We’re on the verge of a historic catastrophe
Is Donald Trump “unhinged” or “unleashed?” And is there any difference?
That’s the question that the Washington Post‘s well-sourced reporters Philip Rucker and Robert Costa are currently ruminating over:
“This is now a president a little bit alone, isolated and without any moderating influences — and, if anything, a president who is being encouraged and goaded on by people around him,” one Trump confidant said. “It really is a president unhinged.”
…
Trump is making hasty decisions that jolt markets and shock leaders and experts — including those on his own staff. Some confidants are concerned about the situation, while others, unworried, characterize him as unleashed.
The idea that a guy who bet his entire media presence on deciding to be the most famous guy who didn’t believe the first black president could be a citizen is only now becoming “unhinged” is ridiculous. But the real danger is that he’s increasingly unleashed.
He knows he has GOP Congress willing to obstruct for him and a state-run media willing to turn any of his tantrums into Gospel.
How America’s largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump’s war on the media: https://t.co/iLVtKRQycL pic.twitter.com/dMdSGellH3
— Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 31, 2018
But he also sees that Republicans have suffered what appears to be a historic trouncing in both special elections and the regular scheduled Virginia elections. His businesses are under siege. And, unlike us, he’s seen the questions Robert Mueller has for him.
So what is he doing? He’s speeding us toward two wars — one that could be nuclear and one that could only be resolved by an invasion of a country four times the size of Iraq.
He’s bringing in a Secretary of State and National Security Advisor who have rarely hidden their antipathy for Muslims and their lust for a war in Iran. And he’s creating a diplomatic moment that is likely to manufacture the sort of crisis that could be used to justify the deadliest war in decades.
How could North Korea ever make a deal to constrain its nuclear program as Iran is being punished for making a deal to constrain its nuclear program? As if the trail of deposed leaders in countries who gave up nukes or abandoned nuclear ambitions in Iraq, Libya and Ukraine isn’t disincentive enough.
Trump loves the drama of meeting with Kim Jong-Un and his new National Security Advisor loves using the pretense of diplomacy as the justification for war.
Here is John Bolton, in his memoir, admitting that he supported talks with North Korea in 2002 only because he expected them to fail, which he could then use to discredit diplomacy and pursue more hawkish policies on North Korea. pic.twitter.com/6nVcDuUuzW
— Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) March 25, 2018
Trump’s strategy has always to be to grab the attention he needs to silence the voices of humiliation screeching in side his head. When the voices on the outside match his daddy’s condemnation on the inside, he’ll try anything. That’s worked for him for a long time. But increasingly his options are being reduced to war and and tyranny, so that’s what we should expect.
And until we vote, our only hope is a dismal one: We have to get this complicit/captured GOP Congress to at least debate the horrors he has planned.
