- After enough weeks and months of behavior like this, it's become axiomatic in many circles that Trump simply must go, for whatever reason. Our desperation as a nation to get back to "normal" – that is to say, back to being able to pretend we're a civilized people with justified hegemonic authority – has hit such a fever pitch that there is now real energy behind a pair of long-shot efforts to remove our mad king from the throne ahead of schedule.
The problem is that Trump might just live in an awful sweet spot – a raving, dangerous embarrassment, about the worst imaginable, but safe under the law absent new information. Depending on whom you ask, we may have to break democratic rules to be rid of him – something we've never had a problem doing, of course, but this is no desert sideshow, this would be center stage with the whole world watching.
- This is the paradox of Trump. He is damaged, unwell and delusional, but at critical moments he's able to approximate a functioning human being just long enough to survive. He is the worst-case scenario: embarrassing, mentally disorganized and completely inappropriate, but perhaps not all the way insane.
[...]
He is miserable, so are we, and we're stuck with each other.
People forget - Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease two years into his second term. His son said he saw it in the '84 debate. There was no 25th Amendment nonsense. We all knew he was an absent-minded conservative jackass and that we were helpless to do anything about it because the Republicans worshipped him like a god. The muthafuckin' king of Spain for 35 goddamn years The people in power will do whatever is necessary to stay in power. Crazy, senile, dangerously stupid, don't matter - this is the horse they've hitched their wagon to and they'll beat it until long past the point of death.Charles did not learn to speak until the age of four nor to walk until eight,[6] and was treated as virtually an infant until he was ten years old. His jaw was so badly deformed (an extreme example of the so-called Habsburg jaw) that he could barely speak or chew. Fearing the frail child would be overtaxed, his caretakers did not force Charles to attend school.
We deserve Trump, though. God, do we deserve him. We Americans have some good qualities, too, don't get me wrong. But we're also a bloodthirsty Mr. Hyde nation that subsists on massacres and slave labor and leaves victims half-alive and crawling over deserts and jungles, while we sit stuffing ourselves on couches and blathering about our "American exceptionalism." We dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win "hearts and minds" that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease – including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of view, of course.
Having read ten thousand pages of world history at a clip, as well as at least that in increments, the United States of America is pusillanimous compared to any other world power. We ain't noble, we ain't great, but this constant need to pretend that the United States is somehow exceptionally bloodthirsty or despicable only serves to illustrate naïveté.
Trump is no malfunction. He's a perfect representation of who, as a country, we are and always have been: an insane monster. I thought the bit I put in bold was insightful. There's a great temptation to pin all the ugliness on Trump because the alternative is far harder to face. Trump is the tip of a very large iceberg.The Trump movement culturally represents an absolute denial of our sins from slavery on – hence the intense reaction to the removal of Confederate statues, the bizarre paranoia about the Washington Monument being next, and so on. But #resistance is also a denial mechanism. It makes Trump the root of all evil, and is powered by an intense desire to not have to look at the ugliness, to go back to the way things were. We see this hideous clown in the White House and feel our dignity outraged, but when you really think about it, what should America's president look like?
I've been saying for awhile now that we really need to face the fact that Trump isn't necessarily unrepresentative.