Donald Trump In One Day

In the morning, I usually see some item about President Trump that looks like it would be good to blog about. By the end of the day, there are often three or four more items.

Friday, the first thing I saw was a CNN article that said Mr. Trump had added Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz to his impeachment legal defense team—a legal team that already includes former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Let’s take a closer look at what I’m calling Mr. Trump’s “Birds of a Feather” legal team:

Ken Starr once tried to oust a president for lying about oral sex, helped cover up systematic sexual assault at Baylor University, and helped sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein get a sweetheart plea deal
Alan Dershowitz helped O.J Simpson beat a murder rap and helped sex trafficker & pedophile Jeffrey Epstein get a sweetheart plea deal; and
Pam Bondi once took a $25,000 bribe from the Trump Foundation (now defunct) to drop a legal case against Trump University (also now defunct)

Apologies for the cliché, but you just can’t make this stuff up.

“Dopes and babies”

Later, I read this shocking excerpt in the Washington Post of a forthcoming book, A Very Stable Genius, that detailed a meeting in the Pentagon in 2017 in which an epic Trump Tirade ended thusly:

Trump by now was in one of his rages. He was so angry that he wasn’t taking many breaths. All morning, he had been coarse and cavalier, but the next several things he bellowed went beyond that description. They stunned nearly everyone in the room, and some vowed that they would never repeat them. Indeed, they have not been reported until now.

“I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” Trump told the assembled brass.

Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

For a president known for verbiage he euphemistically called “locker room talk,” this was the gravest insult he could have delivered to these people, in this sacred space. The flag officers in the room were shocked. Some staff began looking down at their papers, rearranging folders, almost wishing themselves out of the room. A few considered walking out. They tried not to reveal their revulsion on their faces, but questions raced through their minds. “How does the commander in chief say that?” one thought. “What would our worst adversaries think if they knew he said this?”

The really infuriating thing, after Mr. Trump’s insult to his generals, is that it happened in a meeting that had been organized so that Mr. Trump’s Secretaries of State and Defense, and the chairman of his National Economic Council, could school the overgrown man-baby on “why America’s safety hinged on a complex web of trade deals, alliances, and bases across the globe.”

Read the entire article to get some insight into why Mr. Trump has spent the last three years alienating our allies while cozying up to the world’s vilest dictators.

Yes, this is the meeting after which then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Mr. Trump “a f—–g moron.”

An extra dose of sadism

By afternoon, I’d already read that the Trump administration intended to repeal federal rules mandating more fruits and vegetables in school lunches and breakfasts. As to why the announcement was made on Friday, the New York Times reports that Friday was Michelle Obama’s birthday.

The Trump administration moved on Friday to roll back school nutrition standards championed by Michelle Obama, an effort long sought by food manufacturers and some school districts that have chafed at the cost of Mrs. Obama’s prescriptions for fresh fruit and vegetables.

The proposed rule by the Agriculture Department, coming on the former first lady’s birthday, would give schools more latitude to decide how much fruit to offer during breakfast and what types of vegetables to include in meals. It would also broaden what counts as a snack.

Although an Agriculture Department spokeswoman said the announcement on the former First Lady’s birthday was a coincidence, “some Democratic aides on Capitol Hill had their doubts.”

Don’t we all.

For many schoolchildren, this is the only food they get all day.

Three years in, the extra dose of spite with which Trump does everything still appalls me. “I’ll hurt Michelle Obama by undoing her school nutrition guidelines,” he probably though, proud of himself. “I’ll hurt her even more by doing it on her birthday.” The man is an absolute sadist.

Last Saturday, a woman from my parish berated me for not seeing Mr. Trump’s “good points.” What good points? I asked her. She never answered. Not because she knows he has no good points, but because she, like Mr. Trump, loves the spite.

He has to go

Feeling numb? Me too. And this is just one day, one news cycle in which we learned that Mr. Trump’s impeachment legal defense team is every bit as morally bankrupt as he is; that Mr. Trump can barely contain his utter contempt for the U.S. military and everyone in it; and that it wasn’t enough for him to undo Ms. Obama’s years of hard work on behalf of America’s schoolchildren, he had to announce it on her birthday.

Unless Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is up for re-election, decides that Mr. Trump is a liability, there is very little hope that the Senate will vote to remove him from office. That leaves it up to the American people to send Mr. Trump packing next November.

But one way or another, he needs to go. Because if he wins another term (and I am sorry to get all tinfoil-hatty here), America is done.