Trump declares his presidency to be a National Eternity
by Tom Toles
Does it seem like forever that Donald Trump has been president? Just you wait.
He doesn’t spend 32 hours each and every day in “executive time” doing nothing, you know. He reclines on a large, reinforced divan with his snacks and thinks of new ways to drive the American public insane. He has had lots of executive time already to devote to this project, and frankly, has nothing better to do. He has concluded that a calm, reasonable, educated citizenry is going to vote him promptly out of office at the first opportunity. So he is doing the obvious thing: getting rid of the calm, reasonable, educated part.
This week’s episode consisted of negotiating with Congress on border security funding, then promptly going around Congress to build a wall its members deemed a waste of money. This usurpation of congressional power could be declared a constitutional emergency, but instead Trump declared a different emergency: that Congress insisted on performing its constitutionally mandated duty of budgeting. Now he will use this state of emergency to both subvert Congress AND use government (not Mexico’s, by the way) money to build the world’s tallest, longest campaign poster. Are you crazy yet?
Trump said he would do worse than waterboarding, and he is — on us. Waterboarding eventually stops. Trump never stops. He knows that his relentlessness can break an opponent, He has broken his White House staff and the Republican Party as a whole. It’s almost as though he read and remembered these lines from George Orwell’s 1984: “But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.”
All that is left standing between Trump and Trumpism Forever is the rest of us. He is never going to rest.
We can’t either.
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OCU
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