The presidency is an actual job: This idiot can't do it
https://www.salon.com/2020/03/10/the-presidency-is-an-actual-job-this-idiot-cant-do-it/
BOB CESCA
MARCH 10, 2020 5:13PM (UTC)
Steven Wright, the great surrealist comedian, once inadvertently described how the last several weeks, if not the last three years, have felt to so many of us.
On his 1985 "I Have a Pony" concert album, Wright joked about the sensation of leaning too far back in his chair, but catching himself at the last second just before falling over backward. "I feel like that all the time," Wright added. We've all done it at one point or another, and we're all familiar with that momentary adrenaline rush of out-of-control panic.
With a pandemic rapidly circulating the globe, with the first stages of another financial crisis in progress and with a breathtakingly incompetent White House running the show, we're all feeling a bit like we're leaning too far back in our chairs. And we're more or less experiencing that sensation "all the time." So much of it's in reaction to the aforementioned breathtakingly incompetent White House and our even more incompetent president. He's supposed to be handling this with expertise and aplomb, as most previous chief executives have, but he absolutely isn't. In any way.
Instead, it's another crisis in which Donald Trump and his team of ass-kissing henchmen are dealing with it like the Three Stooges trying to fix the plumbing — Curly accidentally trapping himself in a cage of leaky pipes, while geysers of water shoot out of the light fixtures. Trump's total absence of presidential qualifications, like the fuel rods at Chernobyl's No. 4 reactor, are becoming rapidly exposed, precipitating a political, economic and public health meltdown unlike anything we've experienced in the modern age.
For several years now, Trump has managed to bullshit his way through his presidency, walking a narrow path while pretending he knows what's going on, pretending he has a handle on the details and responsibilities involved in serving in such a rarefied position. Despite his inner delusions and outer bragging, he doesn't.
For three years, Trump leaned heavily on his skills as a well-practiced New York con man, and, accordingly, continued to cultivate the fanboy adulation of his Red Hat cult as his exclusive audience. Thanks in part to the blinding velocity of the firehose of news and a successful whitewashing effort provided by Fox News, previous nightmares such as the president's incompetent, callous and punitive reaction to Hurricane Maria have whizzed on by without Trump experiencing any blunt-force damage to his low-40s approval polling.
But now Americans at large are waking up to a grotesque, unavoidable reality: This isn't new. Trump has always been staggeringly out of his depth as president, routinely overwhelmed by the rigors and requirements of the gig, while appearing to act based solely on his own political and financial desperation. [more...]
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