White Rabbit Hole

The Trump White House is starting to resemble what might happen if a branch of government took too much acid. It’s like a freakout, and apparently it’s affected everyone, because no one seems to know how to at least create any sort of outward appearance of calm. Order. Stability. Sanity. Hieronymus Bosch might be hard-pressed to portray this White House.

Imagine the substitute teacher in shop class where nobody’s listening, the teacher is upset because he demands attention and isn’t getting it, the students who are there to learn are upset because the teacher doesn’t seem to give a rip about them, and the other students are trying to figure out how to turn on the power tools. That seems orderly compared to this White House.

We have: 1) a president who is highly disengaged from reality, still basking in the glow of his ‘victory,’ yet worried his ‘victory’ won’t be perceived as legitimate because of the possible role of the Russian Government in helping him win, and so he turns everything into a reliving (or retraumatization, depending on your politics) of the election, or some sort of signal for the 2020 election. It’s not about ‘governing.’ It’s about ‘winning.’ 2) an executive branch where people all seem to be doing whatever the hell they want, which is alarming when those rogue actors include Pompeo, Bolton, DeVos, Carson, the coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA, the boy who is spearheading an immigration policy that would have prevented his own family from immigrating to the US; 3) the conscience-free spokespeople who serve as the shovel brigade, trying to figure out which end of the pig gets the lipstick but mostly ending up just relocating the manure piles in the general direction of the press corps, which collectively feels like a group of abused family members; 4) a Congress that has watched this all happen, done everything it can to support and protect Trump, and pretended that a full three-ring meltdown in DC, topped off with a government shutdown approaching four weeks now, has nothing to do with them, that complete republican control of Congress for the last two years and a pile of divisive, hyperpartisan policies and laws passed and judges confirmed don’t reflect on them in any way, whatsoever (as long as re-election and campaign funding prospects look good); 5) a press corps and electorate that vacillates between covering Trump because he’s ratings gold or not covering him because he rarely says anything of substance, and when he does, it’s often a lie or some conspiracy theory re-tweeted. This is a press corps where Sean Hannity, Fox & Friends, and Jeanine Pirro are household names (and to be fair, ‘Judge’ Pirro’s analysis was prescient two years ago).

There is really no other way to describe the cruelty and banality of shutting down government because a president doesn’t get his way on an issue where his most obsessive campaign promise was one in a series of dumb chants (‘build the wall,’ ‘lock her up,’ ‘drain the swamp’), the public is against it and placing most of the blame on him by a 2 to 1 margin, and he has only sounded dumber over the last two years (perhaps a more apt metaphor might be the overflowing pit toilets from unstaffed national parks).

The thing with the White House’s acid freakout is that there is no one left to talk them down. The press has almost normalized this state of affairs, because it happens so frequently. The ‘Trump tweetstorm’ is a thrice weekly fixture. But when this all happens in the middle of the longest intentional shutdown of government, and Trump says other-worldly things like this could last for days, months, years, well, in the real world, we’d be talking about a mental health intervention.

But when the mental illness happens to be one of the most important institutions, historically, in the ‘modern’ world, it’s more than just a crazed, paranoid leader having a meltdown moment with a short social media shelf life. Trump has chased away the adult temperaments, leaving the sycophantic, the overzealous, and the sociopathic. None of these groups have any particular use for consensus, open dialogue, thoughtful deliberation, or more bluntly, facts and truth. There’s no one to stop them. And Trump, far from having realized he’s in so far over his head that aids don’t even try to explain things to him any more (leave that to Doucy, Kilmeade, Hannity, Pirro, Putin and Erdogan), seems so deluded he believes he’s just hitting his stride. While most of the public watches this freak show in some state of distress or disbelief, remember: The White House hasn’t even peaked yet. It’s like when Otho realizes that séances aren’t for amateurs. Except we’re talking about the US, the world, hundreds of millions of people directly depending on a functioning, stable government, perhaps a billion more indirectly.

Add Trump’s paranoia to this toxic brew, and what you have is an unsustainable situation, unprecedented breakdown, and some real threats to US security (versus Trump’s three little pigs and the big bad MS-13 mythology). Trump has ironically exposed an Achilles heel of American democracy—a president who seeks to sow division and destruction can move faster than the checks designed to hold him accountable. So as a slackjawed and wide-eyed White House and McConnell-led senate offer no short-term fixes for a shuttered government and millions in distress, we definitely have an emergency on our hands. It’s just not the one Trump—who has bigger fish to fry, after all, his masculinity hangs in the balance—is peddling this week.

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