Occam's Razor

Donald Trump is in a heap of trouble. He’s going to get impeached, assuming he doesn’t pull a Richard Nixon and resign first. That will be one major blemish on his record as president, as if there aren’t many others. Getting thrown out of office by the Senate is a much higher hurdle, but every day it seems more plausible.

It’s pretty clear that most Republicans in Congress don’t like him. Oh they say they do for show, but if given their druthers you can bet that the vast majority would druther Mike Pence in his spot. Then maybe the crazy would stop for a while. Because it just gets more and more insane every day.

Trump is blaming Democrats of course, but if he really wanted to blame someone of course he could look in the mirror. He could also blame voters for unwisely picking him, although of course he famously lost the popular vote by three million votes. This of course became one of the first items he labeled as “fake news” once he became President-elect. Still, if he has to pick a villain, he could pick Fox News, the biggest propagator if not creator of fake news out there.

This actual fake news peddled by Fox News and many right-wing outlets is, quite frankly, over the top, outlandish and utter bullshit. This fake news was published by outlets that I hope at least knew they were peddling in fake news. Their fake news was a means to an end: political power. For at least twenty years they have been at it, and its been working. How many Tea Party members of Congress arrived sincerely believing that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya? Trump clearly did, and he’s been peddling this and many other outlandish fake news stories. It’s been his way of getting attention, something he craves more than power. Fake news gives him power, or at least it has until now.

A truly stable genius would recognize this fake news for what it is: complete and utter bullshit. But apparently our stable genius president doesn’t. He spends much of his day tuned into the Fox News network where this stuff is highlighted hourly. He’s been indoctrinated by Fox’s fake news. Who’s buying their bullshit? Or stable genius president is buying it, pretty obviously.

Just look at what is bringing him down: fake news the right wing has been feeding him. He actually believes the preposterous suggestion that there’s a DNC server somewhere in Ukraine. He has bent over backwards to move the levers of government to prove the allegation. Not only did he create a shadow State Department in the form of his lawyer Rudi Giuliani, who he sent to Ukraine to pressure its leaders to find this server, he also sent his attorney general to Europe to do the same thing. Imagine that: our chief law enforcement officer and supposed arbiter of the execution of the law is being sent on a crazy quest to chase this and other bogus theories that are the product of hyperactive, paranoid people that probably mostly inhabiting their mothers’ basements.

I’m sure there are some Republicans in Congress who actually believe this stuff, but I suspect they are only a small percent of them. Most of them know it’s all bullshit, but they simply don’t care as long as it allows them to acquire and maintain power. Now though a number of them are beginning to care, as they realize that their peddling of fake news is becoming counterproductive. Fake news is biting them in the ass. It’s also creating an out-of-control monster, manifest in the form of Donald J. Trump.

It used to be that Trump had some gatekeepers, but they are all gone now. His senior staff is now entirely filled with disposable yes men (and a few women), virtually all white. They are interchangeable and he changes them frequently. He doesn’t have to chafe because someone near him is suggesting that he is not the smartest person on the planet. He just decides stuff, the staff salutes and that’s that. Unfortunately, a lot of these decisions are terribly bad, such as his recent decision to withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria, one of these ultra-stupid things that even Republicans in Congress could not forgive.

Stupid compounds stupid. There was no gatekeeper to tell Trump that hosting the G-7 next year at his resort was a bad idea. Instead, according to published reports, they said it was an interesting and intriguing idea. Not one person apparently had the guts to say, “Well Mr. President, if you are looking for a way to get removed from office, this brazen violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution alone should do it.”

The larger problem though is that you can only pretend the emperor has no clothes for so long. At some point, someone’s going to say, “Hey, he’s naked!” You can stifle the obvious for a while but at some point reality hits you on the head like a 2×4. Last week, arguably Trump got whacked.

Farmers affected by his tariffs can’t pretend his trade actions aren’t hurting. That’s true of all sorts of businesses affected by his tariffs. Denying climate change isn’t keeping it from happening, and already the impacts are being felt severely. Cutting fuel emissions standards won’t keep more people from ending up in the hospital or dying from asthma and other lung-related diseases. The greater the difference between reality and what is asserted, the harder it is to ignore. Reality works like this.

And so the pain continues until the body politic does the one thing it can’t help: instinctively vomit out the filth that is killing it, fake news in this case. It looks like that process is underway. Let’s hope we vomit out enough of it to survive. Vladimir Putin is hoping we won’t.