In case you missed Charlie Pierce’s essay in Esquire here it is.
The National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday morning was only an undercard attraction on the bill of CrazySlam ’20.
Pierce’s essay really wrote itself because all he needed to do was include some of Trump’s own words from the National Prayer Breakfast Sermon From The Mouth. He said this about Trump’s performance:
His trolley went around the bend and off the tracks. His sanity had expired and met its maker. It has ceased to be. It was a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It’s kicked the bucket, rung down the curtain, and joined the bleeding choir invisible. But, alas, this is not yet an ex-administration*, and it still derives its only energy from the incredibly toxic stew of vengeful rage and inflamed victimhood that is the only sign of sentient life in the brain of its president*.
This is what he wrote about the Republican Party:
I have resisted using the word “cult” to describe where the Republican party is at right now because I think it absolves too many of the people that made something like Trumpism inevitable. But, Lord above, we’re looking at a battalion of drill-thralls now, with no minds of their own and no souls to speak of.
Pierce is a frequent guest on MSNBNC along with Rick Wilson who is also a regular there. They can be counted on to turn their acerbic wit and ability as wordsmiths on Trump and his supporters.
This is what Wilson wrote about Trump’s projectile vomiting of a State of the Union address in the People’s House (my characterization):
Trump’s Speech Was a Bataan Death March of Bullsh*t
And it was a wakeup call for Democrats, who have acted as if 2016 was a fluke and Trump’s personal sh*tshow, corruption, and idiocy all but ensure an easy win in November.
The working title, visible in the URL was “Trumps State-of-the-Union was half American Carnage Half Morning in America”
Wilson’s third and next to his last paragraphs predicted accurately is post-acquittal diatribes.
Trump knew this speech had a utility for his campaign, and that it is framed against the impeachment acquittal vote on Wednesday. He knows that soon—very soon—he’ll enjoy the fruits of Mitch McConnell’s labor. He knows that after he is acquitted in the Senate there is no power in American government that will constrain him again. He knows he is about to hold executive power at a level no president before him could have imagined. That knowledge was enough to have him read off the teleprompter for one night.
It wasn’t the speech that Trump wanted to give, which we’ll hear soon enough.
He concludes with a choice phrase that he isn’t allowed to utter on MSNBNC (in bold) in a chilling and sobering conclusion.
“The state of the union is pure, weapons-grade, uncut fucking chaos, and I am both unhinged and unbound from any consequence, ever. All the pretty words my speechwriters worked so hard on are a thin veneer over the seething mass of coming horrors. I have gambled our economy, compromised our security, and shredded our dignity, and I’ll do it again. My message to the American people: bend the knee. To my enemies: vengeance is coming.”
Indeed, what with the news today that Lt. Colonel Vindeman has been fired and escorted out of the White House, and his suspending the Global Travel program (see “In suspending Global Entry, a spiteful Trump makes us all less safe” by historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat) because he’s furious with New York, Wilson has been proved to be correct, although knowing Trump you didn’t need a crystal ball to predict this.
Update: I was just reminded of another regular on MSNBC who is on right now, Charlie Sykes.
This is his current article in The Bulwark:
The Gospel According to Mad Kind Donald
Some excerpts which stood out to me:
What America saw on Thursday was Trump in full. There was no expression of regret, no grace notes, no appeals to the better angels of our nature. Instead we got a raw, bitter, unhinged rant of crazy. Two of them, in fact. And it was all perfectly on brand.
Trump is a man unconstrained by the demands of decency or conscience, logic or consistency, and he clearly revels in the license these freedoms afford him. However feckless some of his former aides may have been, it is clear that Trump now occupies a world in which no one tells him no, or cautions him against improprieties, or urges graciousness, or pleads with him to be presidential, or responsible, or even coherent.
It was in the same spirit that Trump later in the day marked his impeachment acquittal not with a press conference, or a speech, but rather with a celebratory Festival of Grievances in the East Room of the White House. It began, of course, with a word salad of invective.
Trump described his enemies as evil, corrupt, leakers, liars, lowlifes, sleazebags, and dirty cops. “Adam Schiff is a vicious, horrible person,” Trump told his eager minions. “Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person.”
It was a pure Trumpian stream of consciousness: self pity, bitterness, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, sniffs, anger, mockery, self pity, James Comey, sniffs, the dossier, Hillary, Obama, conspiracy theories, Russia, self pity, Mitt Romney, payback, Hunter Biden, sniffs, insults, Robert Mueller, the FBI, bullshit, self pity…
Through it all ran the theme of Trump as Victim. No one had ever been treated as badly as he had been. He didn’t know “if other presidents would have been able to take it.” A million tender snowflakes melted.