That is a line from a Charles M. Blow column posted this evening, titled It Is So Much Worse Than I Thought and subtitled “How can a family that can’t run a charity run a country?”
Blow informs us this will be his last column for a while because he leaving to write the most important think he has ever addressed (not about Trump). He wants to leave us with some parting words,and the line I used for my title appears at the end of three short paragraphs:
But since I have written almost exclusively about Trump for more than two years, please allow me this parting assessment: It is so much worse than I thought.
My original objections to Trump, the things that pushed me into the Resistance, were his immorality, dishonesty, fraudulence and grift.
I freely admit now that I was seeing only the pointy edge of an enormous machine. I had no idea how immoral Trump actually is
That was enough to grab my attention, and I suspect for those who regular read Blow (and thus understand how vitriolic he has been towards the man) would be similarly moved.
He reviews much of what we know and have recently learned about Trump. I will not recapitulate that here, as you can and should read the entire column.
After the one-line paragraph that also appears as the subtitle, Blow writes
I could not have predicted the extraordinary lengths to which the president would go to obstruct justice and undermine the rule of law, nor that he would do these things in full view, for everyone to see.
I could not have predicted, when I first wrote that Trump was a pathological liar, that his rate of lying would increase with his time in office, rather than decrease.
He continues by noting how much Trump’s lying has increased, then refers us to the new category established by the Washington Post fact checkers of the “Bottomless Pinocchio” for “when a politician refuses to drop a claim that has been fact checked as three or four Pinocchios, keeps saying it over and over and over again, so that it basically becomes disinformation, propaganda.”
Blow reminds us of the overwhelming number of contacts between Trumpistas and Russians, as well as the number of the latter who have taken plea deals, and/or been
charged, indicted or convicted of lying about those contacts.
He acknowledges he could not have predicted this, and yet Trump,
his congressional backers and his citizen supporters are continuing to tell us that this doesn’t matter as much as we think, that this is a politically driven prosecution, that everyone does what Trump has done.
It is the penultimate paragraph that puts this all in context:
They are all wrong. This is huge, and the longer we pretend that it isn’t, the more damage we do to the health and stability of our own country.
I will let you read the final paragraph on your own.
Let me offer a few personal remarks.
First, I will miss both Blow’s insightful observations and incisive prose about Trump.
Second, I wish him well with his new project.
Like him, I worry about what Trump may do to our Republic. Looking at Trump’s actions today with respect to Syria and Russian sanctions, I wonder if we are seeing an acceleration of the betrayal of our democracy because the man realizes he may not long be able to remain in the Oval Office and is desperate to fulfill his obligations to Putin (?and Erdogan?) while he can, perhaps before he cuts a deal to keep him and his children out of Federal prison?
Who knows? I don’t.
What I do know is that my Mondays and Thursdays will now have a whole to fill, as I will not have columns by Charles M. Blow to peruse and ponder.