CommentsFURTHER--If you were hoping our lunatic village idiot miraculously grew a brain or soul for the new year: Sorry. After weeks of sulking and skulking around the White House - "I was all by myself in the White House.
It's a big, big house - except for the guys on the lawn with machine guns. Nicest machine guns I’ve ever seen. I was waving to them. I never saw so many guys with machine guns in my life...These are great people. They don't play games, they don’t, like, wave. But I was all alone with the machine gunners" - Trump held a wildly ignorant, incoherent first Cabinet meeting surrounded by his low-life coterie - the best people! - of liars, bigots, sycophants and thieves.
Also Game of Thrones! (Don't ask.) Following a lurid spectacle brilliantly dubbed "Mango Unchained," one observer noted, "The movie "Idiocracy" can no longer be classified as a comedy, but as an extremely prescient, historical docudrama."
Full disclosure: We stopped watching about a minute in as he babbled about stopping billion dollar payments to Pakistan - "for nothing, like it's water, because they don't even vote for us in the U.N." It got worse. He endorsed the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and got everything wrong: “Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists." One response: "The sound you hear is historians everywhere, weeping." He made up walls around Obama's house and the Vatican. He tripled the number of people here illegally. He said, "I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?" He said, "I could be the most popular person in Europe."
He said Syria is "sand and death," and "I know more about drones than anybody," and "the wheel, the wall, some things never get old." Best response: "I don't feel moats are getting enough attention in this discussion." He bad-mouthed McCain, Mattis, Flake, anyone who ever disagreed with him. He boasted, "I just got a great letter from Kim Jong Un. The few people I've showed this letter to - they've never written letters like that. This letter is a great letter." He said he'd just had a meeting about Iran with lots of good-looking generals, "like from a movie." At the meeting, there were so many "computer boards. I saw more computer boards than...I think they make today." In the words of Daniel Dale, D.C. correspondent for the Toronto Star, "Trump's hingedness level was not high today."
Is there any reason to document the madness, to prove again that Trump is "a rambling hulk of an insane human being," that "an empty plastic bag in the wind is more stable than this guy," that this would all be pretty entertaining if he wasn't, like, you know, the president? We honestly don't know.
In comments following one report of the mayhem, psychiatrists and mental health workers began telling their own stories of patients in locked psych wards who, despite the occasional fictional transmitter in a tooth, made more sense than the guy leading this Cabinet meeting.
"While it sounds funny and we joke about it, that kind of serious mental illness is devastating to the individuals suffering and to their families," one noted. "And not to stretch the analogy, but we now have a nation of families being devastated." Truth. And warning: the mindfuckery will keep coming for a while. Hang on, be kind to each other, this too shall pass.
(Abby Zimet writes for Common Dreams … where this piece was first posted.)
-cw
