The Lunatic In Charge

 

Donald J. Trump, “president” of the United States, has lost what was left of his mind. Last weekend, it exited for good. Gone. Gone like hope for America and the world if he and Republicans remain in control.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s not TDS. It’s a clear-eyed warning, obvious to sentient humans everywhere. Those who still support him will never see it, but Trump, as he devolves into incoherence, is placing every one of us in grave danger. Witness his latest round of insane postings on his vanity media, Truthless Sociopath (I might have misspelled it).

In one weekend, he put up over sixty truly bizarre, AI-generated images and indecipherable rants. One depicted him firing from space, blowing up the Earth. Another was a map of North and Central America, Greenland, and Iceland painted with the American flag, causing world leaders to pledge support for those islands. One showed the moon, captioned “The Moon is Ours.” Still another changed New Mexico to New America. Next, he was marching through fire with an army of giant robots. There were many more, equally nuts. 

MAGAs might welcome it as “sticking it to the libs.” Congressional Rs might pass it off as “Trump being Trump, ha-ha.” But it’s far from funny. It’s as serious as the stroke that turned John Fetterman into a Fox “news” bot and the possible one that explains Trump’s often-drooping face. Serious as his imbecilic, mismanaged war on Iran, his catering to adversaries while disparaging allies, his backfiring tariffs.

Our country is “led” by a man with a degenerating mind, empowered to order nuclear attacks anywhere he chooses. Seeing his life of privilege and uncontested criminality coming to account, embittered and vengeful, who can say he wouldn’t? With a Secretary of Defense almost equally dislocated, a pretend tough-guy who fired every General and Admiral with the integrity to refuse, replacing them with obedient inferiors, he’s removed the resistance. Those brainless tariff wars are already nuking world economies. Why not for real?

As Trump’s authoritarian incompetence has split and damaged America, so is it dividing and threatening Europe. By popular vote, an undisguisedly fascist party just overtook a part of Germany. Elon Musk, himself proudly fascist and back in with Trump, praised their victory. Joining the goose-steps heard round the world, the Department of Homeland (In)security’s General Counsel is targeting federal judges who’ve defied MAGA actions, posting their names and contact info on social media, leading, predictably, to death threats. Everywhere you look, Trump’s madness is afoot. 

The fascist playbook is written in blood, followed, drip by drip, by Trump and his inexcusable Cabinet. It receives implicit approval by our feck-free Republican Congress, and has been adopted by MAGAs. Sure, they’re brainwashed by Fox “news” and other far-right media. But it’s no excuse. They know what they’re seeing and like it.

Rewriting history, burying truths, like slavery; turning national treasures into propaganda palaces, defacing them with Trump’s likeness and tastelessness. I saw it when I travelled the Soviet Union in the Sixties.

Forcing out Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian Institution, grand archive of America and Americana (it displays Julia Child’s kitchen and Portland’s Sandy Boulevard!), preserver of the breadth and depth of our history and achievements. Attacking educational institutions and scientists like Anthony Fauci. And science itself. All part of the playbook, which differs little from Project 2025.

Controlling the press, menacing those still committed to a well-informed electorate, as democracy demands. The head of the FCC bullies outlets that publish polls Trump doesn’t like. Planting pliant loyalists in the judiciary, cowing legislators into “investigating” political opponents. And scapegoats, always scapegoats, currently a toss-up between trans Americans and imaginary communists.

Chapter One, of course, is “the big lie.” Trump has been lying about a stolen election since before the 2020 votes were counted. Echoed by elected Republicans (Elected? How did that happen?), facilitated by the Heritage Foundation’s hand-picked Court Supremacists, he’s using it to justify rigging elections for real. Chapter Two is ignoring rulings and laws they don’t like, threatening – and jailing – free-speeching protestors. And, in Trump’s America, infected by his psychopathy, getting away with it.

His handlers know the stakes. If Democrats retake Congress, the party, both literal and figurative, will be over. Corruption polluting the White House will be addressed. Impeachments will, hopefully, happen and, given Trump’s precipitous unpopularity, a few Rs might rediscover patriotic integrity and vote for removal. Starting, though, not with Trump but with Hegseth and Patel, both of whom have demoralized and damaged their respective departments, exposing America to real danger.

It’s unsurprising that Trump, being Trump, nominated such obedient incompetents, but it’s to the forever shame of Republican Senators who, knowing better but cowardly, abandoned America and ushered them in. Removing Trump while those two remain wouldn’t end the madness. First them, then Trump. A few more of his deranged posts, and maybe the (presumably) remaining true conservative voters will find it in themselves to acknowledge the obvious and do what’s right. It’s a definitional national emergency.

Notes From The End Of Time

Tomorrow's newspaper column:

February fifteen, two-thousand-nineteen. Day one of the denouement, the beginning of the end. Herewith and henceforth shall I endeavor to document the fall, in hopes survivors, if any there be, may come to comprehend and avoid our fate. 

Today it was announced that our country is in a state of national emergency. Responding as a patriot, and for as long as I’m physically able, as long as there’s air to breathe, I’ll record events as they unravel. Perhaps an eventual historian, even an alien lifeform or probe, picking through the rubble, will find these words and piece together the finale of a formerly great and powerful country. Here will be a diary for the future reader, whoever it may be and whatever it may hold.  

Day two. Saturday, February sixteen. The “president” has fled the White House. Ensconced in a state protected on three sides by ocean waters, his panic is palpable. Mysteriously, he is photographed ordering an omelet. I struggle to decipher the meaning: an attempt, albeit inconsistent with his declaration, to convince us to go about our business as if nothing has happened? If so, is it intended to expose us to harm, as with his prior pollution and energy directives, and treaty dissolutions? Is he party to the emergency? Or, given his bodily habitus and the effects of eggs thereon, has he decided the emergency is so dire, nothing matters? We’re left to wonder. And worry. Perhaps it was egg-white only. What then?  

Day three. Sunday, February seventeen. Relentless snowfall and freezing temperatures ended long since, yet snow remains, now become ugly, black, disfigured, like random chunks of crumbled buildings, smothered in toxic ash. Is this the true emergency, poison falling from the sky rather than amassing at our borders? I shudder, as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road calls itself to mind. I must acquire, hoard, and protect food and drink. 

Day four. Monday, February eighteen. The stock market has failed to open. Mail is undelivered, and my bank is closed for the third day straight. Systemic collapse has become undeniable. I recall something whose meaning originally escaped me: our garbage was picked up but the recycle bins weren’t. Of course! Why recycle as Armageddon approaches? And yet they collected the garbage. Oh! I understand: they intend it as feed for themselves. The situation is far worse than I’d allowed myself to think. But it reminds me to retain everything that might be digestible. Trees are bare. Would that I hadn’t forgone plantings last spring. 

Day five. Tuesday, February nineteen. Using blankets and scraps of cardboard, we’ve blacked out our windows. I worry light may still show through, alerting marauders of our presence. I’m grateful my neighbor is Deputy Chief of Police, but his drab, aging, unmarked patrol car affords no visual deterrent and little comfort. I assume he’s armed. If it comes to that, I believe he’d share extra weapons. Unarmed, I place full-tang, cocobolo-handled, high-carbon Damascus steel, Santoku-style chef’s knives inside each door. Lacking enough, one gets a can opener.  

Day Six. Wednesday, February twenty. Housebound for days, I venture out. Needing reinforcement fencing and more protection for my larder, I head to Home Depot, parking several blocks away, reconnoitering on foot. Approaching the parking lot, I see an ominous gathering of brown people, eying me in ways I can’t interpret; greedily, perhaps. Eschewing eye contact, I turn away, wondering how many more are on their way, and what are their intentions. The warnings have been too mild. And too late.  

Day Seven. Thursday, February twenty-one. Daring to check the news, I discover all is not lost: Bernie is running again. He must believe the US will still exist in 2020, and surely, as they always do, Democrats will select and rally around their best candidate, setting aside bitterness for the good of the country when it isn’t Bernie. What could go wrong? 

But then I discover there’s been massive voter fraud, after all, just as Trump has told us. He was right. About. Everything.  

Wait. It was Republican fraud? In North Carolina? Home of “surgical,” Republican-created voter ID laws? Later, I read McCabe informed the Gang of Eight, and Trump takes Putin’s word over the DNI on Kim’s missiles. I no longer know what to believe. 

Hopelessness overwhelms. We uncover our windows, resigned to the onrush of rapists, murderers, landscapers, and roofers. 

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Stalemate

My next newspaper column:

FBI worried. Turkey threats. Secret meetings, missing transcripts. Racism gestures. Removing sanctions. William Barr. A weekly columnist must cull the heard. So here’s but unum e pluribus: 

If that meeting between Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, and Trump was as described, one wishes the Speaker had replied differently to Individual-1. It’s reported he asked whether, if he reopened the government, Speaker Pelosi would fund his wall. No, was her answer. If she’d said, “Donald, I haven’t read Art of the Deal, because I don’t have time for fiction. But I doubt it recommends laying down your cards at the start of negotiations,” would he have still made a show of walking out? Probably.  

Ever unreliable, Trump had agreed, only days earlier, to sign funding legislation without the wall. Then came marching orders from Fox “news” and that was, and still is, that. Did Putin pipe a tune, too?  Our chaos is his fortune. Also, Trump had promised to accept “the mantle” and not blame Democrats. Trump’s promises: good as fools’ gold. By a margin of nearly two to one, though, Americans blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown.  

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is Trump’s perfect antagonist: a smart, savvy, tough woman, unfazed by his fact-free bullying. Neither wants to cave to the other: Trump, because he knows it’d reveal his tough-guy fakery; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi because she knows she can expose his tough-guy fakery. She’s playing chess to his tic-tac-toe, leaving him only one way to avoid humiliation: declaring a national emergency. Checkmate.  

Consider the implications: egged on by such mental masterpieces as Sean Hannity and righteous lip-quiverer Lindsey Graham, Individual-1 would execute exactly the sort of power-grab haters of President Barack Obama claimed would happen tomorrow, every day of his presidency. If Republicans excuse it, when there’s clearly no emergency, on what basis could they complain when a Democratic president declares an entirely justifiable national emergency due to climate change? (They would, of course.) If the number of violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants triggers a national emergency, why not the tens of thousands of Americans killed yearly by guns? 

Giving any president unlimited rights to declare a national emergency is a prelude to dictatorship. Or is it only when a president is of the other party?  

If presidents should have the authority to declare a national emergency, mustn’t it be limited to when circumventing normal legislative processes is necessitated by the need for immediate action? For reasons obvious to everyone but the contentedly deluded, building a wall, or a sawable series of slats, to address a situation ongoing for decades, steadily becoming less of a problem, which will take years, and which, notwithstanding Bill Barr’s lie, won’t impede illegal drug importation at all, falls outside that category. And taking the Jade Helm of our military to accomplish it? Would our patriotic militiamen, so vocally virile not long ago, rush to oppose the tyrant?  

Among the kinds of Trump supporters from whom I hear regularly, his declaring an emergency would be welcomed with cheers and chants of “Lock (we’re-not-sure-who-anymore) up.” But maybe Speaker Pelosi figures it’d be the catalyst that causes a handful of Republican lawmakers at last to find their missing integrity. It’s a gamble. But if assuming unrestrained power by deception wouldn’t do it, the Constitution, and governance by and for the people, become moot; so let’s get it over with and take to the barricades. Are you with us, Sovereign Citizens?  

After three years of telling his crowds Mexico would pay for his beautiful concrete wall, Invididual-1 denied ever saying so. Then he clarified: he never said they’d write a check. But he did. Both. Google it. Imagine: a liar of that magnitude essentially declaring martial law. There’s no way in hell Trumpists would stand for it in a Democrat, yet they’re all but drooling over it now. 

At this point, besides wondering what Putin has on Trump, one must consider what Trump has on servile Mitch McConnell and fawning Lindsey Graham that explains such dereliction. Incriminating tapes? Horse head in their beds? Lindsey has flipped like a flounder, and Mitch knows the original funding bill passed unanimously. The votes are there for overriding a veto; if was right then, why not now? It’s how checks and balances are supposed to work. 

In the dimness of receding time, they once did.

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