Checking in

It's 3 a.m. in America

It’s been six months since I weighed in on President Trump; maybe I thought he’d have a short-lived reign--as short as his stubby little fingers. But here we are, almost a year into our national nightmare.

Well, actually, it’s a bad dream only to some of us. He still has his “base” (how apropos a word), in whose eyes and minds (?) he can do no wrong. That constituency is holding steady at 35 percent of the populace, a number that corresponds, roughly, to the percentage of Amurricans who seethed over the very idea of a black man in the White House.

Trump promised to fight for the interests of all those who’d been “left behind,” but thus far his Presidency has been wholly devoted not only to leaving the little man (and woman) behind, but to plowing him under. The Republican tax plan (or boondoggle, to be more precise), the latest piece of criminal mischief intended to be shoved down our throats, will benefit the rich and hurt the not-rich, almost everyone agrees, even the 227 craven GOP representatives who voted for it Thursday.

“I’m willing to pay more (taxes),” Trump said last May, and in September he said that his tax plan was “not good for me, believe me.” True, the measure that passed this week will benefit him and his sleazy family by only about a billion dollars.   

But what did we expect from someone who looked at the Presidency of the United States as a money-making opportunity?

Since this was transparently so from the beginning, why did so many people vote for him? Well, anything’s better than Hillary, right? Even a nuclear war, I guess.

But why did 53 percent of white women decide to vote for this vulgar misogynist and admitted pussy-grabber? As a lark, maybe? After all, Trump wasn’t really real, only reality-TV real. Is the spectacle of him now unraveling in the White House still amusing?

In fact, it’s not hard to get people to do and say things that aren’t in their own best interests. How else do you explain the women in Alabama standing up for Roy Moore? It’s not that he might have done the things he’s been accused of doing, it’s just that, in the bigger picture, they don’t matter. We’ll excuse his individual peccadilloes, these women seem to be saying, because he’s fighting the good fight against institutionalized godlessness.

Trump, of course, hasn’t joined the debate over Moore--he has his base to think about--but he couldn’t resist tweeting about Al Franken. He couldn’t resist, because he couldn’t bear to think that we might be thinking about Al Franken, and not thinking about Donald Trump. That’s the only conclusion to draw, since both his tweet, and his decision to tweet, were senseless.

That’s the rule of thumb, now, about the rule of Trump: nothing about it makes sense.