Slate re "his" "presidency" - "Its Bad......the Worst is Yet to Come"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2017/02/the_first_month_of_the_trump_presidency_has_been_more_cruel_and_destructive.html

The first month of the Trump presidency has been more cruel and destructive than the majority of Americans feared. The worst is yet to come.

By Michelle Goldberg

Right after Donald Trump was elected president, I interviewed Masha Gessen, the Russian dissident writer, for an essay I was thinking of calling “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Fascism.” The idea became obsolete when Gessen published her own superlative piece on the same theme, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” But during the first surreal, harrowing, humiliating month of the Trump presidency, I’ve often thought back to that conversation, and particularly Gessen’s answer to one of my questions: How do you stay sane when a despicable man is in your head all the time?

Basically, she told me, you don’t. Gessen’s family immigrated to the United States when she was a teenager, and she later returned to Russia but then moved back to America three years ago to escape mounting anti-gay persecution by Vladimir Putin’s government. “In the last three years, since I got to this country, I realized what a mental price I had paid for living in a state of siege and a state of battle for a decade and a half,” she told me. At times, she said, being part of the righteous opposition was exhilarating, “but it’s intellectually deadening. When you are fighting, you stop learning. You stop reading theory. You stop reading about things that aren’t part of the immediate fight.”

Intellectual enervation is a luxury problem. Many in Trump’s America are facing material emergencies such as deportation or the loss of health insurance. A leaked draft of an executive order revealed on Friday would seek to use the National Guard to round up and detain undocumented immigrants, an idea that will spread terror even if it’s never implemented. Compared to this, Trump’s denial-of-service attacks on our attention are nothing. But they have still ruined the daily fabric of life in this country.

Every day there’s a new Trumpian outrage that in an ordinary presidency would be a multiday scandal: an ostensibly light-hearted threat to invade Mexico, a casual dismissal of a potential Palestinian state, a feud with a reporter or an actor or a department store. Trump lies so much it’s as if he’s intentionally mocking the impotence of truth. He shamelessly profits off his office, reveling in our powerlessness to stop him. His closest aide is an unkempt racist who has described Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl as a role model. A senior adviser uses her administration perch to hawk the president’s daughter’s line of polyester-blend workwear in a blatant violation of ethics rules. Trump himself is either enmeshed in a subversive relationship with Vladimir Putin, or he’s willing to appear to be. He and his coterie make a fetish of patriotism yet take a perverse antinomian pleasure in defiling the presidency.


snip - much more to read

[uponit7771]

1. Yeap, it's been 4 weeks and this admin is ate up to be damned

[ThoughtCriminal]

2. "denial-of-service attacks on our attention"

Yep.

[dalton99a]

3. It will get worse. Bannon will see to it.

[PatrickforO]

4. Well, Bannon's trying to position us for Armageddon.

He loves war.

But then,

he'll have a bunker.



or, is that:

[Initech]

5. Will he stockpile plenty of oldies music and 50's TV shows for entertainment?

[PatrickforO]

6. Bannon? Probably porn.

[CrispyQ]

7. This:

During the campaign, when some Republicans expressed qualms about Trump, it was possible for a liberal to imagine that, beneath our mutual partisan loathing, a baseline civic commonality still bound the country together. Hillary Clinton bet all her aspirations on it. She argued not that Trump was a typical Republican, but that Republicans were better than Trump. She was wrong. Republicans in Congress have watched silently as Trump has shredded American credibility in the world, terrorized immigrants, and flirted with treason. We can now see that there is nothing—not sexual lasciviousness, not corruption, not meddling by foreign adversaries—that Republicans abhor more than they abhor Democrats, nor anything they value above power.