Guest post: No adults in the room?
Originally a comment by Your name’s not Bruce? on Hand it over or else.
This is a nightmare. How much farther into madness must Trump (and America) plunge before somebody calls for the invocation of the 25th Amendment? I wonder if Putin has the Epstein files, and this is what he’s been holding over Trump all of this time? Putin is the biggest beneficiary if Trump immolates NATO from within. It says nothing good about the United States (or our species) that the fate of billions of people hinges on the psychopathology of one man and his handlers, both American and foreign.
I remember from history classes that during hard times in absolutist monarchies, it was common, for those petitioning for the redress of grievances, to blame harmful conditions and bad policies on a rotten apple or two among the king’s counsellors, rather than the king himself, as complaining about the former was, sometimes, somewhat less dangerous than the latter. I think there’s more than enough rotten to go ’round, but who’s really driving this bus of lunacy?
I really don’t understand what’s going on. I know that I’m probably hopelessly naive about all of this. I can’t truly believe that it is all clumsy, blind, blundering, that there’s nobody guiding and controlling it, even if that guidance and control is malevolent and foreign. It actually makes a perverse kind of sense, more so than if this is the result of pure stupidity and toxic narcissism. How does anyone in Trump’s inner circle benefit from encouraging this kind of brinksmanship and extortion of America’s allies? Are some of them in Putin’s pocket as well? How can none of them see that this plays into the hands of both Russia and China? I know that Trump has surrounded himself with talentless sycophants who know fuck all about anything, but Jesus fucking Christ Almighty, doesn’t anyone know how to tell him “No”? Trump is so easily goaded, manipulated, and fickle, it’s not beyond the admittedly limited capabilities of those around him. Can’t they see that they’re going to go down with him if he crashes everything? Are there no adults in the room? If there actually are individuals or “forces” in his cabinet reining him in, they’re doing a piss-poor job of it.
I know that Vance is probably waiting until he can serve two full terms himself before he pulls the plug on Trump. Vance can only do that if he serves less than two years as Trump’s replacement, so he might sit tight and wait for another year and a bit before finally organizing an internal coup because Trump has “gone too far.” But at this rate, with the combination of internal and external chaos, there might not be much more left for Vance to be president of.
A big issue is that these people on the cabinet are partaking in the wealth grabbing and don’t want to give up their gravy train. They are also attracted by the power that they have under Trump’s umbrella. They were not put in place due to competence, but due to loyalty. This was a lesson that Trump learned from being 45, he was too often thwarted by people who had at least some appreciation that the constituion is more than just a parchment in the National Archives. As for Vance, his fealty is to Peter Thiel, who needs this sort of chaos to continue and ten years of Vance would destroy what little is left of our Republic. I am starting to think it is time to break up this little experiment as a failure. It’s too big to succeed, and the biggest weakness of democracy is that people can vote for its destruction. Maybe we could replace it with regional confederacies of states, or something. But we are learning how dangerous it is to have too much power available to a single person. Until and unless we can secure an impeachment conviction of the entire cabinet, we are hosed.
As for Epstein, he had many world leaders and wealthy people on his client list and most of his money was blackmail money. It’s likely out of the hands of Bondi or even Trump. What we need to do is figure out how to address the needs of the victims for justice without the rest of the files. We have their testimonies, what can we do with them? We need to have the will and resources to move forward without the files.
That does happen. One instance was last spring. Trump announced some insane tariff; the next day he called it off. The account that came out was that some trade advisor “got to” Trump, i.e. talked to him, and told him the tariff was a bad idea.
Back before Trump was first elected, I wrote (somewhere, can’t find it now)
It looks like we’re pretty much there now.