Trump's Atrocious Bible Stunt Might Be The Beginning Of The End
The entire affair was a disaster of epic proportions.
https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trumps-atrocious-bible-stunt-might
WASHINGTON, DC -- Donald Trump’s presidency has always been propped up with Tinker Toys and spit. Which is to say: this president is so grotesquely out of his depth that he requires copious backstopping in order to artificially appear as if he’s not quite as incompetent as he actually is. It started, more or less, when Sean Spicer was shoved into the press room to awkwardly explain how Trump’s sparsely attended inauguration was actually the most populated inaugural ever, and the same kind of frantic clean-up effort continues today as Fox News, AM talk radio, Russian trolls and scores of Red Hat fanboys desperately attempt to cover for his total inability to handle the gig. Think of it as an extension of his hideous physical appearance, necessitating that insane comb-over, the slathered on makeup, the billowy suits, the lifts in the shoes, and so on -- all required to at least make him presentable.
How often have we watched in shocked horror as Republican members of Congress or White House staffers scramble to triage his ongoing disaster porn. How often have we seen an entire party of apparatchiks whitewash his ludicrous tweets, or cover-up disastrous public appearances? By now, it’s too often to count. You know those guys in a parade who follow behind the horses and elephants, scooping up their droppings as they go? Trump is surrounded by guys like that. His presidency couldn’t survive without them. Left to his own devices, Trump never would’ve made it to the White House much less remained in office this long. He needed all varieties of propaganda and voter suppression tactics to get elected in the first place, not to mention a Russian intelligence-led cyber-attack on that election with the express intent to help Trump win. And to remain in office, he needed to scramble the Department of Justice until Bill Barr arrived to flush the entire Russia investigation down the golden crapper. Then he needed Rudy Giuliani’s cockamamy plot to extort Ukraine into helping Trump cheat in this election. And then he required a flock of GOP dodos in the Senate to stop him from being removed from office for the aforementioned cheating. Today, he requires all of the above players to spin his disastrous and deadly response to the coronavirus outbreak in order to keep his poll numbers from descending into Nixon-resignation territory.
I can’t recall another presidency glued together with this much titanium scaffolding to maintain even this level of frighteningly rickety instability. Today in the same White House press room where Sean Spicer said Trump’s inauguration featured record attendance, Kayleigh McEnany compared Trump’s unforgivable photo-op outside St. John’s Church to Winston Churchill surveying the Nazi-inflicted damage in London during World War II. Sure, okay. This is sort of like saying your office’s victory in that after-work softball game was just like the famous “Giants won the pennant!” moment. But that wasn’t enough to cover-up for such a shitty, shitty stunt. McEnany wasn’t finished. She went on to compare her boss’s Bible photo-op to when George W. Bush visited Ground Zero after 9/11; she compared it to Jimmy Carter during the energy crisis; George H.W. Bush’s signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and so on. That’s a lot of heavy lifting, commensurate with the degree of the atrocity. And so it’s no wonder McEnany spread it on so thick. Trump stood in the Rose Garden moments before the photo-op and told the nation on live television that he supported peaceful protesters. While he spoke those words, law enforcement thugs fired flash-bangs and gas grenades into the crowd of, yeah, peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park. All so Donald Trump could haul his ponderous bulk over to St. John’s Church to stand out front, holding a Bible he neither reads nor understands as if to say, “I’m strong and this is a Bible!”
This had to have been a Trump idea. I can’t imagine a professional political consultant who would instruct the president to engage in such an ungainly piece of amateur optics. Any actual practicing Christians who watched the scene had to have resented their Bible being exploited as a prop to augment the stature of a man who bragged about grabbing women by the pussies. Any Christians who were okay with it were probably Trump disciples in the first place -- and by elevating Trump over the exploitation of the Bible, they’re not only endorsing a sacrilege, they’re violating the first commandment: “I am the Lord thy God, you shall have no other gods before Me.” The entire affair was a disaster of epic proportions. Not only did it contradict his televised remarks moments earlier, but it ultimately made him look like a small, petty, clown dictator who can’t even get a photo-op right. So small, in fact, that it required all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to rush into position to help put President Humpty together again. My sincere hope, representing perhaps the silver lining in this crisis, is that Trump’s Bible stunt will signify the beginning of his final self-destruction. Trump always makes things worse for Trump, and this was a doozy. The question now is: what’s next? What else will he do in the face of the protests, and all the rest of the simultaneous disasters, to backstop his failing presidency? Everything is on the table because he’s capable of anything, and Election Day can’t come soon enough.
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Last edited Sun Jun 7, 2020, 12:15 PM - Edit history (2)
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213528851
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