Divorced From Reality

One has to seriously wonder what the people in his inner circle are thinking these days. Are they walking on cracked egg shells? My suspicion is that they're telling this president everything he wants to hear. Those are the types of people Donald Trump has always surrounded himself with. That's why this disgusting administration was doomed for failure. Jack Kennedy, Barack Obama and Dwight Eisenhower always had advisors on hand who would let them know when they were blowing it. Not Trump. All he's ever known in his career are blubbering sycophants, yessing him to his heart's content. Now the silly dingbat is cornered with nowhere to flee to. Bobby Mueller and company are zeroing in and the Donald is desperate. This is ending very badly.

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It was a something none of us, I'm sure, will ever forget: There stood Meghan McCain, passionately eulogizing her  late dad. At the same moment Trump, trying to deflect attention from the final tribute to the Arizona senator, unleashed a Twitter-storm that - it would be too generous to call it juvenile - it was completely infantile, not to mention idiotic. But there was something else that would have been clear to even the most casual observers: the president of the United States has lost whatever precious reason he came into this job with.

Andy Johnson

This would be poignantly amusing if the stakes weren't so high. This is a situation that is unprecedented in the history of the United States. Sure we've had chiefs executive who were a tad unhinged every now and again. Lincoln suffered from what was then termed "melancholia"; his successor, Andrew Johnson was definitely unstable (if you want to know what I'm talking about look up the transcript of his remarks at old Abe's second inaugural); during the final stages of the Watergate scandal that consumed his presidency, Dick Nixon was prone to staying up late at night, drinking heavily and talking to portraits of his dead predecessors. But Donald Trump is something else indeed. Never before have we been forced to deal with a president who was as crazy as a freaking bed bug. With the midterms elections fast approaching and the Mueller investigation closing in, it's an easy guess that Trump is on the verge of doing something drastic. We're at the edge of the worst constitutional crisis we've ever experienced. This is going to get quite interesting.

If you were silly enough to support this unhinged twit during the campaign two years ago, you will forgive those of us who warned you from gloating, I'm sure. We saw this catastrophe coming from ten thousand miles down the road. Perhaps America has finally learned the lesson it should have learned over a century ago. Perhaps not. I won't be holding my breath.

One thing I have to admit about Donald Trump: he sure as hell isn't boring.

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY

Royko

AFTERTHOUGHT:

I can remember when the New York Daily News was one of the best papers in the country, with hard-hitting columnists like Jimmy Breslin, Bob Herbert and Mike Royko, powerful editorials and a standard of reporting that was almost without peer. Those days are long gone. This morning's edition was the worst I've ever seen. A full third of today's edition was devoted to sports, and for the third day in a row, there was not a word devoted to the political catastrophe that is compounding daily inside the Executive Mansion. They have fallen about as hard as a newspaper can fall.