LOOK AT THEM BEANS

Maybe Mexico will pay for a wall after all.  On their side of the border, to keep us out.  Couldn’t blame them.  We’re not sending our best right now.

Meanwhile, back in the States, things have continued to grow curioser and curioser.  I once speculated – this was right after the 2016 election – that Donald Trump wouldn’t serve out his full term.  At the time, I thought he’d get bored and find an excuse to declare victory – “I made America great again” – and retire to Mar-A-Lago.

I was wrong about that.  Right now, boredom is the least of Donald Trump’s problems.  To be sure, he hates his job, to the extent that he understands it.  He enjoys campaigning, but the virus follows him wherever he goes, literally killing some of his most devoted followers.  He’s tried ignoring COVID-19.  He’s tried bullying it, and lying about it.  What does he have left?  Offering the virus a presidential pardon if it will disappear before election day?  Good luck with that.

Roger Stone’s pardon (OK, commutation of sentence) was something new.  Trump has pardoned bad guys before – Joe Arpaio and military personnel who committed war crimes in the Middle East.  But Stone is one of his co-conspirators.  Remarkably, Stone himself made this clear when he said that he deserved to be rewarded for not spilling the beans on his pal.  Apparently there are a lot of those beans.

I wouldn’t bet the farm (not that I own a farm) either way on Trump staying in the race.  He is clearly not playing with a full deck.  Consider this monologue, which he delivered at a press conference on Tuesday: 

“We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.”

Someday I’ll tell you why.  In the meantime, buy Goya beans.

We are sixteen weeks away from our next presidential election.  Whether or not he drops out, Donald Trump is not acting like a man who expects to win in November.  Rush Limbaugh, who a few months ago insisted that COVID-19 was basically the common cold, is now telling his listeners that they may have to resort to cannibalism. 

It has come to this.  The GOP is now the Donner Party.