Piercingly shrill... King Lear with a nuclear strike force.

[kpete]

..........



And, finally, from Tiger Beat On The Potomac:

He had grown enraged by the Russia investigation, two advisers said, frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn't disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said.

Oh, that terrible moment when you look around and the nation's elite political press is fitting you for a straitjacket, and all the scapegoats have been stolen. It took the Vietnam War to destroy Lyndon Johnson. It took Watergate to make Nixon this batty. The current president* has been driven off the rails by a couple of tough episodes of Morning Joe. And there still hasn't been an actual crisis confronting him that he didn't create for himself. I am not reassured by this.

But just because he's barking mad doesn't mean he still can't do considerable damage, especially since the Republican Party, and especially its congressional majorities, remain invertebrate. The president* has made a point of assaulting every democratic institution that (theoretically, at least) could check his power.

On Thursday, it seems, he's planning to delegitimize democracy itself. From CNN:

An action that Trump has discussed since the beginning of his administration, it will be spearheaded by Vice President Mike Pence and controversial Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach…Kobach, who helped on the Trump transition team, is a lightning rod for critics who have accused him of extreme racism and having ties to white nationalists. Kobach is almost single-handedly responsible for some of the nation's strictest immigration laws in at least a half-dozen states -- he not only writes the laws, but advocates for them and battles on their behalf in court. He is often cited as the chief architect of what Arizona's SB 1070, which was passed in 2010 and led to protests and state boycotts for encouraging the profiling of Latinos and other minorities. The Arizona law requires police to determine a person's immigration status when there is "reasonable suspicion" that they are not legally in the US; it was partially upheld by the Supreme Court, but had other sections struck down by the court in 2011.

It kills him, it absolutely rips out his liver, that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Whenever CNN goes to a commercial every night, he climbs down off the ceiling and stews endlessly about how that could happen. Of course, it couldn't have, not legimately, anyway.

And now we have a national commission dedicated to validating the president*'s megalomania, and it's being handed over to one of the franchise's primary arsonists, a guy who only this week got his thumbs screwed by a federal court. From The Kansas City Star:

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson on Wednesday upheld an earlier order from a federal magistrate judge requiring Kobach to hand over the documents to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of an ongoing voting rights lawsuit against his office. Robinson, who is based in Kansas City, Kan., was appointed by President George W. Bush. Kobach met with Trump in November and was photographed carrying a document labeled as a strategic plan for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The photograph revealed a reference to voting rolls. The ACLU has sought access to the documents, contending that if Kobach lobbied Trump on changes to federal voting law, it would be relevant to the case.

So the executive order is the culmination of an ongoing bag job that began at the same time that Camp Runamuck opened its gates in January. However, it has its basis in the fragile psyche of a very dangerous man who raves at his television set when there is no other audience available and who would howl at the wind if it disturbed his hair.

This is King Lear with a nuclear strike force.



http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55023/trump-comey-madness/

[MFM008]

1. Lear

Good comparison.

[Aristus]

2. I'm not so sure.

Lear had latent nobility and the capacity for critical self-reflection.

It took family betrayal, homelessness, a massive thunderstorm, a bout of insanity, and a wise fool to bring them out. But he attained redemption in the end. Too late to save the one daughter who truly loved him. But he at least knew that she told him the unvarnished truth because she loved him.

Trump has no such potential for redemption...

[regnaD kciN]

3. Not sure about the comparison...

...as I understand the character (and I wrote my B.A. thesis on the play), Lear was an originally-wise and powerful ruler who went foolish with age. Trump strikes me more like Claudius, if the latter had delegated the poisoning of Hamlet's father to his friend Putinbras.