Donald Trump is entering his final days as president. And the end looks like a loopy movie. Richard Wolffe writes:
The last days of the Trump presidency increasingly resemble the fictional presidency in the movie Monsters vs Aliens.
In case you missed this 2009 animated masterpiece, President Hathaway (voiced by Stephen Colbert) responds to an alien invasion with a team of unlikely heroes, among them a giant-sized TV reporter from Modesto, a cockroach-turned-mad-scientist, and an enormous blob of Jell-O.
Trump has surrounded himself with wing nuts:
At the center of the team to save Planet Trump are the unhinged characters of Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, who reportedly met with the soon-to-be-ex-president in the White House over several hours on Friday.
Both Powell and Flynn have previously been fired by the reality TV star turned president – who, after all, built a public persona around firing people on The Apprentice. But on Planet Trump, firings are not as final as they appear to be, which surely means it’s not too late for the Mooch to extend his 10-day record of service to the nation.
Powell was ejected from the elite strike force of lawyers just one month ago for her outlandish claims that Joe Biden won the presidential election with mysterious “communist money” and the support of the long-deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.
Friday’s surreal bull session included Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, who has the distinct honor of having been fired by both Obama and Trump – a rare point of agreement between the yin and yang of the American presidency. Flynn lied to Mike Pence and the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, pleading guilty to the felony as part of the Mueller investigation.
Newly pardoned by the man who fired him, Flynn is now reportedly advocating for Trump to invoke martial law to rerun the election. This would normally be key to executing a Chavista coup, but is obviously now the victim of a Chavista coup.
One of the ringleaders of this madcap gang is Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock, who left the online retailer last year claiming that he had romanced a Russian agent on behalf of “the Men in Black”. Good luck making sense of that, or Byrne’s latest venture: what he calls “a team of hackers and cybersleuths and other people with odd skills”. For Trump’s favorite news channel, OAN, this constitutes an “elite cybersecurity team”.
This is the self-defeating, nonsensical house that Trump built.
Unfortunately, that house will endure after Trump leaves.
Image: New York Magazine
4 comments:
Insanity writ large is the only way to describe this whole fiasco, Owen, an insanity that has infected a significant number of 'ordinary' Americans as well.
COVID is a deadly virus, Lorne. But insanity is more deadly. And, when it comes to insanity, there's no such thing as "herd immunity."
Trump is jettisoning his remaining credible aides like a reptile shedding its skin. Gina Haspel is in Trump's bad books. Esper was given the boot from the Pentagon. Barr, who has washed so much of Trump's dirty laundry, has decided to jump before he's pushed. Pompeo has earned Trump's scorn.
Now we hear that Trump is surrounding himself with a coven of discredited, even disgraced advisers including Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and Mike Flynn.
One name that has been curiously omitted from the news reports is Trump's own personal Renfield, Stephen Miller. If anyone has been able to wind up Trump over the past four years it's been Miller, a guy who seems to match Trump's pathologies. As sadists and sociopaths go, they're of a piece.
Today Trump signed an executive order that, henceforth, the federal government shall only construct "beautiful" buildings. With his government under cyber-attack and the nation in the grip of a pandemic with the greatest number of deaths of any country, Trump wants beautiful. That's madness. If they need to distract him wouldn't a box of Crayolas be just as effective.
It's reported that Trump intends to go down swinging on January 6th. That's when he'll lead a Banzai attack with Congressional Republicans voting to oppose Biden's election. Given that requires a majority of both the House and Senate and with McConnell and other Repugs blasting the idea as a cheap stunt, it would be the ultimate humiliation of a man who has already abandoned his limited stock of integrity.
It reminds me of Tony Montana in the closing scene of 'Scarface.' Oh well
Trump personifies one definition of madness, Mound. He keeps doing the same thing and expects a different result. He really is out of his mind.
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