Occam's Razor

The governing phase of the Trump presidency is effectively over. Donald Trump is unraveling in plain site. As a result there is basically nothing he can get done between now and the election, assuming he survives that long. I am very skeptical now that he will make it that long.

You know what people care about by how they spend their time. Right now, all Trump cares about is impending impeachment hearings. He has no time to govern because most of the time he is tweeting, and mostly he is tweeting about Democrats having the audacity to hold impeachment hearings against him. There has been 36 tweets today so far, and it’s only 9:15 PM. The first one was at 5:00 AM. And most of them were related to the impeachment investigation. So far that’s nine more than the 27 tweets yesterday, again mostly impeachment related. It’s hard to find a waking hour when our president is not tweeting.

When you tweet all the time, it squeezes out the time you need to actually govern. To govern, you have to make decisions and take actions. You need to talk with your aides, consult with foreign leaders, heck, consult with your own party. Instead his presidency is now largely a series of multiple tweets an hour, mostly full of rage and hurt.

This self-professed extremely stable genius is proving he is none of these things. He is also proving himself awfully damned stupid, or perhaps just incredibly incurious. The main reason Nancy Pelosi approved an impeachment investigation was due to the “transcript” (actually, a bunch of Cliff Notes) of a call he had with the president of Ukraine back in July. It says right on it: declassified and released on authority of the President. And the notes say explicitly that he wanted political favors from Ukraine:

I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.

This is against the law: compromising our national security for political purposes. It’s not an ambiguous matter. But Trump denied he did this. So he either did not read the “transcript” he declassified or (perhaps because he is functionally illiterate) didn’t understand what he was reading. Most likely he had no idea that what he did was illegal, or felt that it shouldn’t be because his intent was pure somehow in his own mind. According to the still-anonymous whistleblower, someone figured it out, and moved these notes into a more secure electronic vault specifically for code word classified information, another likely violation of our classification laws.

Just today Trump publicly said China should investigate Joe Biden and his son too. It’s like he wants to be impeached. There are two incontrovertible egregious violations of our law right there.

No one is left in the White House to say no to him. Those who did are gone. All he has left are lackeys, who are easily disposed. His trusted source of news is the Fake News … no, not CNN and the Washington Post, but Fox News and right wing websites that are feeding him fake news, such as that Ukraine has an email server that contains the missing Hillary Clinton emails, or something.

Trump is worried about impeachment because it makes him look bad, which reduces the likelihood that he will win reelection. His chances of actually being removed from office are still slim, although I continue to be astonished that Republicans in Congress are still mostly sitting on their hands and biting their tongues while this Captain Queeg roams around the White House. Trump actually believes the fake news being fed to him. More worrisome (but not surprising) are that his aides do too … they actually believe this crap, or they are too timid to say they know better. Trump won’t brook any dissent. Oh the irony: Trump is being undone by the fake news he consumes because, well, it’s fake, instead of the “Fake News” which his actually real news. His fake news can’t be empirically proven. But his case of cognitive dissonance is so severe he can’t admit to himself that it could possibly be fake; or that his “friends” have been faking him out all this time simply so they could wield political power.

Obviously, this isn’t going to end well. The logical me knows what a more logical Trump should do: simply resign at some point, after getting a promise of a pardon from Mike Pence, as I mentioned in my last post. But Trump is severely mentally ill and is not playing with a full deck. Above all, he can’t acknowledge to himself that he is not the glorious image of himself that he sold to himself and to voters. And with an administration full of sycophants, they apparently mostly believe this stuff too, or simply are in it to the bitter end, like our so-called Attorney General Bill Barr.

My wife is expecting that Trump will bust a blood vessel or something and keel over dead. Given his obesity, his chronic lack of sleep, his refusal to exercise and his dangerously disordered mind, she may be right. He is clearly feeling the gates closing. It’s all he cares about.

His days of governing though are plainly over.