As we do (almost) every weekend, we turn our attention to, sigh, Donald Trump's weekend tweets. We are mainly doing this as historical record, at this point; when future history books write about the man's clear unfitness for the office, due to a toxic combination of stupidity, dishonesty, corruption, narcissism, and probable cocaine usage, let nobody say there was no evidence at the time.
This is going to turn into one of those things like the Iraq War, no doubt, where a great many people who do not have columns in the New York Times are all pointing out the looming catastrophe in real time but it is only after every prediction is proven right that the important wags in the papers and in Congress begrudgingly start to admit that no, flagrant lying in service of plainly crooked ends was not merely a side note to the story, but the whole damn story. They will then congratulate their boldness in coming to this conclusion, while pretending there was no possible way anyone could have predicted that Trump was in up to his strangely puffy eyeballs in Russian conspiracies, and in-office bribe-seeking, and the remnants of the Republican Party will act concerned and surprised for exactly as long as it takes to convince dullards they're very sorry for all of that, rinse, repeat.
But where were we—ah yes, Captain Suspected Substance Abuse and his regular weekend of Unsupervised Twitter Shouting Theater. What have you got for us, man whose family met Russian government cutouts after being promised secret Russian dirt on your American election opponent?
This appears to be a lie, unless we're counting 44% and below as "around" 50%. By this measure, Donald Trump's net worth is "around" eleventy trillion dollars—which he will probably also claim, before the month is out.
But again: The constant drumbeat of a sitting president demonizing the very distribution of facts is not normal. It is beyond not normal; it is fascist. Whether he stumbled accidentally into the same rhetoric as the world's worst authoritarians, dictators and kleptocrats or arrived their intentionally is irrelevant; the ruddy dotard is consistently, on a daily basis, seeking to undermine the core tenets of American democratic life and there's not ten Republicans in the entire Congress who have expressed substantive displeasure with that.
This also appears to be a lie; the reporter herself says the story didn't claim that. But what an interesting thing to read into it. Oh, and the important thing is "no Collusion"!
The number of times Trump has vowed there was no "Collusion" now must easily have topped a thousand. This is odd, for a man who's son invited Russian government cutouts to come visit him after they openly wrote that the meeting would be part of the Russian government's "support" for his money-laundering father. Fortunately, nobody in his family will ever be charged with collusion. The operative legal word is conspiracy.
In a shocking development, this is technically true. If you omit all other races but the five special election victories to hold Republican-held seats that Republicans were widely expected to win beforehand, and do not count any of the other special elections this year, such as the one in which a Democrat claimed victory over a Donald Trump-stumped-for child molester, the Republican record looks fabulous. (Also, only one of those Republican victors physically assaulted a reporter immediately before his election, a mere 20% reporter-assault rate.)
In other news, if you judge a man’s medical condition by the limbs a bear didn’t chew off, the fellow might look to be downright chipper.
If it seems that this weekend's selections were a bit sedate, compared to recent weekends, this is likely because Donald is still basking in the glow of his latest Nuremberg rally, a spittle-flecked campaign event in Pennsylvania in which he led the audience in a hate-fest against individual named American reporters, publicly asserted we should follow the lead of autocracies like China and execute drug dealers, claimed that South Korea's president had confided in him that "without Donald Trump, the Olympics would have been a total failure," and bragged at length about winning the 2016 electoral vote.
Perhaps if we started explaining it on the national news programs rather than grumbling about it only on the confines of Twitter, our children would learn something that they are not learning right now: That no, this is not behavior appropriate for a president. It really is genuinely not.