President Let-Me-Eat-Cake over here is crazy, and getting crazier, and he will descend quickly into full-on hallucinatory, meet-my-invisible-friend, why-do-we-have-nukes-if-we-don’t-use-them crazy, while our only hope to remove him, our political system—destroyed by twenty-five years of utter partisanship and complete denial and the placement of a price tag on virtually everything and everybody in our country—is no longer capable of even pulling off a successful White House Easter egg hunt.
He is getting crazier.
A GILDED COACH, YOU SAY?
Post date • THURSDAY, APRIL 20
The president of the United States insists on being brought to Buckingham Palace alongside the queen of England, in a golden coach drawn by six royal white horses.
Like goddamned Cinderella.
Like a man unaware of the security nightmare he will create. Like a man unaware of the massive public protest that all the king’s—or, in this case, queen’s—men and all the queen’s horses might be able to keep nonviolent, might be able to contain, but cannot keep from happening.
When The Times of London reported this latest evidence of the nexus of narcissism and madness meeting inside the addled brain of the demented man a minority of voters have cursed us with, it caused barely a ripple here, because it was only the fifteenth- or sixteenth-craziest thing Trump has done this week. Reminder: the newspaper reporting this, quoting security sources and making references to London’s Metropolitan Police and the U.S. Secret Service, is owned by Trump’s latest hanger-on, Rupert Murdoch. This is not a story designed to harsh Trump’s buzz. This is reality so real that even Murdoch gets it. The Times reported that “the White House has made clear it regards the carriage procession down the Mall as an essential element of the itinerary for the visit currently planned for the second week of October.”
The story, by its crime-and-security editor, dripped with warnings. As recently as 2003, Vladimir Putin’s state visit saw the foreign leader and the queen ride the seven-tenths of a mile with the carriage top down. Six years ago, President Obama had the presence of mind to thank the British for the option of the ceremony but ride in his own armored limousine.
Even when the president of Mexico and the Chinese premier visited—separately—in 2015, each had the common sense to ride in a closed carriage. It is not clear that Trump has even agreed to that. “If he is in a golden coach being dragged up the Mall by a couple of horses, the risk factor is dramatically increased,” The Times quoted its primary security source. “There may well be protections in that coach such as bulletproof glass, but they are limited. In particular it is very flimsy. It would not be able to put up much resistance in the face of a rocket propelled grenade or high-powered ammunition. Armor-piercing rounds would make a very bad show of things.”
But we’re not even talking about those scenarios. This is a president who would not throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ Opening Day baseball game, obviously out of fear that he would be booed. This is a president who has yet to appear anywhere in public in which he might not be loudly cheered. This is a president who collapses into paranoid accusations of paid agitators when protesters, demanding he release his tax returns, force him to alter his motorcade route, from his fantasyland of a golf course he owns but can charge the taxpayers each time he uses it, to his other fantasyland of a country club he owns but can charge the taxpayers each time he uses it.
This is the world’s ultimate snowflake living inside the world’s ultimate snow globe of his own creation to prevent the slightest chance that his delusion that he is universally beloved will come into violent contact with the reality that he is hated—insisting that he ride to the palace in a golden coach moving so slowly that he would have to hear and see at least some of those who despise him, for as long as ten minutes.
Twenty years ago, I had a stalker, and while I worked, ironically, for Rupert Murdoch, the woman appeared to be getting crazier and crazier. For everything else they do wrong, Fox does protect its employees from stuff like this. Murdoch gets a serious death threat a day, his head of security—a former Scotland Yard chief—told me when he flew from London to Los Angeles to coordinate a game plan to keep me safe. He had assessed my case on the plane, and he said that while he did not suspect the woman was going to turn to violence, he wanted to enact several protective measures, because her behavior reminded him of the story of a prominent actor being stalked by a woman fan.
This woman’s delusion about the actor was different from most. She didn’t need to actually inject herself into his life. She was content to simply mirror his life. If he spent the weekend in, say, Miami, she would weasel the information about where he was staying and what he was doing—something at which stalkers are adept—and she would go to Miami herself. She’d stay at a hotel near his, follow him at a discreet distance, and never once interact with him, but on Monday morning she could go home and go to work and say, “Mike”—we’ll call him that—“Mike and I were in Miami. We went to South Beach. We even saw that funny game you bet on, jai alai.”
When it was all over, her coworkers were absolutely astonished. Everything she had told them was factually correct and rich in detail. They never realized it was only literally correct. “Mike” had indeed gone to Miami and South Beach and jai alai, and this woman, his stalker, had gone to Miami and South Beach and jai alai, and the parts she left out were that she had stayed a hundred yards away from him at all times, and he never knew she existed. The stalking ended, Murdoch’s head of security told me, in Minneapolis or somewhere, when Mike left his hotel on foot and his stalker followed at a safe distance—and then suddenly Mike realized he’d left something at his hotel and turned around to go get it.
And the stalker was faced with disaster. Mike was now approaching her. She couldn’t run away—that would be admitting to herself that Mike wasn’t actually her boyfriend. She couldn’t cross to the other side of the street. She couldn’t stop him and introduce herself. She certainly couldn’t let him walk past her without so much as looking at her. The entire elaborate, self-delusional fantasy was about to crash down upon her.
Unless . . .
Murdoch’s man said that as soon as Mike got to within a few feet of her, this woman, whom he had never met and who had never contacted him, but who had built a complete and intricate and expensive relationship with him, saved herself from the confrontation with reality—the end of her world—in the only way left to her. She reared back and punched him in the face. She could now smile and explain—to the police, to her coworkers, to herself—that she and Mike had had a fight, and they had broken up.
*
In our little nightmare, of course, Donald Trump is Mike’s stalker. And Mike is the reality in which Trump the Stalker is failing and old and paunchy and fooling a thousand fewer people right now than he fooled an hour ago, a reality in which the world mocks him and the politicians use him, and his judgments are entirely wrong, and those closest to him try to calculate the exact date it becomes to their advantage to sell him out over Russia and impeach and jail him.
And mostly, Mike is the public that hates Trump the Stalker.
The public that Trump the Stalker has decided to expose himself to, from a slow-moving golden carriage on the way to Buckingham Palace in October. What happens when reality approaches Trump and he cannot avert that confrontation?
What kind of punch to the face does a thwarted stalker throw when he has nuclear weapons?
THE WHITE HOUSE RUSSIA COVER-UP
Post date • TUESDAY, APRIL 25
It went by so quickly and in such a cacophony of five interviewees all on at the same time, that its importance seemed to go right past everybody, maybe even the man who was saying it. “There is serious belief, in the FBI, in the congressional committees in the House and the Senate, that there is an active cover-up going on, involving trying to keep investigators from finding out what happene
d in terms of the Trump campaign—Trump associates near the top of the campaign—and what happened in their associations with Russians, and that there is an active cover-up going on . . . One of the things that the congressional committees are very concerned about, as is the FBI, is that they don’t have the resources to conduct a proper investigation, and the White House is taking advantage of it.”
An active White House cover-up to keep the FBI and Congress from finding out what the connections between All the Trump’s Men and Russia really mean. It is a startling conclusion, it was attributed by the CNN guest to FBI and Capitol Hill sources, and it was said by who?
Carl Bernstein.
*
Being dead right about Watergate forty-three, forty-four, and forty-five years ago doesn’t mean he’s automatically right about Trump and Russia. But it does mean Bernstein’s reporting gets a faster and more durable benefit of the doubt than anybody else’s. And while Bernstein underscored that there yet may prove to be nothing to the Trump-Russia links, the unalterable fact of history is that Richard Nixon was forced from office not by the Watergate break-in but by the cover-up.
People went to jail during the infamous Teapot Dome scandal not because of the oil or the money, but because of the cover-up! They got Big Tobacco because of the cover-up. Iran-Contra. The Dreyfus Affair! And even Bill Clinton was impeached not based on what he said or did or didn’t say or didn’t do, but because of the cover-up. And Bernstein says FBI and Capitol Hill sources believe there is an active cover-up being undertaken right now by the Trump administration. If that’s true, the cover-up by itself might be impeachable—even if there is no Russian smoking gun, or it is never produced.
What would it look like? What would the signs of a cover-up be? I mean, apart from the nuclear-detonation-size obvious ones like the Jeff Sessions recusal, or the self-defenestration of Congressman Devin “You Haven’t Heard from Me Lately, Have You” Nunes.
Well, how about the principals all backing away from one another? Like, oh, the new head of the CIA branding WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Or like WikiLeaks tweeting, “Trump’s breach of promise over the release of his tax returns is even more gratuitous than Clinton concealing her Goldman Sachs transcripts.” Or the Justice Department reportedly seeking to charge Julian Assange and even perhaps trying to pry him from his hidey-hole at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he’s visited by Nigel Farage and Pamela Anderson. Separately—please, God. Or maybe Vladimir Putin’s primary TV mouthpiece, Dmitry Kiselyov, telling his Russian viewing audience, “Trump is more impulsive and unpredictable than Kim Jong-un,” and “more dangerous.” Or the younger of the moron twins, Eric, telling a British newspaper, of the missile strike in Syria, “If there was anything that Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie.” Or, most recently, Trump telling the Associated Press that in 2016 “WikiLeaks came out . . . never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it.” Except that on December 2, 2010, asked by this Fox clown, “You had nothing to do with WikiLeaks?” Trump said, “No, but I think it’s disgraceful. I think there should be like death penalty or something.”
So Trump denounces WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks denounces Trump and Trump threatens to arrest Assange and the Russians denounce Trump as more dangerous than Kim Jong-un and Eric Trump makes it look like Daddy fired fifty-nine missiles just to show he’s not a Russian marionette and then Trump never heard of WikiLeaks until last year, except he did in 2010.
Boys, don’t everybody run out of the room at the same moment—you’ll all get crushed trying to get through the exit.
Cover-up!
There are other, slightly more subtle signs. Notice that odd story that turned up on CNN? “The FBI gathered intelligence last summer that suggests Russian operatives tried to use Trump advisers, including Carter Page, to infiltrate the Trump campaign, according to US officials.
“The new information adds to the emerging picture of how the Russians tried to influence the 2016 election, not only through email hacks and propaganda but also by trying to infiltrate the Trump orbit.”
See what they’re doing there? Carter Page is no longer a Trump foreign policy adviser—the second one he ever mentioned. Page, who has denied all wrongdoing, is also no longer an alleged courier carrying a reported audiotape of Trump to Vladimir Putin in an offer to swap Russian-friendly policy changes for election-roll hacking by the Russians so Steve Bannon could microtarget American voters. He’s no longer a possible traitor. Now he’s the victim.
“U.S. officials.” That’d presumably be current U.S. officials, you know, like Trump, or somebody appointed by Trump—suggesting the Russians tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign by using people too dumb to realize it, like Carter Page. And thus Page becomes not a conspirator but the injured party—the way, if Trump or his buddies are indeed on tape because they happened to be talking to Russians that foreign intelligence services were spying on, Trump and the Trumpettes are not disloyal monsters willing to sell out this nation; they were the victims of wiretaps and Barack Obama and Susan Rice and maybe the Devil himself.
Carl Bernstein’s comments last Friday about serious belief at the FBI and the House and Senate intel committees that Trump is, at this moment, perpetrating an active cover-up of his people’s ties to Russia underscore the necessity of an independent prosecutor—a necessity so important that Democratic candidates for the House next year ought to run on it and pin down their Republican opponents on it by waving the flag and asking: Who is running this country—us or the goddamned Russians?
And another thing about Bernstein and Watergate and trying to make Page and Trump—and whoever is next—into the victim rather than the perpetrator. Early in the Watergate cover-up, Richard Nixon tried to make it look like the whole thing was John Dean’s idea, that Nixon was the victim, that there was a witch hunt. McCarthyism. Communists. We ran out of gas! We got a flat tire! We didn’t have change for cab fare! We lost our tuxes at the cleaners! We locked our keys in the car! An old friend came in from out of town! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! It wasn’t our fault, we swear to God!
It’s a cover-up.
WHAT ARE WE DOING?
Post date • THURSDAY, APRIL 27
The Trump Gang, already shaming us for all of history by rounding up good, honest, law-abiding Americans without criminal records and with families who they have started and raised here, and forcibly sending them back to countries they barely know or do not know at all, may shortly begin rounding up judges and forcibly sending them to the immigration detention camps at which our neighbors are being scapegoated and uprooted from our country so Trump can fulfill his credo of hate, sadism, and barbarism.
Literally forcing judges out of their homes so they can throw Americans out of their homes—for the sake of Trump’s pointless, racist brutality. This is being done in our name. Shame on us!
The day this was reported by the Reuters News Agency, it largely slipped under the radar: a letter, from the Department of Justice, asking for fifty immigration judges to volunteer to go—the word used is “deploy”—to New York, L.A., Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, Baltimore, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, El Paso and Harlingen, Texas, Omaha, Phoenix, and Imperial, California, and perhaps elsewhere, so as to dispense with due process as quickly as possible. Start deporting scapegoats at six a.m., continue deporting scapegoats until ten p.m., on split shifts. For a month or two at a time.
Not enough volunteer judges? Quoting Reuters: “If the department cannot find enough volunteers, the department would assign judges to detention centers, the sources said.” What are we doing? What are we doing?
You’ve heard the horror stories already: Mothers. Mothers-in-law of military veterans. Grandmothers. Parents. Natives of Puerto Rico—and their captors are too stupid to realize Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. Crime victims. Pe
ople outside homeless shelters. Roberto Beristain, described by its mayor as one of the model citizens of South Bend, Indiana; a restaurant owner there; a criminal because at Niagara Falls one time, he accidentally crossed into Canadian territory. And the husband of a Trump voter. Trump fooled her. “He did say the good people would not be deported, the good people would be checked.” Madam, he lied to you. Your husband was deported because he was easy to find.
What are we doing?
What are we doing to Catalino Guerrero, who got a sixty-day extension before what is still a scheduled deportation next month? He’s been here more than twenty-five years, has two jobs, owns his own home in New Jersey, pays taxes, has four children, four grandchildren, has type 2 diabetes, recently had a stroke, has heart problems, uses a cane, and has no criminal record. In fact, he has been the victim of a crime in our country—a home invasion.
Why is Trump’s ICE trying to deport him? Guerrero claims he got bad legal advice and filed for asylum. And if you file for asylum and don’t get it, you have to leave. He filed for asylum in 1992, and the ruling against him came seventeen years later. On May 22, we may throw him out because he’s replicating what my great-great-grandfather did. Making his way here—because in 1992, as in 1854, we were the light of the world. Because both Catalino Guerrero and Friedrich Olbermann wanted freedom and better lives, maybe not in time for themselves, but for their children. Catalino Guerrero and Friedrich Olbermann and how many of your ancestors? And how many of the ancestors of the unthinking humanoids who are cheering the Trump raids? And how many ancestors of Trump?
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 36