SHIP OF FOOLS

In Plato’s Republic, there’s a story about a ship with a captain and crew so dysfunctional that they prize loyalty above all else, and are suspicious of anyone who exhibits signs of competence. Donald Trump, who famously doesn’t read, has certainly never read Plato, and may not even have heard of him, but his presidency has been little more than a re-enactment of Plato’s scenario.

Here are some miscellaneous observations as we head into the weekend.

A couple of weeks ago, Trump gave an interview in which he was asked if he stood by his claim that President Obama wire tapped him during the campaign. Trump replied, "I don't stand by anything." Ironically, that’s the best one sentence summary of Trump’s presidency I’ve ever read.

Then in May, Trump ratcheted up the crazy. He has taken credit for coining the phrase “priming the pump.” He ranted about the Navy using digital catapults on its aircraft carriers, insisting that they return to using steam. He told Time Magazine that “in a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care.”

Last winter, I thought Trump’s word salad was a rhetorical strategy designed to throw his opponents and the press off balance. It certainly functioned that way during the Republican primaries and the general election. But now it just seems like he’s out of control. Republican consultant Rick Wilson wrote on Twitter that Trump’s recent interviews “sound like evidence submitted in an involuntary commitment hearing to a mental institution.”

Nearly every day, Trump voluntarily offers new reasons to believe that he’s guilty of obstruction of justice. Yesterday, he held a press conference in which he said, “I can always speak for myself and the Russians.” It’s being reported as “I can only speak,” but he said “always.” Freudian slip?

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Today we can add another example of the truth of that adage. On July 22, 1973, the Washington Post published a story by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with the headline “Nixon Sees ‘Witch-Hunt,’ Insiders Say.” Yesterday (May 18), Donald Trump began the day with a tweet claiming that he was the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt ever.” At his press conference later in the day, he doubled down: “The entire thing has been a witch hunt.” This from a guy whose mentor was Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy's right hand man in the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

Today, the New York Times reports that Trump told his Russian pals on May 10 that: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Then he offered them some top secret information, blowing the cover of an Israeli asset embedded in ISIS. Little man, you’ve had a busy day.

Not to be outdone by the Times, the Washington Post revealed today that the criminal investigation into ties between Trump and Russia has identified a “senior White House advisor” as “a significant person of interest.” Gosh, I wonder who that could be! I really wish it was Jeff Sessions or Mike Pence, but Jared Kushner might be a more reasonable guess. What the heck, they’re all scoundrels. We’ll find out in the fullness of time.

In the meantime, it’s fun to watch Trump’s defenders build successive fallback positions, only to see them crumble into dust within days, if not hours. First they called the whole story was fake news. Then they said if there’s a problem, it involved two people at most, Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn, who are long gone anyway. When the investigation widened, they said at least nobody close to the president was involved. I eagerly await the next dispatch from the Fuhrerbunker.

I’ll close with a quote from Hunter S. Thompson: “The slow-rising central horror of Watergate is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.”