Dear America,
I want to be clear about this. I have always known that Donald Trump was a reprobate and that he was in general morally bankrupt. As I have said before, I am from New York and I am within months of the same age as Trump, so I have seen him prancing around New York City like the Sheik of Manhattan since he got hold of his father's money and business about forty years ago. He has always been a narcissistic self-promoter, a braggart, a bully and the overall supercilious and conceited panjandrum of his own little fiefdom. I have no doubt that there was fraud in much of what he did, especially in Atlantic City with the casinos that bore his name, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was just the tip of his criminality, but recent events have changed my mind. He is not as harmless as the snake oil salesman that he has always projected himself to be.
Start with the anonymous op-ed piece in the New York Times that stated point blank that but for some adults in the White House, Donald Trump would have not just run amok, but ruined the nation with his petulance, willful ignorance and inadequate intellect. Because it was anonymous, Trump and his sycophants could dismiss it with impunity regardless of the cogency with which it was written. But just hours after that piece appeared, Bob Woodward's book--Bob Woodward of "All the President's Men"--was published and said exactly what the Times piece said, but in more detail and with attributions to various high ranking members of Trump's administration, including cabinet members. Of course Trump's cadre immediately tried to tar Woodward and his reportage, but to what effect it is hard to say. Woodward appeared on PBS and was interviewed by Judy Woodward, who actually pulled no punches when she confronted him with the Trump repudiations of his work. But Woodward fared well. None-the-less, Woodward's book, "Fear", disappeared from the news as quickly as it came, as did the anonymous exposition of Trump's imbecility in The Times. As we have been seeing for about two years now, Trump is the teflon Donald when it comes to his base, and he is a master of slight of hand when it comes to the news media, who keep publishing his preposterous tweets even when they are patently false.
But just as all that was dieing down, Trump insisted that the work of the federal government in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria last year was an unheralded success story despite the fact that electricity wasn't restored to much of the population until nine months after the storm and thousands of homes with nothing but FEMA-issued blue tarps for roofs still hadn't been repaired. And when a day later a report created by experts at George Washington University for the government of Puerto Rico revealed that almost 3,000 people had died of storm related causes--lack of medicine because of the electricity outages that interfered with refrigeration and the unavailability of proper hospital and other medical care for the same reason--Trump labeled it a ploy created by the Democratic Party to diminish him. Like his tweets, the news media covered Trump's absurd claim that the report was a conspiracy against him, and while he should have been diminished by his attempts to cavil his way out of the criticism leveled at him and his administration, only time will tell.
But all that is just more of the same from our illustrious Don. None of it should surprise anyone; I know it doesn't surprise me. But what it does do is scare me, and I think a lot of people...even Trump supporters...are becoming uneasy with Trump's detachment from reality and worse, the impunity he thinks he has to redefine it. That isn't just moral bankruptcy or even amorality. That is quite possibly psychosis.
God help us, America. This guy could be the worst thing that ever happened to our country, not because he is such a dolt, but because he is not sane.
Your friend,
Mike
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