Nick Kristof's column in the Times this weekend, Lessons From 100 Days Of President Trump, reminded us that "Trump distinguishes himself in one area: incompetence" and that "Trump remains a bully and a charlatan." Kristof wrote that over his entire career he's "never known a national politician as mendacious, ill informed, bombastic and dangerous as Trump." And it gets worse as he lists a dozen grievances against Trump.Then yesterday, on CNN's Reliable Sources, Carl Bernstein accused Señor Trumpanzee of having "lied as no president of the United States in my lifetime has, day in and day out."After Trump's performance at a partially-filled 7600 seat barn in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Saturday night, David Gergen, a former top advisor to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, went on CNN and said his stand up routine was "the most divisive speech I’ve ever heard from a sitting American president." Trump was trying to avoid the embarrassment of being roasted on national TV at the White House Correspondents Dinner so he did a free bread and circuses number for some poor schlepps in Pennsylvania who couldn't afford to take the family to see The Fate of the Furious, Smurfs: The Lost Village or How to be a Latin Lover. Instead he ldelighted them with his litany of lies while they laughed and drooled and screamed "lock her up" and "build that wall" over and over again. He boasted about overflowing crowds and lines of people outside while anyone with an IQ of 80-- about the average, it's calculated, for most Trump voters-- could just look around and noticed rows and rows and rows of empty seats.Gergen: "He played to his base and he treated his other listeners, the rest of the people who have been disturbed about him or oppose him, he treated them basically as 'I don't care, I don't give a damn what you think, because you're frankly like the enemy.'"The Daily Beast reported that "everyone was eating it up." These are our countrymen.
The phenomenon of a Trump rally is its collapsing of the space-time continuum. It’s timeless and timely with the recitations of the old themes-- “does anyone remember who our opponent was?”-- and the introduction of the new material-- “Senator Schumer is a bad leader.”Within these spaces, Trump is largely impervious to criticism. His failures are the faults of the Democrats and Republicans who won’t cooperate with him, and his successes are the result of a unique businessman’s approach to the presidency.“What Donald Trump really is is an independent president, if you will, for lack of a better term hijacking the Republican Party,” Michael Avila, a Trump voter from New York City, told the Daily Beast. “Which I think is a good thing.”“I think he needs to get rid of Paul Ryan somehow, someway,” Avila added. “I think he’s a big issue.”For Edward X. Young, a 57-year-old actor from New Jersey, sporting an assortment of buttons including pictures of the president and his wife, Trump achieved a great deal in the first 100 days considering the “quasi-Marxist Democratic party” he had to work with.His one major issue was that Trump didn’t fulfill the campaign promise of putting Hillary Clinton in jail.“She’s behind the Resistance,” Young told The Daily Beast, referring to Clinton. Trump “should prosecute her and put her and her lousy husband behind bars, and her daughter too.”Everything else was mostly peachy to Young-- especially the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.“The last time a new Supreme Court Justice was confirmed, in the first 100 days, was 136 years ago in 1881,” Trump proudly proclaimed at one point. “And I was devastated to hear that because I thought I’d be the only one to have done that.”He’s right on the numbers and the significance (Chester Arthur was the last to do it in that timeframe), but it’s one of those Trumpian anecdotes that misconstrues a rare opportunity that few presidents get as a massive single-handed achievement.Yet it plays for the cameras and it plays for the audience that hates the cameras. And on the 100th day of Donald Trump’s presidency on a balmy night in Harrisburg, more than 100 miles away from the grind of his daily job, that’s all that really mattered.“It is truly great to be back in the wonderful, beautiful state of Pennsylvania,” Trump said to the fans. They all seemed to agree-- the mothers of active service members, actors, bikers and even a few skinheads who came down to celebrate the fact that they had taken the country back from the clutches of the elites who had failed them.It was a country now where you could wear a Pepe the Frog mask and wave a flag representing the fictitious 4chan-generated Kekistan on the lawn where a president just spoke.And it’s never going to be the same. Even after police on horseback chased Pepe off the lawn and into the night.
Trump woke up Sunday morning, tweeted some of his normal bullshit and then probably watch his pre-taped interview with John Dickerson on Face The Nation, which he referred to as "Deface the Nation." He's such a witty guy. When Dickerson asked him what he knows "now on day 100 that you wish you knew on day one of the presidency," he's learned "how dishonest the media is, really. I've done things that are I think very good. I've set great foundations with foreign leaders. We have you know-- NAFTA, as you know, I was going to terminate it, but I got a very nice call from a man I like, the president of Mexico. I got a very nice call from Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada. And they said please would you rather than terminating NAFTA-- I was all set to do it. In fact, I was going to do it today. I was going to do as we're sitting here. I would've had to delay you. I was going to do it today. I was going to terminate NAFTA. But they called up and they said, 'Would you negotiate?' And I said, 'Yes, I will negotiate.'"Most Regime observers have noted he was talked out of scrapping NAFTA by the Goldman Sachs crew he recruited to run the economy even before he called Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto as a face-saving gesture. Anyway Dickerson was stunned by the shallow response and followed up: "Surely, you've learned something else other than that the media is dishonest... Give me another thing you learned that you're going to adapt and change because all presidents have to at this stage." And the orange monkey told him things take longer than he'd like them to. "It's just a very, very bureaucratic system. I think the rules in Congress and in particular the rules in the Senate are unbelievably archaic and slow moving. And in many cases, unfair. In many cases, you're forced to make deals that are not the deal you'd make. You'd make a much different kind of a deal. You're forced into situations that you hate to be forced into. I also learned, and this is very sad, because we have a country that we have to take care of. The Democrats have been totally obstructionist. Chuck Schumer has turned out to be a bad leader. He's a bad leader for the country. And the Democrats are extremely obstructionist. All they do is obstruct. All they do is delay. Even our Supreme Court justice, as you know, who I think is going to be outstanding, Justice Gorsuch. I think that it was disgraceful the way they handled that. But, you know, I still have people, I'm waiting for them to be approved. Our chief trade negotiator. We can't get these people through."And then he stumbled through an awkward and cringeworthy attempt to explain TrumpCare 3.0, which he is basically clueless about and sounded very much like his crackpot Adderall-fueled tweets. Does this delusional imbecile sound like a President of the United States to you?
