It's Happening

It took comparatively little time, although more than I thought: we're now seeing, italicized and bolded, the problem with electing a president who's incurious, ill-informed, and doesn't care to make the effort to change it; who possesses the vocabulary of a toddler; who's always gotten away with lies instead of explanations; who appears to believe that words become true as they exit his larynx and approach his lips. Who believes his own bullshit about how brilliant and knowledgeable he is. And who's clearly mentally unstable.

They're shutting him down: no appearances where he might be called upon to address complicated stuff, like the stillborn healthcare plan, or his dissociative accusations about our last actual president, or leaks of alleged CIA spy techniques, among other things that aren't easily lied away, or for which "beautiful" and "disaster" and "sad" don't really suffice as descriptions, much less explanations.

Donald Trump isn't equipped to deal with such things, nor was he ever; and his staff knows it. He hasn't the vocabulary, the intellect, or, maybe most important, the desire to spend time learning. For his entire career he's been able to bullshit and bully his way through. Do whatever he wanted, let the lawyers and accountants deal with the damage. Come out scot-free from the economic carnage left in his wake.

It's inconceivable that the people around him didn't know it well before the election: it's characterized his entire life. Maybe they assumed he could fake it, as usual, or that Steve Bannon could handle it. Or that sticking to friendly news sources and sycophantic "reporters" would save him from himself. Maybe they believed, because there's a hard core of people who'll never turn away from him (roughly the same number who believe Earth is flat, the moon landing was faked, and chemtrails are part of a plot), that even if some supporters began to see through him and begin to worry, to regret their votes, it wouldn't matter.

What's been obvious from before the start, to anyone willing to look, is now becoming undeniable to many of his former apologists: Donald Trump is mentally unstable and temperamentally and intellectually ill-equipped to handle the requirements of the presidency. He strikes out at perceived enemies, sees plots behind his back, produces word salads that make Sarah Palin seem almost literate. (Okay, no.) He lies about all things great and small.

If it ever was, this is no longer cause for amusement or schadenfreude; it's too important, too scary. If people near to him, or people of his party in Congress, don't care enough for our country to figure out how to get him to resign, they should put him out of his misery and impeach him. What do they have to lose, except the public trust for having excused him for so long? They'll get Mike Pence.

Because a guy like Trump, when his faux sense of control is lost, when his fragile ego takes too many hits for him to handle, when he begins to recognize that tweets and lies and puffery don't solve problems as big as these, well, he's headed for a meltdown of which there are no prior examples. Not in the White House, anyway.

For his sake and ours, "they" (meaning people with the power and influence) need to step in damn soon. Maybe he'll listen to Ivanka. Or maybe Steve Doocey can take his tongue out of Trump's ass and speak truth to power. (Okay, not him.) There must be someone on that side of the fence with a remnant of integrity. Can't think of any, but surely...

Oh, but The Donald still plans to hold another campaign rally next week, in Tennessee. Because he'll only have to strut and bask. And maybe that's the best his people can do: let him hold rallies every week and keep him the fuck out of the Oval Office. It'd be nice to know who'd become de facto president, of course. None of the possibilities is very reassuring.

But if they're evil and despicable, they're not, far as I can tell, so dangerous that they might do something sudden and irreversible. Except Bannon, maybe. And Pence. And Sessions.

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