Brain Salad Surgery

Look, I'm not as stupid as I look.

"So I deal with foreign countries, and despite what you may read, I have unbelievable relationships with all of the foreign leaders. They like me. I like them. You know, it’s amazing. So I’ll call, like, major — major countries, and I’ll be dealing with the prime minister or the president. And I’ll say, how are you doing? Oh, don’t know, don’t know, not well, Mr. President, not well. I said, well, what’s the problem? Oh, GDP 9 percent, not well. And I’m saying to myself, here we are at like 1 percent, dying, and they’re at 9 percent and they’re unhappy. So, you know, and these are like countries, you know, fairly large, like 300 million people. You know, a lot of people say — they say, well, but the United States is large. And then you call places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and you say, you know, how many people do you have? And it’s pretty amazing how many people they have. So China’s going to be at 7 [percent] or 8 percent, and they have a billion-five, right? So we should do really well."

  -  Excerpt from WSJ transcript of Donald J. Trump captured in recent fugue state.

This meaningless, superlative drenched patois is the quintessential Trump. The central talent necessary to hold forth like this (the only way he ever communicates publicly) is simply possession of sufficient gall to just keep right on saying words until someone stops you. 

Or you have a fucking stroke or something. 

Unfortunately, nobody ever stops you from talking when you live at 1600 Pennsylvania. 

See what can happen?   

Since the President is still tweeting out pics of himself wolfing fried chicken finger sandwiches stir-fried in lard and Heinz ketchup, or whatever he has the White House kitchen pumping out for the 3:30am feeding... maybe we can still hold out for that stroke.



4:12AM  INTERIOR - WHITE HOUSE RESIDENCE

(MANOLO, a butler, delivers a mixing bowl filled with heavy cream poured over a box of Count Chocula, garnished with a well done rump roast on a gold serving platter)

      TRUMP

"Thank you Manola, this looks fabulous!"  


      MANOLO

"You have to keep your strength up for this morning's tweet, Mr. President."

     (quietly, tentatively, respectfully)

"It's, uh, ManoLO Mr. President" 

      TRUMP
     
"Don't sass me there hombre or I'll have your brown ass shipped back to Mexico so fast it'll make your head spin."  

      MANOLO

"I am from Dallas Mr. President."  

      TRUMP

"I don't give a shit where you're from.  Go on now.. get outta here... you little bitch... before...   (gurgle)  fore...faghh...  uhnnahzzz...agghsisigghaaaa... COVFEFEEEEEE!" 

      MANOLO  

      (calmly, hesitating, unable to determine whether anything is actually amiss)

     "Mr. President?  Sir?"  
  

So we can hold out for a stroke.  Did I say that already?

Unless he's reading a speech, Trump is incapable of coherent verbal communication. Even when reading the words of others properly strung together, his communication style is similar (in effect and affect) to that of a lamprey. His tweets are indistinguishable from the sorts of things you would hear from an eleven year old girl. An eleven year old girl who smokes Parliments, lives in a trailer park and finds herself starring in a science fiction movie in which she is running the United States.

Call me crazy - but if the Gods have decreed that a reality television star will be given a turn to run The Corporation - I'd actually prefer Honey-BooBoo or The Situation.

The sole evidence Trump even knows how to write are his tweets and his cartoonish signature. He delights in scribbling his favorite name at the bottom of presidential executive orders authored by the head of Breitbart News. Orders which he has not read and sometimes forgets to actually sign. He then proudly holds aloft the Big Chief tablet featuring his 3X9 in. signature.

Somewhere a Deplorable swoons, secure in the knowledge that very soon all the Muslims will be gone and he his pals will be making $21 an hour in a coal mine somewhere. Maybe someday (even if it's a long shot) he'll have enough wealth and power to grab a little strange pussy himself. Trump and BillyBush Do the Backlot at Universal didn't lose Trump any votes. It gained Trump votes.

Observations:

• The Deplorables are not deplorable. They are, regrettably, chumps.
• Grab only those things you have been granted express permission to grab.
• One in every 110 people in this country is a Muslim. They aren't going anywhere.
• Coal mining employs fewer people than Arby's.
• 
  

These signing ceremonies are staged to make Trump look as good, powerful, smart, and Presidential as possible. For many, Trump scribbling his "Hey Everybody I've Got A Small Dick!" signature at the bottom of an order repealing 40 year old environmental regulations evokes the image of a six year old wraith with nuclear weapons in his lunch box and a smile that induces the existential terror of a live alien. 


The power signature is central to his style esthetic. An esthetic which includes gold, goldy-looking stuff, a ray-gunned flaxen hairdo worthy of Quintin Crisp, and of course, those memorable neckties. Mr. Trump, you have $9.5 billion, a Slovenian fashion model trophy wife and your own skyscraper on 5th Ave., and are The President of the United States of America. You can't have someone from Hermès run over a few ties that don't horrify every straight male on the planet whose wife doesn't dress him? 

*  *  *

Maybe there is no God.  What if some eleven year-old crack-whore or alien first-grader really is seated at the Resolute Desk in the body of a deranged, elderly billionaire?

Don't swallow those pills...  Comes a sudden, brilliant ray of light.

Maybe there actually is a God.  And maybe He'll show up just in time to make everything alright...

And maybe He's... Michael Richard Pence.  

This is why irrational belief in a benevolent presence lurking in the background of your life can lead to trouble.

As our Energy Secretary - who handles atom bomb manufacturing - is famous for saying: 

Whoops.

*   *   *

Three conclusions suggest themselves when considering the embarrassing tripe which issues from Trump's fast-food scented mouth: (i) he actually is as stupid as he sounds; (ii) his score on the Dementia Severity Rating Scale is in the 'uh-oh' range, or; (iii) he's putting on one hell of an act.  

Just because he made millions insulting, bullying, and shaming people as a TV celebrity - and political candidate - doesn't mean he can act. 

He wasn't acting.

He's not acting now.

He's fucking crazy, ok?

Most of Trump's support is based on the fact that he's rich, he's pissed off, and he sounds a lot like the guy on the barstool next to you after he's had a few pops. And you've had a few yourself. Although I'm quite sure most of the President's supporters do not believe him to be an unrepentant, sociopathic, bald-faced liar; he is nonetheless an unrepentant, sociopathic, bald-faced liar. 

The problem a hugely successful liar like Trump encounters when suddenly lying to millions - and not just sixteen bondholders sitting across a conference table who are about to be relieved of a billion dollars - is that his audience now includes professional journalists and others who smelled him coming when he was riding down that gold escalator to infamy in Midtown a few years back. 

Few of us were either amused, amazed, or impressed by the fact that he inherited a lot of money, made a lot more, and had a passenger airliner to zip around in.

Big shit.

*  *  *

Trump's repeated, casual dismissal of the established press is unique - and further evidence of his profound ignorance regarding the American Presidency. It could be argued that he swore an oath to protect the press - see for example the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution - and not mother-fuck them.

Trump has for the moment convinced his supporters that American newspapers simply make shit up. These institutions make mistakes, occasionally hire people as stupid as Donald Trump, Jr., and are run by human beings. However the (non-alternative) fact of the matter is that The Lying Washington Post and The Failing New York Times have a much longer and better established track record of truth-telling than do Trump and his mini-me monster children.

Trump's views on the press are a result of his experience.  He has told thousands of lies to financial and gossip columnists and subsequently seen them end up in print.  So naturally enough he projects his experience onto the entire media. This sort of behavior sometimes makes Trump seem more like a solipsist than a narcissist. 

American political journalists much more often than not (unlike most in the Trump administration) understand the gravity of what they're covering. They generally don't make things up. The political press get stories wrong; they are much more often right. And you can count on less than one hand documented instances of a WaPo or NYT political reporter inventing fake sources and engaging in the sort of fabulism that routinely issues forth from the White House Press Room lectern. 

There are reasons the American political press tells approximately 1% of the lies that the White House machine spews out in a typical news cycle. Perhaps this level of honesty is not due to major US news organizations necessarily being beacons of light and truth. Maybe reporters are just smart enough to understand the implications of inserting WHOPPERS into stories that people much smarter than them will be dissecting for inaccuracies. Too bad the President is so smart he never again need learn anything; he could take a lesson from this band of prevaricating yahoos.

*   *   *

Not many people know this, but business and politics require different skill sets. It could be that soon everyone who voted for Trump will understand that this fact is not one of those facts that can be replaced with an alternative fact. I have hope for Trump's voters. They have recently learned (along with their President) that Lincoln was a Republican, and that health care financing in the world's the largest economy is complicated.  Perhaps now their learning bone has been stimulated they'll be begin to figure out other important things.

Things like Steve Mnuchin's plan to buy dead peasant policies on all of them, cancel their health insurance wait for their mortality rates spike.  Score!

Trump's manhandling of his little chippies from the Wall Street Journal is profoundly unsettling. I had trouble selecting the most egregious example of his contempt for the language - his very contempt for expressing meaning.  Almost literally nothing that he ever says makes any sense. That this seems to be central to his popularity is a deeply disturbing notion.  

Someone said (and it may have been me because I can't find it on Google) that there is great political value in meaninglessness. You might have been able to argue about that up until last November. Not now. Any person other than the President of the United States who gurgled out this sort of nonsensical drivel in the office of the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal would be immediately escorted out of the building. Unless his last name was Murdoch.

Someone (very likely a member or members or many members of the intelligence community) leaked the entire transcript of Trump's latest cant which included the rambling, verbal melange reproduced above. Trump has yet to grasp the correlation between his calling the intelligence community or its political allies clueless morons one day... and seeing videos of himself getting peed on by Russian hookers the next. On Wikileaks. 

Despite Trump's deep knowledge of hacking, he is apparently unaware that the people who design security for the NSA don't really have much problem reading Don Jr.'s emails or the unpublished editorial material of the Wall Nut Journal. It's all sitting on a server out in the desert. If you're at the right console all you have to do is type in something like:

Z:\trunk-line\725 Fifth Avenue\Nyc/NY*.*

And hit enter.

Wait a moment. 

Sort through the pornography and spam and unpaid invoices until you get to...

"I love it - especially later in the summer"

or

"Pee in my mouth Natasha. PEE HARD!" 

That last hasn't actually happened. At this point it's fake news. I'm fairly sure (or at least highly disposed to believe) that Trump has taken a few safflower showers in Moscow and that Vlad's impalers have it all on hi-def.  But nobody's exposed any Trump Russian a pee-pee tapes to the press. 

Yet.

(And all the Goldman exes at Treasury - generally physically incapable of passing on a trade - are probably not really buying dead peasant life insurance on Obamacare patients currently receiving chemotherapy. That's Fake News too.  But it's a hell of a fine rumor if someone would care to start it.)

Those leaked interview transcripts are (as Trump himself might say) terrific. But I can't read a whole one. They are fascinating in the way fatal car crashes are; you have to look away fairly quickly. I had to avert my eyes from this WSJ transcript when the following whopper was loosed on the hapless journalists who (God bless them) were doing a pretty damn good job of acting like they weren't sitting in the same room with some peckish Carl Childers.

And I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful. 

When Trump's brilliant strategy of telling billionaire-yacht-fashion-model-slut stories at the National Jamboree elicited a call from Chief Scout Executive Michael B. Surbaugh, I don't think it was to say 'thumbs up Commander.'  And (natch) it turns out there never was such a call. Trump just... made it up.  His moo-moo wearing press-agent from the Ozarks attributed this inconsistency to the (by now well established) phenomenon of 'alternative facts.'

I get that this next is never going to be universally understood but it bears repeating as frequently as possible: There are no such things as alternative facts. The world is not a TeeVee show. This is not an episode of The Outer Limits.  

There is no such thing Opposite Day.

*   *   *

Know what billionaires call other billionaires who discuss their own net worth in public?

Losers.

That's not an alternative fact.

*  *  *

Trump's campaign deployed a deliberate (if poorly executed) plan to tell lies to people justifiably pissed off at a government which systematically exploits them. The strategy put Trump in the White House - and in the process established a new bar for the toleration of sociopathy in national politics. 

If the term "Getting beat at your own game" were to appear in some sort of encyclopedia of human foibles, it would picture Trump sitting in the Oval Office. His genius refinement of the modern Republican Party's core strategy allowed him to trade up from a 35 year old 757 flown by pilots whose paychecks he regularly shorted - to a brand new 747 equipped with a complimentary US Air Force bird colonel in the left seat. 

If the 30% to 40% of voters in the lower two income quintiles who consistently vote Republican were to discover their party leaders had been trick-fucking them since Reagan - there would basically be no more Republican Party. 

Being former Masters of the Universe, many administration employees will recall fondly that old investment banking chestnut. Guys like Mnuchin spent decades trick-fucking Fortune 500 CFOs; Walmart shoppers are fairly easy to coax into the wood-chipper.

Republican operatives are uniformly dismissive in private of any suggestion that the economically disadvantaged members of the Republican base (frequently, it's margin of victory) will ever figure out what's being done to them. The Republican brass knows it can maintain this constituency which is not actually a constituency by hitting the dopamine buttons hard enough with rag-head bashing and stories of liberals harvesting baby-brains to sell to the Martians. Hell, the head of the party has revealed his ability to plant stories in the National Inquirer. 

It is unfortunate for the country that the only ideas which work well enough to keep these poor bastards voting Republican are ones based on fear. Fear has always been the easy (and lazy) political sell. Fear's free - and we're all pretty much wired to have a bit of an affinity for it. All we need is a little winding up. Think horror movies.  

Like Dr. Strangelove.