The efforts to tiptoe around the plain evidence that Donald Trump is a racist, lying, possibly dementia-riddled sack of shit continue.
President Trump campaigned as one of the world’s greatest dealmakers, but after nine months of struggling to broker agreements, lawmakers in both parties increasingly consider him an untrustworthy, chronically inconsistent and easily distracted negotiator.
Because he is. He just is—there is no consider involved here. He is transparently unaware of the details of even his own would-be priorities. He lies extensively and about everything. He contradicts his own prior statements with such regularity that he genuinely appears to have no ability to distinguish between reality and fiction. There was a point at which we could charitably have considered him a mere incompetent; that point has long past.
The president’s propensity to create diversions and follow tangents has kept him from focusing on his legislative agenda and forced lawmakers who might be natural allies on key policies into the uncomfortable position of having to answer for his behavior and outbursts.
Horse shit. The sitting “president” does not have a “propensity” for diversions; the sitting “president” is demonstrably unable to hold any conversation not predicated on those diversions. He cannot give a speech without it devolving into constant asides on his own superiority. He cannot give a speech in which he states, accurately, what his own supposed legislative proposals would do. He cannot give any evidence that he so much as remembers seeing the pieces of paper his legislative proposals are written on.
[T]his past week, Trump created whiplash. On Monday — just moments after Alexander and Murray released the blueprint for a short-term authorization of federal subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford coverage but that the administration had just halted — Trump said he supported the effort.
A few hours later, however, the president was decidedly cool to it.
He either cannot remember past conversations or is so untethered to the words coming out of his mouth that he will freely opine two opposing viewpoints during the span of “a few hours.” His opinions are widely known to hinge on what he has seen on television in the prior 20 minutes. And we are still, now and forever, attempting to justify his daily mental crack-ups as evidence not of incapacity, but markers of an American financial sub-segment so devoted to malevolent crookery toward their fellow Americans that he just cannot help being a crooked sack of lying shit.
“The expectation that you will stand by what you said you would do is higher in politics than it is in the cutthroat world of real estate,” Schwartz added. “That’s a brutal environment in which misdirection and bullying and making one offer and changing it later are all common practice.”
Donald Trump is not accustomed to the honesty expected in politics, the disclaimer so often goes. And we ought to seriously contemplate hanging members of the high-flying New York real estate community from lampposts, French Revolution-style, if being crooked to the point of making the rest of the planet wonder if you are suffering from senility or delusion is legitimately considered the de facto means of doing business in that particular marketplace. Let us call the members of the New York real estate community before Congress and ask them the question directly: Is Donald Trump’s comprehensive inability to utter true statements a byproduct of spending too much time renting apartment space to fellow gilded, lying boors? Would he have been a decent person, if not for spending all that time with the likes of the rest of you? Strictly for accounting purposes, how many of you do you suppose would fit into the barrel of a good-sized cannon, once stripped of your belts and watches?
Time and time again we hear that Donald Trump’s inability to act like a decent, non-piece-of-shit human being is a product of his rich-bastard real estate roots. Time and time again this is presented as explanation for why we cannot expect Donald Trump to even abide by the begrudging quasi-ethical standards of America’s second-most corrupt gilded class, his fellow politicians. If this is truly the case, it presents the strongest argument yet for socialism.
What we can glean from the press and political responses to Donald Trump, in this last year or so, is that every last grunt and mew about “ethics” or “honesty” or “not being a gigantic piece of shit at every available opportunity” in the national conversation is bunk, and has been bunk all along. There has been no ethical breach that cannot be summarily excused—regardless of how stroke-inducing the same sorts of breaches were even months prior. Open lies, of the sort that the world’s most mockable tyrants are known for, are accepted as planks of a political debate no party now has the blueprints to; they are lies for the sake of the leader’s self-satisfaction, and for not a damn thing else. The ruling party gives speeches declaring that the sky is red while they draft legislation that mandates it be painted green; the network talking heads decry the lack of morals among the little people while apparently staging a decades-long corporate orgy in the offices upstairs.
Take every bit of column-space in the nation’s newspapers from the last 40 years and toss it in the garbage. None of it meant anything. None of it means anything now. The nation is now in the hands of a possibly-senile, delusional liar up to his cheap weave in international organized crime links and the nation’s ruling class is tiptoeing around the implications of it all during spare moments between deciding how certain Americans on certain sports fields should or should not be allowed to “disrespect” the country that put the oozing pustule in office in the first place.
Enough. Just, enough. We need not rely on the psychoanalysts to confirm the man is a liar; we need not furrow our brows and ponder whether his transparent incompetence is accidental or is in fact a crafty political plan by a man merely playing at being an incompetent for the sake of a party inside joke. Pretending at normalcy in the face of such an obvious malignancy is precisely what will normalize that malignancy and cement it as the new status quo. Rage against this poisonous toad. Rage against institutions that seek to paint his buffoonery as anything less than the ravings of a malevolent nitwit. Rage against normalizing this gilded, lying, monarchist twit.
This is a Creative Commons article. The original version of this article appeared here.
