The first 30 days: A fine month of unmitigated hell

March 1, 2017 Originally published on SFGate

“I’m not drunk. You’re all drunk. You’re all drunk. This my motherfucking house. This my motherfucking house. Goody goo-goo. Goody goo-goo.” – Donald Trump (via Trevor Noah)

It’s been a nervous, semi-serious joke since the beginning of Trump’s stubby middle-finger of a campaign – if not well before that – given the man’s tendency to stumble through half-formed thoughts like a drunken gerbil, garble the most basic of democratic concepts and generally make a mockery of grammar, coherence and life itself, embarrassing even small children who only know nine words and also how to burp.

It’s a joke – “Might Trump be truly mentally unstable?” – that quickly turned far more dire and dangerous as he lurched, lied and stabbed his way into power, his overt derangement and misanthropy not at all diminishing, not turning to a more reasonable form of statesmanship, but actually accelerating, deepening, becoming something far more sinister and openly terrifying: A Russia-controlled fascist in clown’s clothing, a man-baby with the mind of a tire fire. As George Packer put it in the New Yorker: “It won’t get better. The notion that, at some point, Trump would start behaving ‘Presidential’ was always a fantasy that has the truth backward: the pressure of the Presidency is making him worse.”

Did you catch the most surreal, deeply weird press conference in recent American history, from a few days back? You must watch – at least the highlights, though the whole 77 minutes of it makes for truly mesmerizing, nearly avant-garde theater, like watching the world’s worst Transformer attempt to assemble itself out of broken razor blades, shards of glass, a giant bucket of pink slime and whatever glue Trump sniffed that morning. Hell, even comedians were stumped about what to make of it.

This much we know: We are, as widely noted, a mere month into the most acidic political era in our recent history, and the cruelty and destruction has been widespread, frightening and, in many ways, much worse than many people imagine. And it’s just getting started.

Or is it? There are, it cannot be denied, many bright flames of resistance, successful howls of protest and blessed judicial pushback, not to mention many curious flickers of hope that this sh-tshow won’t last all that long, after all – though right now, every day seems interminable and every check of the newswires brings a fresh and unconscionable hell.

If you think of Trump’s presidency as a 48-minute NBA game, we’re only at the one-minute mark https://t.co/OkYHFrBdDC via @POLITICOMag

— POLITICO (@politico) February 20, 2017

You needn’t go far to find fascinating whispers and not-unreliable hints that, for example, the peeing-Russian-hookers thing wasn’t only accurate, it was just a fragment, a pointer to a stunning mountain of damning evidence that the president is more corrupt and deeply revolting than anyone has even come close to imagining, all rumbling, churning, and building toward the biggest reality TV reveal of all time: the well-deserved annihilation of a bogus president, the most spectacular scandal in American political history, as we all kick the orange bastard off the island forevermore.

It’s not at all difficult to believe. Trump has insulted and/or alienated nearly every major world power and U.S. ally, along with their intelligence agencies, not to mention the U.N. and NATO and most major trade partners, saving his bromantic lust only for one man: V. Putin, pug-like murderous thug with the extant humanity of a child molester.

Congressional Republicans, AKA the only ones who, technically, have the power to stop Trump’s rollercoaster of madness, have, nearly across the board, revealed themselves to be biggest cowards in history, even ignoring and sneering at their own constituents in favor of ripping out their own hearts for a taste of gross totalitarian power.

But we might not even need their help: It’s easy to imagine multiple intelligence agencies worldwide compiling their own dossiers on Trump’s myriad obscenities and corruptions, lest he decimate the global economy, destabilize world currencies and vomit the world straight into WWIII.

As evidences by the Milo Yiannopolous “scandal,” we might have finally found the Republican threshold for gross wrongdoing: pedophilia. Everything else – sexual abuse, rape culture, groping women, fellating Russia, mocking immigrants and refugees, gutting science and the environment, violating Senate rules to cram through unqualified monsters to Trump’s cabinet, et al – these are no problem for the Republicans. But molesting kids, even for the heartless GOP, is just too ugly of a PR mess to shrug off. Maybe one of those dossiers will reveal Trump did more than just walk in on multiple Miss Teen USA contestants in their dressing rooms? Is that really what it takes, Speaker Ryan? Or do we have to go full apocalypse?

One thing seems certain: we cannot survive four years of this. We have barely survived four weeks, and the embarrassment, the damage done, the cruelty and the dumb are unprecedented in history. A massive cataclysm would be almost a relief.

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Mark Morford

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