Shortly before the House opened debate on Donald Trump’s well-earned impeachment, White House propaganda minster Stephanie Grisham predicted, on Fox News, that the Great and Powerful Oz would pay scant attention to the day’s historic proceedings. She said that he planned to spend his time governing. In her words, “He is such a focused president…so focused, and he is leading our White House, and keeping us calm.”
As we learned long ago, virtually every utterance from this White House is worthless, so naturally it was no surprise to discover that with the debate barely an hour old, Trump was already in a lather, banging the all-caps button on his phone, rage-tweeting with five exclamation marks that his impeachment is a bunch of ATROCIOUS LIES, an ASSAULT ON AMERICA. Apparently this is the Trump regime’s definition of “calm.”
At this point, you don’t need me to recap the factually devastating case that will tag Trump with the I-word til the end of time. And there’s no point in quoting the exceedingly vocal Republican white men who fouled the floor debate by comparing this impeachment to Pearl Harbor (Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania), comparing Trump to Jesus Christ (Barry Loudermilk of Georgia) – indeed, concocting all kinds of rhetorical atrocities without once refuting the evidentiary fact that Trump tried to muscle Ukraine for two reasons: to absolve Russia of blame for the ’16 race, and to get helpful fake dirt for the next race.
So forget the GOP’s bellowing bootlickers. It’s the mad king we need to worry about.
The real news this week is the bonkers letter that Trump sent to Nancy Pelosi, truly an historic missive that combines staff-generated big words that Trump probably doesn’t know with the ransom-note punctuation for which Trump is infamous. The letter seems to have been stitched together from tweets, rally rants, and toxic word chunks that psychoanalysts typically classify as “delusional projection.” On Twitter, one such specialist, Justin A. Frank, assessed the letter this way: “We rarely see this deteriorated level of functioning outside an in-patient psychiatric ward.”
What’s important to remember is that while this letter is shocking (at least when once compares it to the appropriately dignified letters released under the signatures of all normal presidents), it’s not shocking in the least if we remember (hard as it may be) that we were amply warned, way back at the onset of this nightmare, that this guy was very wrong in the head. And that we’d pay the price for indulging him. And that a serious reckoning, like the one we’re now witnessing, was virtually inevitable.
I was one of many who said so. Two months before Trump was formally nominated in 2016, I wrote the headline “One Sick Puppy,” and detailed the Narcissistic Personality Disorder symptoms that fit him to a T. And at the dawn of his reign, when he was already telling congressional leaders that he’d lost the popular vote only because three to five million people had voted illegally (a delusional evidence-free lie), I warned that Republicans had better wise up, because “the day may come when they’re finally compelled to acknowledge – in the national interest – that Trump is dangerously off his rocker. In fact, even then, a conservative commentator named Andrew Ferguson warned that “the candidate who campaigned as a sociopath shows signs he may yet govern as one.”
And so he has. The real tragedy, right now, is that the two Articles of Impeachment – while narrowly focused for maximum punch and speed of passage – barely touch on what’s truly most horrifying about our current national crisis. The White House letter – incoherent, self-pitying, packed with lies – offers far more compelling proof of his unfitness for office.
We get his umpteenth lie about how impeachment supposedly overturns a previous election (the Founders never said that); about how he won “an Electoral College landslide” (it ranks 46th of 58); about how impeachment itself is unconstitutional (the Constitution gives Congress “sole power” to do it); about how the whistleblower “issued a false report of the phone call that bears no resemblance to the actual phone call” (the whistleblower was correct; saying otherwise is “Lie of the Year 2019”); about how it was really Joe Biden who tried to use foreign aid for personal gain (that lie was put to rest three months ago); about how House Democrats supposedly gave him less due process than the accused witches got in Salem (a lie which has prompted the mayor of Salem to offer him this advice: “Learn some history”).
Such are the letter’s highlights – plus his whine that Pelosi has hurt his family: “You do not know, nor do you care, the great damage and hurt you have inflicted upon wonderful and loving members of my family.” (That would be the same family he betrayed with adulterous affairs – a porn star, subsequently paid off to keep quiet; and a Playboy Playmate – while his wife was home nursing his newborn son.)
And, finally, my favorite line: “No intelligent person believes what you are saying.” Even if we excuse his penchant for hyperbole, there’s still the nagging statistical evidence that higher-schooled people (who are, broadly speaking, intelligent) long ago decided that they can’t believe a word that he is saying. According to the latest Yahoo News/YouGov poll, 58 percent of Americans with college educations say Trump has abused his power, 55 percent support his impeachment, and 53 percent want the Senate to throw him out.
But he won’t be thrown out. We’re fated to host his dangerously twisted state of mind for at least another year – and far longer if the servile Republicans successfully weaponize his grievances and spin his behavioral abnormalities as a new authoritarian normal.
I keep thinking about something that Lindsey Graham said shortly after Trump took the oath to defend the Constitution. At the time, Lindsey still had a few toes of one foot in the sanity camp. He said he was unhappy that Trump kept talking about three to five million illegal voters. He said, “I would urge the president to knock this off,” because otherwise, “people are going to start doubting you as a person.”
I’ll just leave that right there.