I know, I know. He is talked about far too much already, and mostly to little or no effect. It pains me to even type his name (although I have given up on my substack practice of using only demeaning nicknames for him – it isn’t that there aren’t enough, it is just too much work and honestly makes me feel a bit like I’m joining him in the slime). But I haven’t said a word about him in months and the bile is backing up. His antics are by turns sad, stupid, laughable, offensive, hysterical, sometimes all of the above and far too often just downright evil.
His cognitive and physical decline is becoming hard to ignore. He has always been an idiot, what with the incomprehensible word salad, claiming to have invented words, incessant hyperbole, and pathetic vocabulary. But things have changed of late. He doesn’t remember things said less than 24 hours previous (some argue he didn’t forget he is just deflecting with denial, but I am seeing genuine confusion). The list of physical questions is getting longer by the day – the cankles, bruising on his hands, balance issues and nodding off in meetings. To be fair, I might nod off in a three hour cabinet meeting, but since those meetings are mostly about shameless sucking up, one of his favorite things, you’d think he could prop those eyelids. He had a “routine” MRI last month? Um, I’m pretty sure there is no such thing, even for a 79 year old POTUS. Add that he had no idea why or even what part to the list of indicators, but he was sure he aced it. The “best the doctor had ever seen”. We have learned that the more he protests and the more his trained sycophants defend him the more likely it is that there is something up. They all claim he is 6’3” and weighs 215 lbs. You know, just like Chris Hemsworth, as in Thor. That one is also funny because it means he grew an inch and lost 25 pounds. Now far be it from me to fat shame anybody, and he could give a shit about his health if he was still up to the job. Not that he ever was, but this is getting ridiculous. Didn’t we recently kick Biden to the curb for less?
How could he possibly be getting meaner? In just the past couple of weeks he has called people garbage, stupid, worthless, terrible, morons, obnoxious, incompetent and in one case actually called someone “piggy” to her face. The fact that the bulk of this invective was directed at women, mostly reporters asking perfectly reasonable questions, makes it even more disgusting if not in the least surprising. He has always been nasty, crass and an instinctive bully. It feels different to me now, though. He used to keep most of his worst insults and bullying to social media and rallies, confident in the safety of his mob, knowing they would gleefully go along. (They, of course, support his despicable behavior because it enables their own, but that is another topic altogether.) It has in recent months become both more blatant and more direct. I think this is in part because even as he deludes himself and gaslights the country into thinking all is peachy, part of him knows it is all beginning to crumble and he is terrified. And as such he is a rat backed into the corner of his cage, wild-eyed and paranoid, attacking anything in reach. But that is only part of it. All of us – the public, the media, Congress, international heads of state – have made it possible. We can certainly claim the frog in boiling water defense as we just kept putting up with worse and worse, moving the theoretical line that he would someday cross further and further down the road to ruin. We have enabled, even helped create, this incredibly dangerous monster.
An old saw of my mom’s that I love to describe inveterate liars is “he would climb a tree to tell a lie rather than tell the truth standing on the ground”. It might have been coined for Trump. I think his incessant mendacity is equal parts an insatiable need to brag, a natural defense mechanism, an utter ignorance of and disdain for the truth, and just plain gleeful deceit. I think he gets off on it. I do, however, find myself debating whether he knows that what is coming out of his mouth is total bullshit and doesn’t care, or if he actually thinks it’s true, either because someone told him so or because he wants it to be. I think both happen regularly but then remember that it makes no difference because the lie is the lie. I see it in particular in the small but specific lies he tells that are so glib and so facile and do so much damage. “Every boat we destroy saves 25,000 American lives”, in defense of the indefensible boat strikes in the Caribbean. One small moment of even mildly reasoned thought exposes this for the impossible, blatant, cut from whole cloth, baseless and outlandish whopper of a lie that it is and I will leave you to your own devices to blow it up. But it sounds kind of compelling, right? Just the type of thing that becomes a talking point, an easily remembered and repeated little tidbit for any red-hatted dipshit with a keyboard or microphone to throw around like gospel. Even scarier its genesis is very chicken and egg. Trump said it in October but a Pentagon spokesperson repeated it last week. Did he just make it up or did some toadie put it in a report and only he was stupid enough to repeat it? Again, either way it is dangerous and damaging.
He is increasingly checked out. He has done more interior decorating in the last couple of months than anything, even golf. Maybe 18 holes is just too taxing. He was infamous even during his first term for being unproductive, unwilling to read briefings, cancelling meetings daily and devoting hours of his schedule to “Presidential time”, which was assumed to be spent watching news and social media. Again though, it has gotten worse. I can’t even begin to count – and neither can the WH Press Corps – the number of questions he has answered with “I don’t know” or “I haven’t heard anything about that” or famously as to his pardon of former Honduran president Hernandez, “who?”. I can’t decide if it is worse that he did it without knowing or did it on purpose. Pick any video of one of his executive order binges. They go like this: someone puts one in front of him, he opens it and pretends to read while they position the relevant minions and props for the photo, he looks expectantly to whomever who then explains what it says. He then either just nods thoughtfully and signs or, if he thinks he might know what this one is about, pukes up some irrelevant word vomit while people smile and pretend they don’t realize he has no idea what he is signing. It would be comical if it didn’t involve things like removing state restrictions on building data farms or rolling back tailpipe emissions standards to 2016. I see this as a horrifying microcosm of his presidency. Then I wonder if this is a bad thing. Let the guy pick marble for bathrooms and live his dream of being an awards show host. The less he does the better, right? It is a tempting thought until you remember who is doing the work if he isn’t. Hegseth, Noem and Gabbard are dangerous because they are incompetent. Bessent, Zeldin and Lutnick are dangerous because they are corrupt. Kennedy, Bondi and McMahon are dangerous because they’re fanatics. But the names that keep me up at night are Vance and Vought and, fuck me, Stephen Miller. Because while they are corrupt fanatics, they are not incompetent, and all too powerful. Which makes them dangerous in a very different, much scarier way. Trump is cruel, ignorant, capricious, narcissistic and probably a sociopath, but he is also bumbling and ineffective, which at this point might be preferable.
There you have him, friends, our President. His health is failing and he becomes more addled by the day. He is getting meaner, lying more and paying less attention to his responsibilities. And I didn’t even mention his systematic destruction of our standing, power and reputation in the international community, where he is an embarrassing laughing stock and puppet to despots. Are we tired of winning yet? Just think,only three more years. We’d better start brushing up on the 25th Amendment. Thanks for reading.