more succinctly than his penchant for payback to his enemies. He has spoken openly about it, even had it written for him in “The Art of the Deal”. This is a fundamental tenet of his “leadership” style. It’s defining. Unashamedly.

Well guess what folks? YOU are the enemy.

Two-plus months of scorched earth for America are a near certainty. The public who shunned his collapsed Administration will be the targets of his rage. How he strikes out is yet to be imagined, at least by me, but the striking out is a certainty.

The press needs to lead the call for removal. Essentially the public is immobilized by shock. It is too hard to understand how we made a mistake this egregious, this destructive, this stupid. It’s hard to admit that we are wrong, even harder when the wrong was so obviously wrong from day one, so obviously an attack on a Democratic Republic. So obviously stupid. That’s a bitter pill to swallow alone. We need support to heal from our own mistakes. The 25th Amendment would do it, but it won’t happen. Those that have that power have slithered from the same shithole he came from.

We need the press to let us know we aren’t crazy.

He is.