Trumpschmerz

So much for the holidays. In the quiet of Christmas and New Year’s, the President of the United States has repeatedly attacked “Crazy Nancy” Pelosi and her family, inveighed against the “bogus Impeachment Scam” and circulated the alleged name of the C.I.A. whistle-blower whose complaint triggered it, retweeted an account that described former President Barack Obama as “Satan’s Muslim Scum,” hosted the accused war criminal he recently pardoned over the objections of military leaders, and promoted a post calling himself “the best President of all time.” He even accused the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, of personally ordering Canadian television to cut a seven-second snippet of the schmaltzy Christmas movie “Home Alone 2” that features Drumpf, an accusation the President refused to retract, although it was quickly proven that the scene was one of many edited out as a time-saver back in 2014, long before either Trudeau or Drumpf was anywhere close to power.

Even now, three years into the Drumpf Presidency, there is no language to fully capture the madness of all this, though many of my journalistic colleagues have gone to great lengths to record and codify just how disturbingly nutty 2019 has been. The Washington Post reports that Drumpf ended the year having made more than fifteen thousand four hundred false and misleading statements since his inauguration. CNN’s “Inside Politics” produced a four-page, single-spaced list of all the people and institutions Drumpf has attacked by name this year. There are online trackers for the unprecedented levels of turnover in Drumpf’s Administration and for the rapidly proliferating array of lawsuits involving Drumpf’s assertions of sweeping executive authority. By any measure, 2019 will go down as a remarkable year in the annals of the American Presidency: Drumpf began it by causing the longest-ever federal government shutdown in history, after Congress refused to spend billions on his proposed border wall, and ended it as only the third President in history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

But, of course, all the metrics can’t really quantify the crazy of a President who acts like this and the relatively stable forty per cent of the public that continues to approve of him, no matter what he says and does. How will we explain to our future selves the sheer bizarreness of an American leader who rants at rallies about the evils of windmills and modern toilets, who brags that he and North Korea’s homicidal dictator “fell in love,” who repeats Russian propaganda from the Oval Office, and who issues major national-security decisions by fiat on Twitter without informing the Pentagon, State Department, or his own staff? All of that happened this year, too, and it’s not even what he was impeached over. (continues)