A moveable farce

As Donald Trump becomes more aware and alarmed that his presidency and his reelection are in danger, his campaign rhetoric becomes nastier and even more obscene. He becomes more Trump.  Like a computer virus, Trump 2.0 is more destructive than Trump 1.0.

His campaign moves across the country as a wildfire spreads, shooting off incendiary flares far and wide. Speaking in Minnesota to a crowd of red-hatted Trumpolocos, President Donald Trump said Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden was considered a good vice president only because he “understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass.” Trump’s locos cheered wildly.

This is bad in so many ways. Yet, expect worse as the campaign continues to its climax.

Beyond that, how, exactly, to characterize this verbal ejaculation? In an editorial, The New York Times described it as one of Trump’s “infinite vulgarities.” True, but generic.

Charles Blow, an opinion writer for the Times, unlike most pundits, detected the clear racial undertones in the image that starkly portrays the worst fears of white racists, a society where the terms have been inverted and white men cater to black ones. Trump’s outburst is the stuff of farce. Farce is “a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterizations and ludicrously improbable situations.”

Could there be anything cruder than Trump’s pornographic image? Is there a more ludicrously improbable situation than Barack Obama, a president that relished tough debates with and among his subordinates because he knew that that is how you make good decisions, allowing a brownnoser into his inner circle?

Could there be a bigger buffoon than Donald Trump, with his paper thin but grotesquely inflated ego, his ridiculous hair and his too-long ties, his constant repetition of falsehoods as authoritative statements from heaven?

Almost a century ago (1922), in Babbitt, the American novelist Sinclair Lewis captured what I imagine a contemporary gathering of Trump and his cronies might look like: “The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.” This gathering, made up exclusively of white male Republicans, could pass for today’s Republican Congressional caucus.

Trump’s fantasy about a rump-kissing Biden betrays another classical Trump psychological tendency, projection: “Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.”

Trump concocts a ludicrous scenario in which Obama is the object of butt-kissing, but it is he, buffoon-in-chief Donald Trump, who has a nearly pathological addiction to adulation and unquestionable approval. It is a Trump trait the media usually confuses with valuing loyalty. In fact, it’s just a sign of insecurity.

The Trump administration is a clan of the worst and the dimmest, incompetents and know-nothings, self-dealers and nepotists. More than anything it is a government of yes-women and yes-men. Kelly Ann Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mick Mulvaney, the bootlickers are almost infinite. The list of those who did not understand how to kiss Trump’s bottom and have survived is an empty set.

The current chaos and paralysis in government is a result of subordinates anxious to follow the leader wherever he goes but unable to predict where he will be at any point. There are some constants in Trump’s behavior—lying as the default, a predilection for cruelty over kindness, an agenda to restore white supremacy and make America safe for plutocracy. But in his day-to-day gyrations and oscillations, Trump should be read like an electron in quantum theory—using the uncertainty principle.

It is a maddening situation for any rule-bound public servant. This explains, in part, the game of musical chairs that is this administration and the fury of those who quit in exasperation as well as the actions of those testifying about it in Congress as I write this.

That this makes for a dysfunctional state is an understatement. This is a surreal administration that reflects presidential delusions about the foreign birth of Barack Obama, the size of the crowd during the inauguration, the number of “illegal aliens” who voted fraudulently in 2016, the corruption of the Biden family (more projection), Hillary Clinton’s treasonous emails, and too many other things to list.

The upshot is disaster. Today, the main risk to U.S. national security is not Russia or China. It is Donald Trump. The main threat to democracy is not the left or even the extreme right. It is Donald Trump.

During the Watergate saga, one of the main players spoke of “the cancer growing on the presidency.” Republicans and Democrats of that era joined to excise the tumor before metastasis could set in. Today, the malignancy has already spread, and the Republicans have come together to prevent any treatment to limit the damage.

There are two hard truths the people of this country must come to terms with:

• Donald Trump, loser of the popular vote by millions of votes, president by dint of the anti-democratic and archaic Electoral College, beneficiary of foreign interference in the U.S. electoral process, is an illegitimate president.
• The Republican Party as a whole, in its extremism and dereliction of duty to the Constitution, has become an illegitimate party.