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Scott M. Krasner's avatar

I waver between bewilderment and rage when reading these daily summaries. I can almost "understand" his more political moves - installing loyalists, withdrawing troops, even trying to sell access to the Defense Department's wavebands. I don't agree or condone these actions, but they're consistent with his approach to governance to date.

What's comprehensible is ignoring - in any and every way - the coronavirus and its impact. Unconscionable doesn't begin to describe his failure to acknowledge the deaths of 280,000 Americans, or to endorse any means of protecting each other as best possible. It's inhumane. It's devoid of empathy, morally vacuous, and ethically deplorable. It is unequivocally and unalterably wrong.

And yet 74,000,000 thought it acceptable to return him to office. McConnell has personally obstructed any efforts to extend relief for 8 months and counting. It's Hobbseian in its social brutishness. Even Hobbes might be appalled. And Republican leadership is mute.

I'm almost beyond shock. Since the beginning, many thought each of Trump's transgressions would be the last straw, yet nothing happened. The only apparent imposition of accountability is his having lost the election. Court losses haven't swayed him. Our perverse campaign finance laws have given him license to steal despite the misleading fine print. His Cabinet, always incompetent for the task, is asleep, silent, or in on the game. Each day goes by with no visible effort to limit his efforts to salt the earth in advance of his successor. And Republican leadership ignores or enables him to proceed unhindered.

He's unmoored. He's looking to preemptively pardon family and loyalists who are most likely would be criminally liable but haven't yet been charged. His most ardent supporters are almost insane (read Giuliani and Powell) or seditious (read Flynn and Lin Wood). And still the Republican party watches with bloodless faces and dead eyed stares, saying not a word.

What is one to think? How does one explain this to children? How can one reason with any family, friends, or acquaintances who somehow believe Trump is in the right, brought low only by a grand, silent conspiracy of wrong minded citizens and foreign actors?

Perhaps history can look upon Trump's reign of terror more dispassionately. Today, however, I and many others feel like we're helpless, our minds and sensibilities best represented by the visage of horror in Edvard Munch's The Scream.

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TCinLA's avatar

One of the things that has gotten me over the past four years, and moreso this past month in which four years of Trumpcrap has been compressed into 30 days, is that I cannot figure these people out. I have for a number of years worked as a creator of dramatic fiction, during which time I gained a reputation for being able to create "honest, believable characters." Not that all were honest, moral people, but rather that they were honest portrayals of people who might do the good, bad or indifferent. But with these Trump people, I really can't figure them out, how they got to the level of awful they inhabit. I mean, how did an otherwise unremarkable kid from a middle class Jewish home full of what appear to be decent people, become this kid who went out of his way to be an asshole, who got his jollies from the outraged responses of others to his assholery, become Stephen Miller, who I can only compare to Reinhard Heydrich, even though he likely doesn't have the stones to become the author of a Holocaust? Lewandowski, Bossie, O'Grady, mentioned here tonight. You look at who they were and their previous unremarkableness is the constant. What turned them into monsters, or were they always monsters but just able to maintain a facade? And why were/are they? Most of them don't appear to be getting rich from their involvement with Trump, but they're drawn to him like moths to a candle.

'Tis a puzzlement.

And then there's the response they raise in me, which is best left to the Dylan line - "If my thoughts 'n dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine."

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