Just a Normal Week in Trumpistan

Over the past week, Donald Trump has:

• recommended ignoring the due process rights of American citizens deemed (by someone) to be “a potential danger to themselves or others,” in favor of confiscating the person’s firearms and “any weapons”;
• boasted of being able to ban a certain kind of gun accessory (bump stocks) on his own, without having to go through Congress;
• accused Republican legislators of avoiding gun control measures because they are “afraid of the NRA”;
• opined that police should have taken the guns away from the Florida school shooter and any other citizens judged mentally ill “whether they had the right [to confiscate the guns] or not”;
• gone on a Twitter rant against his own attorney general (again), calling his actions “despicable”;
• demanded massive tariffs against foreign steel in the broadest presidential assault on the concept of free markets and the dynamism of liberty since the bank bailouts of 2008 (which Trump not only supported at the time, but even proposed to top by suggesting that even nationalizing the banks would have been acceptable);
• paid respect and admiration to Xi Jinping’s overriding of China’s presidential term limits and seizure of lifetime power (and no, I am not referring to his joke about trying the same thing in the U.S., but to the genuine praise of Xi the man — Xi the communist dictator, to be precise — with which he prefaced that joke).

As the past week has amply and superfluously demonstrated, there is no limit to this president’s stupidity, arrogance, disrespect for his office, disdain for the republican form of government, flouting of his constitutional role, ignorance of his nation’s history, and disregard for natural rights and the principle of individual liberty. 

And yet his sycophants in the so-called conservative media, and throughout the rest of his enormous cult of personality, continue to make “unparalleled,” “historic” pretzels of themselves in their desperate attempts to rationalize and justify the utterly irrational and unjustifiable madness that is the Trump presidency. 

“I suspect he is just toying with his opponents,” they say. Or “This is all part of his complex negotiation method.” 

No. There is no “complex” anything about Trump’s thinking. He is a vain, self-important dimwit, so far in over his head that he doesn’t even know what having one’s head above water would feel like. His followers at this point are merely those who have chosen, for their own various reasons — variations on personal weakness — to drown down there with him, all the while desperately denying the reality of the sunlit world they used to be groping for. 

America as a whole does not deserve the fate she is headed toward, but millions of Americans do deserve it, lust for it, and have sold their virtue and their reason to secure it. Just another normal week in what I have called America 0.5, aka Trumpistan.