Donald Trump has eaten congressional Republicans’ brains, and yet he had plenty of room left over for an insouciant lavender-coconut dessert foam—which is of course what he found when he finally stuck the oyster shucker in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s head.
Last week on Fox News’ Sean Hannity Somehow Convinced Great-Grandma Gladys to Get an Aryan Nation Neck Tattoo White Power Hour, disgraced presidential cosplayer Donald Trump claimed he could declassify top secret government documents with his mind. I’m sure you heard something about this. It’s not true, of course. For one thing, he failed to lick the hallucinogenic toads in the correct order, and the incantations don’t work if the blood offering is made up of more than 30% nougat.
And yet Republicans, whose spines now hang languidly in Trump’s closet like a refulgent rainbow of fey feather boas, are so afraid of the Eye of Sour-Don they can’t seem to state the glaringly obvious.
The latest example? Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, had a really hard time admitting that Trump’s magical powers stopped at draining the life out of innocent Americans from thousands of miles away.
On Sunday’s episode of ABC This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. Barrasso the easiest question he’ll ever get: Can Donald Trump declassify top secret documents with his Adderall-besotted mind? Somehow, the senator struggled mightily with this one.
Watch:
STEPHANOPOULOS: “I want to ask you about the investigation into Donald Trump’s handling of classified information. Even though his lawyers have provided no evidence that he declassified the documents, Trump said this week that as president he could declassify documents by thinking about it. Do you agree with that?”
BARRASSO: “I’ve not heard that one before, George. Look, I tell you, in terms of national security documents, we have to always use extreme caution. I’m on the Foreign Relations Committee, we deal with classified information all the time and are always very careful. I don’t know anything about the rules for when a president declassifies documents and information. What I do know is, and what I’d like to see from a Senate standpoint, is I’d like to see the Department of Justice come to us and show us in a classified setting what the information is, what they’ve done. I thought this was a raid at the former president’s home, never seen anything like that before, clearly, and it’s become political. So I want to get a briefing so that we can then be informed to see what actually happened here.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “That was a rhetorical question. You know that a president can’t declassify documents by thinking about it. Why can’t you say so?”
BARRASSO: “I don’t think a president can declassify documents by saying so, by thinking about it.”
Whoo-hoo! Glad you finally got around to admitting it, John! And you showed your work! But a simple “no” would have sufficed.
Imagine being this afraid of gainsaying a gormless ex-reality show host who wanted to build an alligator moat along the U.S-Mexico border and thinks the Air Force literally has invisible planes. Republicans talk about him like you’d talk to a guy wearing a suicide vest in the Skee-Ball line at Chuck E. Cheese.
Of course, you’d almost feel sorry for them if they hadn’t created this monster all by themselves. But they did, and so they must be punished.
So let’s punish them. What’d’ya say?
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.