Disgraceful Exit

Donald Trump seems hell-bent on not admitting guilt and keep clinging to his dysfunctional presidency for as long as he possibly can, even though his chances of actually getting anything done are now slim to none. His downfall will require either a lengthy impeachment process or the Vice President invoking the 25th amendment.

Unfortunately, the latter seems far fetched, because it would require a majority of cabinet members to be at least marginally competent and have a spine. People like Rex Tillerson and James Mattis seem to be fed up with Trump's constant failures, but Trump's cabinet includes people who were specifically chosen to be personally loyal to him. Betsy DeVos, for example, has no relevant skills whatsoever for her job and would be out in a second as soon as any other person than Trump would claim the President's seat.

It even appears as if Donald Trump is trying to further defuse the threat of the 25th amendment by getting rid of cabinet members who might call for him to step down. John Kelly, a person with no obvious ties to Trump, was just moved from a cabinet position to be chief of staff. H R McMasters is reportedly facing a risk of being fired after getting rid of a holdout from the brief reign of Mike Flynn. The rumored candidate for his replacement is Mike Pompeo, an obvious Trump loyalist. Getting a majority of this cabinet to oppose Trump seems unlikely. With Trump being a constantly growing embarrassment to the United States, both at home and abroad, it might not be totally impossible, but having high hopes for it to happen would be unwise.

Impeachment is a lengthy and humiliating path to defeat which will do great harm to the nation, but right now it seems like the only option.

Fox And Fiends

President-but-not-really Donald Trump has now gone completely bonkers. Based on one crazy, contrived and fundamentally false story on Fox News, he now claims that Russia was actually opposed to him winning the 2016 election, and could therefore not have been responsible for any attacks on Hillary Clinton or any meddling with the US election process.

That's right. The so-called President is choosing to believe a half-assed lie from an already thoroughly debunked fake news source over the reports from his own intelligence community, plus nearly every other source with any credibility.

This president is broken. We need a new one.

"Sleazy"

In his latest characteristic self-referential insult, Donald Trump really nailed it. By calling the ranking Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee "sleazy Adam Schiff" we realized what epithet to put on the president.

Donald Trump is sleazy. That's not a presidential quality. At all.

Junior Meltdown

I suspected one of Donald Trump's stupid sons would slip up and incriminate him, but I assumed it would be Eric, because he seems to be the most dim-witted of the two. As it turned out, it was Donald Trump Jr who figuratively drenched himself in gasoline and set himself on fire while the nation was watching. He doesn't even seem to understand that soliciting or accepting "help" from a foreign actor to unfairly influence an election is a crime. With his pathetic attempts at a defense he only managed to further incriminate himself, and drag his father down with him in the process.

The level of stupidity he showed is almost hard to understand, and his expensive lawyer must be gnashing his teeth. John Oliver's name for the Trump-Russia scandal, "Stupid Watergate" is very appropriate indeed: it's a big mess, and all the people involved are bad at what they do.

Putin's Puppet

Today, we saw reality fight with Donald Trump and lose. No less than four intelligence communities in the US have issued a joint statement that Russia was meddling in the 2016 presidential election, that there is ample evidence to support it, that it was a large, state-sponsored effort that simply had to be ordered by President Putin, and that there are no signs of any other sources for the hacking.

Despite this, Donald Trump has been strangely reluctant to admit that the attack came from Russia. He has claimed that it might be a fat kid sitting on a bed somewhere, or the Chinese, or sometimes even claimed that the entire thing is a hoax created by the Democrats because they are sore losers. His most admissive stance (it changes rapidly over time) has been that it "probably happened", but that "nobody knows for sure who did it" and that it "didn't change a single vote". This is all pure and utter nonsense.

When Trump met Putin today, he mentioned the issue. Naturally, Putin denied that he had any part in it. After the meeting, Putin claimed that Trump accepted it as truth, although the White House later denied that. When asked, however, Trump still won't believe his intelligence services and admit that the hacker attacks on the election emanated from Russia. The reason? Because Putin said so. The collected intelligence apparatus of the United States says otherwise, but Trump instead chooses to believe a criminal, homicidal dictator who plays him like a fiddle.

This is the stuff of nightmares.

Fifty States Of Nay

Now that the final responses are in, it turn out that all 50 states have responded with a refusal to the request to turn over voter registration data to the Trump administration to aid the investigation of the totally made-up accusations of voter fraud favoring the losing side in the election. No wonder. The same people who are under investigation for stealing sensitive voter data and using them to gain unfair advantage in the election are now asking the states to voluntarily turn over the same kind of data to them. You can't really blame them for their lack of trust in the matter.

Pekoral

There is a word in Swedish that has no direct counterpart in English: "pekoral". It means "something written or composed in total earnest and solemnity, but so severely lacking in literary or musical quality that it becomes embarrassing, sometimes even crossing over into unintended humour".

Donald Trump's commissioned personal anthem "Make America Great Again", premiered to a cringing population on the 4th of July 2017, is that kind of bad.

No. Don't listen to it. Don't... oh well. I can't stop you, really. Knock yourself out. But remember you were warned.

An Audience Of One

Donald Trump's tweets have now definitely descended into crazy territory. He is trying to reinforce his crumbling pack of lies with even more lies, and apparently he assumes that his readers won't bother checking with other sources or even think for themselves.

His recent attack on the hosts of MSNBC's show Morning Joe is telling. Over the course of just a few short, incomplete and badly crafted sentences, he managed to pack in a surprising number of lies, even by his own standards. Every single one of those lies are easily disproven. From the look of it, he isn't even trying any longer. The case might be that he is now only pandering to himself, clinging to his own Trump-centric version of reality in a last feverish dream of being a real president while everything is coming apart around him.

Donald Trump! The world has given up on you and is waiting for you to resign, so we can get on with things that actually matter. Your delusional attacks on media are unfit for a leader of a free country, your monetary transactions are shady to the extreme, and you had your grubby little hands deep into the mess with Russian meddling with the election. Please just resign and let the investigators do their job in peace. You will probably end up in jail for the rest of your life, but you deserve that, and you know it. While you are waiting   for the hammer to fall, you have absolutely no business being the President of the United States.