Clash of the Extremists

 

"Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn't become president, could return to inconspicuous lunching."

From the forthcoming book
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Michael Wolff
As reported in this morning's NY Daily News

This was my theory a year before the catastrophic election of 2016 -  and you did indeed read it here first, folks! Trump never had any intention of becoming president of the United States. He was merely intending to "up his brand", so to speak. As we all know by now, his scheme backfired in ways that the hideous old bastard never dreamed possible. He should have heeded the advice of that great muckraker from a bygone era, H.L. Mencken. Donald Trump's lethal error was overestimating the intelligence of the American people. This is black comedy at its finest; and the funniest thing of all is the fact that it's all too deliciously true!

 

The vicious back-and-forth this week between the Donald and former chief strategist, Steve  Bannon, reminds me all-too-well of the petty squabbling that went on between Josef Goebbels and Hermann Goering throughout the entire mercifully brief reign of Adolf Hitler eighty years ago. Extremists will always eventually devour one another. Reading William L Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich two years ago was a double edged sword: While the "rise" part was thoroughly depressing, the "fall" chapters were just oodles of fun to read about! It's sort of a similar feeling I get while watching the utter disintegration of the most corrupt and disgusting administration in the history of this weird nation.

 

Won't you come home George Dubya? Won't you come home? 

The new book by Michael Wolff quoted above has been dismissed by the Trump Mob as nothing less than a tome filled with lies that should not to be taken seriously by anyone. If that is, indeed, the case, why are the president's lawyers working overtime at the moment trying to prevent its publication next week? It is rather more likely that Mr. Wolff has revealed a few nasty truths that Trump would rather be kept in the dark. The man is so completely arrogant that he went into this thing seriously believing that he would never be accountable to history. Despots are always prone to believe such nonsense. That's the reason they always fall of their own weight. According to the Daily News, another juicy detail being revealed by Fire and Fury is this side-splitting nugget:

Daughter Ivanka Trump planned on using her old man's failed candidacy as a springboard for her own run in the future. It was she - not Hillary Clinton - who was going to be remembered in history as the first woman chief-executive. By the way, by all accounts darling Ivanka is dumber than a box of moldy, purple yo-yos. I swear I'm not making this up.

I LIKE IKE!

Don't be surprised that this dimwitted debutante really believed that she had what it takes to handle a job as intellectually taxing as the presidency. And don't think that something as completely improbable as an Ivanka Trump administration might not have happened someday. We live in Idiot Nation. Anything is possible. Anticipate the absurd. It is not even feasible to ask the voters of this country to look back on a Republican president - Dwight Eisenhower for instance - and remind them that "the party of Abraham Lincoln" has morphed into something else entirely. Old Ike might not have been perfect; much of his foreign policy was just a hair short of incompetent, but at least Americans of that generation knew that he was a dignified gent whose heart was in the right place. A political party that devolves from the hero of D Day to Donald Fucking Trump has no right to exist; not here - not in the United States. We're better than that....or, at least, we used to be....Never mind.

I really doubt that Trump's legal eagles will have any luck suppressing the Wolff book. It has jumped to the top of my reading list - a book that we're going to be discussing for many years.

This is all quite too good to be true.

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY

ADVISORY:

The Eastern United States is about to be slammed with the coldest weather in living memory. They are saying that in the next few days, some parts of the country will be colder than the planet Mars. Please stay inside. And if you have to travel, be sure that you have a fully-charged cell phone in your possession. Stepping outdoors for less than a half-a-minute late last night to get something out of my vehicle (without a coat!) I was immediately taken aback by the brutality of the chill in the Northeast air. I don't think I have ever experienced such cold weather - and it's supposed to get worse! These are nights that are potentially lethal. Please, be safe, folks.

It is sad and unsettling to know that there are homeless people out there. Those of us sleeping under a roof and in a warm bed have much to be thankful for tonight.