If you’ve been trying to cope with the firehose of shit flooding the zone, one of the ‘interesting things’ is the way the Mainstream Media tries to explain the truly bizarre and unhinged things coming out of the Oval Office, by taking them at face value. The word sanewashing barely begins to cover how the same media that spent months worrying about Biden’s mental fitness somehow has no problem with invading Mexico, seizing the Panama Canal, annexing Canada, and going to war with Denmark over Greenland — as long as it’s coming from Trump.
Let’s use Occam’s Razor to cut to the chase. Instead of finding ways to rationalize these “bold initiatives re-imagining the Presidency”, it would be far simpler to entertain the possibility that Trump is suffering from dementia and is saying crazy stuff — and no one dares call it what it is. Certainly not the press.
It’s not like mental health experts haven’t been raising the alarm. This is from 2018...
A forensic psychiatrist, who has studied the principles on which the assessment of current and future dangerousness in violent criminals is based, concludes:
‘Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving. He has his finger on the triggers of a thousand or more of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the world. That means he could kill more people in a few seconds than any dictator in past history has been able to kill during his entire years in power.’
He is not getting better with age.
The Cheese and Cracker reference is via Charlie Pierce who picked up on what Trump had to say about the recent collision in D.C. between an Army helicopter and an airliner that left no survivors. Trump was speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast and well, from the transcript as MEDIAite reported:
...But that event, like the tragedy last week, should remind us all that we have to make the most out of every single day that we have.
Who would think that you’re in space? And two things collide. The odds of that happening are so small, even without proper control.
We should have had the proper control. We should have had better equipment. We don’t, we have obsolete equipment. They were understaffed for whatever reason. I guess the helicopter was high. And we’ll find out exactly what happened.
But the odds, even if you had nothing, if you had nobody, the odds of that happening– extremely small. It’s like, did you ever see, you go to a driving range in golf and you’re hitting balls, hundreds of balls, thousands of hours.
I never see a ball hit another ball? Balls going up all over the place. You never see ’em hit. It was amazing that that could happen.
There was a lot of mistakes made and it should have never happened. But regardless of that, it’s amazing that it happened.
And I think that’s going to be used for good. I think what is going to happen is we’re all going to sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new, not pieced together, obsolete like it is land based, trying to hook up a land based system to a satellite system.
And the first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It doesn’t work. We spent billions and billions of dollars trying to renovate an old broken system instead of just saying cut it loose and let’s spend less money and build a great system done by 2 or 3 companies. Very good companies, specialists. That’s all it is. They used 39 companies.
If an A.I. system churned out something like this, it would be recalled and canceled. The development team behind it would be looking for new jobs. (Elon Musk would probably hire them to ‘fix’ government.)
If you haven’t heard about this, it’s not a surprise. Charlie Pierce notes that it appears to be not considered newsworthy by the legacy media.
Will it surprise you to know that The Washington Post’s account of this weird, disordered digression places it as an ancillary element of his undoubtedly empty plans to improve the air-traffic-control system? Or that NPR didn’t mention it at all? Neither did NBC. What does he have to do? Play with his toes? And that’s not even to mention the fact that the guy remains the most thoroughgoing heathen ever to hold his job, and none of the coverage of the event mentions this, instead taking serious his pose as a Defender of the Faith, even though he’s still three wives short of Henry VIII.
The NY Times had a write up of the breakfast, but ignored the planes/golf balls angle to contrast Trump talking about unity with the incendiary remarks he’s been making elsewhere. Shawn McCreesh starts out with:
Of all the many forms Donald J. Trump can take, maybe the most perplexing one is Pious Trump.
It is a shape he shifted into shortly after 8 o’clock on Thursday morning to deliver a sermon of sorts on Capitol Hill for the annual National Prayer Breakfast. In the grand amphitheater of National Statuary Hall, members of Congress sat before him. There were leaders of the Republican Party, never so in thrall to him as they are now. There were Democrats, never so lost and powerless in their struggle against him as they are now.
“Look at each other,” he urged. He said they were a “great group of people” and beseeched them to come together. “We have to make life better for everyone,” he said.
President Trump, appealing to the better angels?
This was somewhat amazing, since the various other forms of Mr. Trump happened to be running around with flamethrowers earlier that morning, torching the federal bureaucracy, the global order, the media, the opposition party in the room and even the messaging coming out of his own White House.
McCreesh notes Trump talking about how the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania made him a changed man, then asks the question:
There’s little evidence that a new Donald Trump has taken office. He posts dark missives and ideas that rattle his staff at odd hours. He talks about retribution against his foes, shutting down the media and invading allied nations. He cavalierly proposes displacing two million Palestinians to turn their homeland into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
So close McCreesh — connect the dots.
Maybe Trump can’t be charged with any crimes thanks to the Supreme Court, and he survived two impeachments thanks to the Republicans in the Senate — but it’s past time to start talking about the 25th Amendment. The press won’t talk about it — but somebody needs to put it out there.
Now.
