By now, you’ve read people opine glibly that President Trump is only president of half the country.
It’s a clever line, but it’s not really off the mark anymore. That shiteating motherfucker is thinking about turning the State Of The Union into a goddamned rally full of his idiot supporters who will gleefully agree that the country has never been greater or some other demented non sequitur word salad nonsense. Never mind that the United States Government is slowly flipping agencies’ open signs to closed and people are going to work without pay. It’s an atrocious situation. But that’s a feature, not a bug for Trump as Republicans generally want government closed permanently anyway. So in their estimation, he’s doing great, couldn’t be doing better. For the rest of us, we are realizing that our social compact is in jeopardy while Trump tries to get his increasingly pointless wall. It simply isn’t worth it and it’s all become particularly ironic, given that the people tasked to interdict drugs and prevent hazards by sea and air are finding themselves the people whose jobs Trump is holding hostage as the cornerstones of that wall. If he really cared or listened to anyone with more than a 5th grade vocabulary level familiar with a subject he’d realize that this is not an effective way to solve the problems he claims a wall would solve. If built, it’d just be some giant, racist reverse-Statue Of Liberty monument to Trump’s ego when the crime and the drugs and the migrants and the asylum seekers continue unabated at the border. It’s funny, Trump has broken tons of promises to his faithful. But of all the promises he has broken, this one is particularly important for him not to break- and I don’t want to be the bearer of more bad news, but it’s because the wall bit is one of Trump’s best lines at his Two Hours Hate rallies that makes it imperative for him that it be built. That’s it. Trump needs adulation like a lizard needs a hot fucking rock. He got a taste of crowd hysteria and he’s hooked. It pumps him the fuck up. And it’s going to cost us $5 billion smackers to get him to give back the government so he can crow to the redhats that he won something (for a change).
Speaker Pelosi’s refusal to open the House to the SOTU looks on its face to be a jab simply to rankle Trump, but if you think about it, having the entire American government in the same place without adequately paid professionals ensuring its safety is probably not the smartest idea ever conceived. But everything is always about Trump. It all reduces to him. And like the infantile jagoff he is, he decided to use his position as commander in chief of the armed forces to deny Pelosi a few diplomatic flights overseas which is probably the norm for the new leader of the legislative arm of the American government. I really hope when all the criminals who aided and abetted Trump’s systematic destruction of the American government are put away, we work on curtailing the potential for excess within the executive branch. NO president should have as much power as it has right now. This is absurd. Trump has been such a spectacular abuser of power that political science can’t seem to catch up to him. And when it does, maybe we need to have a conversation about whether what we are doing as a country, as a political entity- is appropriate for Americans. No one should have the power to do what Trump has done (or Mitch McConnell, but that’s another coconut entirely). Trump doled out institutional positions to people whose sole mission was to disable the agency they would lead. He’s frustrated a generation of experts with his thoughtlessness. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of Trump appointees who don’t have “acting” next to their position. And all the planet-busting deregulation for his corporate donors is shocking and offensive.
The Constitution is too vague and skeletal. Judges “interpret” it, which is alarming and bizarrely metaphysical for something rather important. We ignored Thomas Jefferson when he spoke of not updating our document to fit the times: “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” The Federalist Papers, while of course interesting for historical reasons, cannot guide us as it attempted to answer questions about the challenges of government in 1787, not 2019. And the founders rarely spoke in unison back then. Hell, arms needed to be twisted about the inclusion of the Bill Of Rights and we look at some of those amendments as so fundamental today that you’d have to be insane not to include them in drawing up a government. But anyway, I suspect if we set those same great minds to the task of creating a new republic today, they would come up with something radically different. Why? Because times fucking change. People change. And the old ways are not preventing the new ills. The old ills barely exist anymore. There were exceptions. George Mason, perhaps traveling through time, refused to sign the Constitution, saying it would “produce a monarchy or a corrupt oppressive aristocracy: it will most probably vibrate some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other.”
Is there anything that makes sense today as much as this does? Shit, we have an oppressive aristocrat AND a pretender to monarchy on our hands. How do you deliver a State Of The Union in the state the union has been in anyway?
Am I asking for a revolution?
Me? Nope. I’m a crazy person with too much time on my hands. You all know that.
But I am willing to hear one out.