Freak Out Friday – January 18, 2019

Trump always likes to boast about being the biggest and best. In the past week, he has actually managed to achieve genuine bragging rights about something: the longest governmental shutdown in the history of the United States.

And this week we’ve seen more back and forth between two of the key players: Trump and Pelosi. Meanwhile Mitch McConnell, who has abrogated his responsibility to the three equal branches of the Constitution, has refused to send any bills to Trump that he know Trump won’t sign. Rather than, y’know, wait for the veto and then override it in the Senate, as he would have done without hesitation if Obama were still president. Screw the constitution: partisanship trumps all (no pun intended.)

So earlier this week, Nancy Pelosi sent Trump a letter that suggested it might be wiser to postpone the State of the Union from the 29th (unless the government were opened this week) because of security concerns. While security might indeed be a consideration, it could also be argued that she simply didn’t want to give him another national venue to spout his lies. And furthermore she would have to sit there, knowing the TV cameras were going to swing to her every time he badmouthed her, as he most certainly would have.

But there is NO disputing the petty savagery of Trump’s response. He torpedoed a planned trip by Pelosi and company to Afghanistan and Brussels at the last possible moment. He did so in a letter with at least two factual errors in it (he said it was a seven day trip when it was five; he said they were going to Egypt when they were not.) He suggested that she fly commercial airlines…and when she endeavored to do exactly that, the White House then leaked the details of their flights, thus kicking the security concerns through the stratosphere and endangering not only Pelosi and company, but hundreds of innocent passengers on the plane.

Hundreds. Of innocent. Passengers.

How in the name of God does this man have any followers left? What level of behavior are they willing to tolerate in order to support him? Of all the claims Trump has made in the past years, only one seems to be absolutely true: If he shot down someone in the streets of New York, his fans would still rally behind him. “The guy probably had it coming.” “He didn’t REALLY gun someone down; it was an elaborate trick arranged by Democrats.” The unimaginable pettiness of him suggesting commercial airlines and then torpedoing THAT option literally defies description. He has no morality. No sense of decency. No honor. One could easily imagine Putin doing something along those lines.

However recent events indicate that–and I know it’s been said before, but still–Trump’s world is about to unravel.

BuzzFeed published an incredibly disturbing (to Trump) article that states he instructed Michael Cohen to lie to congress about when he ceased dealings with the Russian over his proposed hotel there. The sources are Federal investigators, and Trump can state that Cohen’s a liar all he wants; this information is coming from other sources than Cohen, including people within Trump’s organization. McConnell can defend Trump and ignore the constitution all he wants. But when Trump is directly involved in perjury to congress, no one–not even Trump’s coterie of ášš-kìššërš–can ignore it. Lying to congress was part of the impeachment proceedings with both Nixon and Clinton, and that’s just one of the many charges being investigated. The fact is that Trump’s entire support system is crumbling beneath his feet. The government is shut down, and his desperate attempts to blame it on Democrats falls flat every time someone replays the footage where he said he would own it and not blame the Dems for it. The testimony against him from his former closest advisors is dámņìņg.

And his family is deep in it, too. He can dismiss various other people as individuals he doesn’t know and never spoke to (despite pictures of him with them) all he wants. But those excuses won’t work with his family members. “I had no idea what Ivanka and Junior were up to.” Yeah, that won’t fly.

He can perform all the petty tricks against Pelosi that he wants to, but he knows his time is coming to an end.

PAD