Thrashing and flailing and raging

Trump's trouble is he expects Russia to quit winning our war against them in trade for nothing that they're fighting for.

If in later 1864, by which time the Union was winning the American Civil War to restore the union and abolish slavery, Russia had demanded that we quit winning the war, and offered that if we did then they'd think about selling us Alaska, we'd have answered, "Thanks for thinking of us, and we might find some use for Alaska if you're minded to sell, but we're fighting this war to restore the union and abolish slavery, and we're winning, so unless you can trade us our quitting the war for what we're fighting it for, then we'll carry on fighting and winning, thanks."  

 

And so to Trump: Quit shrieking at them already and listen to them for once, remember your campaign promises and honor your mandate, while you may yet save yourself and your people, the country and the world. You haven't the time for distraction, you haven't the luxury for error, you haven't the margin for betrayal.

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Since December of 2015 I've never not supported Donald J. Trump, and that support for what little it's worth has been greatest when Trump has been lowest -- until today.  

 

It was but months ago that Trump told us God had saved his life so that he might save the world from nuclear war; today Trump tells us he's "prepared" for nuclear war against Russia, the white Christian country who caused us no harm and posed us no threat, and the world's foremost nuclear power.  

 

And that is but the latest in months now of betrayals, betrayals of Trump's principles and promises, his election and mandate, his voters and believers, and me.

 

Thrashing and flailing and raging. That's the picture of Trump half a year into his second presidency. Trump is not the man he was only last November on Election Day. No more the happy warrior, no more the fun and funny amateur and outsider; no more the champion of the Forgotten Man, no more the enemy of the enemies of the people; no more the un-politician, the one man in politics who may be trusted to do as he tells us he'll do and never to betray us; no more the one president in a generation to decline to go to war.

Trump today is a blunderbuss exploding noisily in all directions, as much against friend or neutral as enemy. He's a brute beast, unthinking and never learning. Forever shrilling, never listening. Equal parts ignorant and arrogant. Changeable as a weather vane in a tempest, impressionable as a fat man's seat cushion, unreliable as a treaty with France. Threats and insults, insults and threats. Hysterical insecurity, bombastic bravado, sputtering impotence. An egotist and a fabulist. A clown and a child. 

I'm no prophet and this is no prophecy, it's no more than a sense, but Trump today looks to me like King Kong about the time he scales the Empire State Building. It's in the Bible, it's in Antiquity, it's in the movies. Unless he recognizes he's a mortal man and discovers a Christian modesty and humility and decency, and unless he remembers himself and his mandate from the people, Trump must sooner or later climb that Empire State Building like King Kong, where those fighter planes must shoot him up and knock him down, tumbling from the tower onto the street in a splatter.