Wednesday, September 02, 2020

The Madness of King George Donald


Trump doesn't truly believe he is a king.  Trump doesn't truly understand how government works.

“I say this openly: Bill Barr can go down as the greatest Attorney General in the history of our country, or he can go down as just another guy,” Trump told Fox host Laura Ingraham. “They have all the stuff, you don’t need anything else. You know they want everything. You don’t need anything else. They all lied to Congress, they were liars, they were cheaters. They were treasonous it was treason.”
Nope; not treason.  

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

Which actually sounds more like what Trump did, according to the Senate Report.  No surprise Trump wants to pin that on Biden and Obama, but that goes more to Trump's unfitness for office than an abuse of power (it is both a floor wax and a dessert topping, mind).

All Trump understands is what harms Trump, where "harm" means a psychic, not a physical or even legal, injury.  "They have all the stuff" is the rantings of a man who just said people "in the dark shadows" are....well, doing "stuff."  Let's not legitimize that line of Trump's argument by saying just what they are doing, because he didn't say.  

“People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. . . . People that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets.”

That's what he said; statements as vague and nebulous as the shadows they refer to.  Honestly, that last sentence could mean traffic lights; or traffic laws.  Or just the common courtesy we show each other so we can get around on the streets, in cars or on foot.  Don't imagine you know what he meant, because he doesn't know.  He's just generating words in order to prompt a reaction.  His psyche is under attack (it always is, according to his niece the trained therapist), and he's reacting.  And that's all he's doing.

Which is enough; which is far too much for the office and authority he holds.  He is dangerous, but not because he's going to loose the Attorney General for the United States on Barack Obama and Joe Biden.  Even William Barr knows he has to answer to the courts, and so far his track record there does not indicate an imminent coup and the establishment of an authoritarian state.

If anything Trump sounds like Queeg there, accusing all his enemies of what he, himself, is doing or is guilty of.  The famous end to that movie excoriates the officers on the ship; but Queeg was clearly incapable of exerting authority on his ship, clearly unfit to be in command.  Trump is Queeg, through and through.  His only salvation is how many "officers" are willing to support his errant and irrational command, rather than challenge him.

To underscore my point about interpreting Trump's statements, another line from Alexandra Petri:

To know any more detail about them would destroy your mind; only a mind such as Donald Trump’s can comprehend exactly what they do in the shadows, can behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Petri means to be satirical, but that's as valid an interpretation of what Trump said as any other; because all interpretationst that try to validate Trump's nonsense are themselves invalid.  We cannot bring any information to these words, we have to accept them as offered.  And what is offered is pure nonsense.  In the words of Walt Kelly, writing about Joe McCarthy, the man shouldn't be allowed anything sharper than a rubber ball.

Trump truly thinks that whatever offends Trump is illegal.  If it isn't, what's the point of laws?  He only wants to punish his enemies, but he wants to punish them because they are harming him.  This is the reality of Trump's America:

Meanwhile, Trump insists reality is what he says it is:

Yeah; uh, no:

And of course this is the ad that bothers him.  Three guesses why, first two don't count.
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