A New Definition Of Genius According To Trump

For your consideration: One Donald Trump who believes with every fiber of his being that he knows more than any other human on the planet (or any human who ever lived, including Einstein, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and all the men and women whose lives were and continue to be devoted to physics and nuclear energy). As if to dismiss the massive brain power of generations of scientists who are still plumbing the depths of the atom and its nuclear forces, Mr. Trump said this about uranium: “You know what uranium is, right? This thing called nuclear weapons like lots of things are done with uranium including some bad things.”

So there you have it. Uranium is just another bad thing, like North Korea, the FBI, all the intelligence services, personal cell phones in the White House, a book he’s never read but doesn’t like already, a broad swath of the media, Dreamers, refugees, and a few dozen other bogeymen all playing inside Trump’s incredible brain (a brain like you’ve never seen). Let’s call the unseen force that created all these bad things the “Deep State,” a netherworld of plotting and planning goblins and ghosts and long-legged beasts invented by Mr. Trump to explain away all the things he cannot understand, or which are simply too inconvenient for his brain to comprehend.

I’ve been doing some digging into the structure and scope of the Deep State, curious to map it out and see just who the Deep State’s controllers are, and how they are so darned impossible to pin down and identify. My search is informed by my own history of work here in Washington. One would think that after nearly 35 years of employment in the House of Representatives, the Senate, three cabinet departments, an investigative arm of the Pentagon, numerous news journals and magazines based here in Washington, and just generally kicking around town for all of my adult life, I might have at least run into someone from the Deep State. I even held a pretty high-level clearance in order to learn some things of importance to the country’s security.  Bottom line? I never ran into any Deep Stater. And why would that be?

Because Washington leaks like a sieve, and is damn proud of it! You couldn’t plot a takeover of a DC street vendor without the Washington Post getting wind of it or Michael Wolff writing about it or CNN breaking into its Breaking News! cycle with all the details of the now-exposed and ruined plan. Why, Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota would feature the plan on New Day, then Poppy Montgomery would follow up…as would Dana Bash and Brook Baldwin. Then Wolf Blitzer would have at least one panel of former hot-dog vendors and food takeover analysts on his segment, all rounded out by a Jake Tapper commentary (and possibly a Sunday roundtable on ABC and CBS, and a Fareed Zakharia GPS global opinion on the strategic impact of failed hot dog vendor plots). On the other side of the dial, Fox News would suggest the vendor (a naturalized citizen of nonetheless questionable national leanings), deserved to be targeted, and that is exactly why THE WALL must be built.

My point, and I have one, is that all of Donald Trumps bizarre ideas about how government insiders are fomenting a gaslighting revolution--telling lies, informing the media, laying dastardly traps disguised as lengthy briefing books designed to frustrate him by being in English (with multisyllabic words), trying to get him to read the Constitution, and possibly poisoning his food (thus, he eats McDonalds as the other alternative to a White House meal…maybe he’d prefer White Castle)—come not from a Deep State, but from the House of Mirrors that is his brain.

No, there’s no Deep State. There is only Shallow Donald.  He's just a lout, an oaf, an illiterate, and a bully who has never been told "no" by anyone (are you listening Mitch and Paul and all of the Cabinet?) and who parlayed--freakishly--a minor fortune into a modest fortune (tax returns anyone?) by intimidation and payoffs to sycophants and construction bosses who were happy to take his money (oh, yes, and by bankruptcies…lot of those).

He has no shame or sense of morality. He has no empathic responses. He does not know, or wish to know, poor people, people of the working class who have no budget leeway, people of color who are the inheritors of all the sweat of the Civil Rights generation. He doesn’t give a damn about coal miners (sorry folks, but the truth must be illuminated here—and not with just a helmet lamp), and he has little use for anyone whose brain could be larger than his own nuclear button.

Because he doesn't read or want to, he has no sense of history, nor does he have the capacity to compare and contrast world events. Therefore, he is unprepared to make key decisions requiring measured decisions. I have this dreadful nightmare that the instructions for the nuclear codes carried by Trump’s military aide (a sorrowful job) have all been rendered into primary-color cartoons, with SpongeBob SquarePants guiding Mr. Trump through his strike options.

No Deep State is necessary to bring this man to a final accounting for the damage he continues to wreak upon America’s global image and on our personal senses of dignity, ethics, and fair play. Mr. Trump is well equipped to do the damage to himself, aided as such people always seem to be by a coterie of enablers—some in, some out…some back in again…some out again—and a family of know-nothings and care-nothings who believe only in themselves.

I don’t know if Michael Wolff got it right in his book, but even if ten-percent is true, we should continue to be very, very worried.

A Time To Reflect, Not Rant

As the holiday season deepens, and more of my FB and Blog friends begin looking forward to family time and fewer distractions by political ranters like I have been known to be, I am going on a sort of hiatus...for the next month, I will not be posting about a certain person who is borrowing 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.. for some indeterminate time.

I will post and blog and HuffPo about the greatness of our country, the lovely people who make it as great as it is (or desperately wants to be), and of the ideals and values (such as I see them) that bind us and and lead us.

I am no Pollyanna. I don't think any of us should ignore the rumblings and disconcerting crackings of the fault lines beneath our feet here at home, or the lightning bolts illuminating the storm clouds gathering across the sea. Those things will continue to be on my mind, as I hope they will be on yours--but in a measured tone. Not as a jeremiad, but as a whispered presence. I believe in vigilance in times of trials, and I believe in always speaking truth to power.

But this is a season of turning to others, of outstretched and giving hands, of affection and joy, of tenderness and understanding, of charity and blessing. Of course, every day should be such a time...but here, now, I just want to address and play a part in a season that seems to encourage each one of us to be a polished facet of something brilliant and loving and magical.

I have many friends here on FB who are deeply committed to their respective faiths--including faiths that do not see Christmas through the brushstrokes of Currier and Ives, or in the glow of colored lights and children's sugar-plumed faces. My hiatus will be a time to reach out beyond the boughs of holly and say سلام (salām), friede, صلح (solh), paz, rauha, pais, 平和 (heiwa), 'Éyewi (Nez Perce), Мир (mir), 和平 (hoà bình), שלום (sholim), and, simply, Peace to one and all. (my apologies if I have gotten any wrong...and there are still so many left unsaid. Feel free to add your own).

I also have many friends who do not see the holiday as a time of worship, but as a time of humility and gratefulness and of promoting happiness. Whatever your conviction, your guiding beacon, your inner spirit, I know you will share it this holiday season as you do every day.

And, finally, to those of my friends for whom the holiday is a reminder of loved ones no longer here, of suffering and pain of loss, of daily trials that no angel on a tree or carols sung in the falling snow can possibly assuage, I send you my love and affection and my deepest hope that your foundering worlds will one day be righted, that your hurt will one day be healed, that your battered spirits will find a safe harbor. It's a little gift--this message of hope--but it's all I've got.

Peace.