The ceaseless barrage of news — both real and fake — from the Trump administration can be numbing, so it’s important to step back every once in a while and look at the big picture: Never have we seen such utter chaos and blatant corruption.
None of what’s happening is normal, and none of it should be acceptable. Life is imitating art: What we have is less a presidency than a cheesy reality show, set in a great stately house, with made-for-television histrionics, constant backstabbing and major characters periodically getting booted out.
Those are the first two paragraphs of this blistering column for Friday’s Washington Post by the inimitable Eugene Robinson.
He goes through Hope Hicks and Rob Porter, before he turns to son-in-law Jared Kushner, of whom he says after reminding us of some of what is wrong with him
Why was he there in the first place? Because of Trump’s appalling nepotism.
This is followed by Robinson also taking off after Ivanka before returning to and dismantling Kushner, then telling us
Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” was a cruel joke. He has expanded it into a vast protected wetland, to be enjoyed by friends and family.
Next we are on to Jeff Sessions, followed by the gun violence meeting with Congressional types, where Trump argued to seized guns and then worry about providing due process, to which Robinson respond
If President Barack Obama had ever said such a thing, we’d be in the middle of Civil War II.
There are then two more paragraphs in this blistering column. The first of these ends with these three sentences about the occupant of the Oval:
Nobody expects him to be consistent. Nobody expects him to know anything about anything. He is defining the presidency down in a way that we must not tolerate.
As Jews might say at the Passover Seder — DAYENU — it would have been enough — had Robinson ended his column there.
But he is not done.
And thus we get this delicious final paragraph:
I spent years as a foreign correspondent in Latin America. To say we are being governed like a banana republic is an insult to banana republics. It’s that bad, and no one should pretend otherwise.
OUCH!
Now, go read the entire column, and pass it on.