Whoo boy. Can you believe I got myself all worked up about Donald’s next move? Man, I need to settle down. After last night’s Presidential “address”, it’s obvious we have nothing to worry about.
Everybody knows Trump sucks at these teleprompter sessions, but last night’s looked even more like a hostage video than usual. Bumbling along in a dull monotone, his eyes all squinty, Trump managed to give a flat speech so devastatingly unpersuasive that it really seemed as if he knows he just can’t sell it, and doesn’t really want to try any longer. When he intoned that the situation on the border amounted to “a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of the heart, and a crisis of the soul” – he pronounced it “soawwwllll” – it was like watching a guy trying to sound out cue cards written in Swedish.
It was full of lies, of course, but they were boring lies, nowhere near florid enough to grab headlines or get the MAGA crowd all excited, and none of them new. He told anecdotes about random violent crimes committed by immigrants (as Ezra Klein quipped, Trump’s message has stayed consistent ever since he rode down the escalator: “Immigrants are coming to kill you”), even though by now everybody has heard that undocumented immigrants commit far fewer crimes than native born Americans. He talked about drugs coming in, which they do, but through ports of entry, hidden in vehicles, usually, that leak through already fortified checkpoints, and everybody knows that too. He made the usual claim that Mexico would indeed pay, but with the latest spin, already spewed all over the airwaves, that the payment will be “indirect”, and somehow a facet of the new and as yet unratified trade deal that doesn’t so much replace NAFTA as put a new label on the can. Yeah, yeah. Kind of like how the Chinese pay tariffs, right Donny?
I guess he did try to slip one new one by, mentioning that he’d changed his planned barrier from concrete to steel “at the request of the Democrats”, which was pretty funny, actually, but otherwise it was so dismally same old same-old that anybody out there in a MAGA hat could probably have given something just like it without eyeing the teleprompter.
It seems pretty clear this is over. Not ended, yet, but over, like the Civil War was after Gettysburg. Now comes the fun part, while we watch the whole Republican establishment squirm, and Trump prays that Ann Coulter will just shut up for five seconds so he can change the conversation, post another picture of the old fence that’s been there south of San Diego for decades, and claim that see, he already built the wall, so he won, and that’s why it’s OK to start up the government again. Sadly for Donald, though, Ann Coulter won’t shut up, and neither will Rush Limbaugh, or all of those morons on Fox News. He’s totally jammed up here. He can’t back down, and yet he’s going to have to, yet still he can’t, Coulter will have his nuts in a mason jar. She’s vicious! She’s worse than Pelosi.
Mitch McConnell is in a jam, too, bless his leathery little mug, and this may only get solved when he mans up and presents Trump with a spending bill the way the nobles handed King John the Magna Carta: sit down, shut up, and sign, dumbass. Yes, yes, I do know you’re our Supreme Leader anointed by God Almighty – now sign or I’ll cut your balls off. How delicious to watch Mitch wrestle with that decision while things just keep getting worse, and everyone around him starts to sweat bullets and panic. God, how McConnell must despise Trump for foisting this godawful political Sophie’s Choice upon him. It could ruin them all. It could brand him for all of history as the Traitor Who Destroyed The Trump. But somebody’s got to step up, or essentially, goddam Ann Coulter is running the country. Oy what a pickle! I’d say it’s no wonder Mitch looked like this yesterday, but actually he always looks like this:
Poor, conflicted Kentucky Fried Mitch there may be powerful sad, but Yummpin’ Yimminy, I’m just so frigging happy!
the needlefish 