33% and Still Falling. What Happens When Trump Burns Through His Base?

With his approval rating now down to 33% in a credible poll — a 7% slide in a month — Our Orange Leader has now begun burning through even his most credulous and reliable fans — namely white folks without a college education. More of them now disapprove than approve of the way he’s going about the business of “draining the swamp”, “rolling a hand grenade into the halls of Congress”, saving them from Sharia Law or whatever it was they wanted most when they voted for him.

With his recent blather about letting the cops rough up the “animals” they arrest, banning transgender troops from the military, restricting immigration to people who already speak English and (apparently) have lucrative jobs waiting for them in the States and sending alt-right centerfold Stephen Miller to defend it all, Trump has plainly been advised, most likely by Steve Bannon, that given the trend lines since January 20 he has to goose the enthusiasm of the hardest of his hard core and the hell with everyone else.

My concern, and I hear it echoing more frequently in recent days, is that with almost no one of any credibility in the government trusting a damned word he says, what happens when he, which is to say “we”,  have to deal with a truly serious crisis?

I’ve heard people wonder about a natural disaster like Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy. But the country’s emergency response apparatus, connecting with state and local authorities, is self-directing enough to deal with that kind of calamity.

My real concern, and I heard it again this morning from fusty old John Podhoretz, the generally affable conservative pundit on “Morning Joe”, is this:  What goes down in a military situation?

North Korea tops everyone’s list, and for a lot of good reasons.

But my worry is that we haven’t yet reached the floor of Donald Trump’s unique combination of incompetence, delusion and cynicism.

Point being: As he — inevitably — feels more and more vulnerable to total, unequivocal humiliation and financial ruin as a result of the Mueller investigation into what has very likely been a career of money-laundering for Russian gangsters, he will need a major distraction. A distraction of the military kind that rallies not just his low-information base but enough tribal Republicans to temporarily restore “presidential” status.

A not so preposterous possibility is that Trump/Bannon will seize on some incident, possibly regarding North Korea, perhaps some place else, and ratchet it up far beyond what is required in terms of military response in hopes of rallying the fraction of the population so poorly informed and forever willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt.

Never mind the response from the 61% who believe Trump is the fool they’ve always suspected. The question at that point becomes what does the Pentagon do? I’ve mentioned this before, because we all suspect — with the highest level of certainty — that the best of the classified information not just on Trump-Russia but Trump’s psychology is available to and a regular topic of conversation among US intelligence and military management.

So … Trump orders a strike, not just with a bunch of missiles blowing up a deserted air base, but a full scale attack with actual, regular commission troops-in-harm’s-way on a purported enemy with an ability to strike back.

What happens when the CIA, Pentagon, etc. receives that order? Given the unprecedented amount of leaking aimed at ridiculing and neutering Trump politically, I think we’ve passed the point where career generals and admirals will reflexively submit to the normal chain of command. As I say, I’m dead certain they already know — far better than we do — what they’re dealing with Trump and Team Trump, and have every reason to assume Trump is too compromised and incompetent to be obeyed in a lethal situation with any level of uncertainty.

Perhaps a bigger problem is that professional terrorists and Vladimir Putin presume the same thing.

 

 

 

100 Days. How Much Stupidity Can We Survive?

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3So let me get this straight. The “yuge”, “beautiful” wall keeping out all those Mexican drugs, bad hombres and strawberry pickers is not only not going to be paid for by the Mexicans, but probably isn’t going to be built at all. Likewise, China the worst currency manipulator in the world, the bastards destroying our economy … will not be branded a currency manipulator, partly because the Chinese guy spent 10 minutes explaining how complicated this North Korea thing is.

And ObamaCare repeal, that thing Republcans voted for 50, 60, 200 times, meaning actually tearing the whole damn thing up and returning us to the golden days of yore when health insurance was dirt cheap and “accessible” to everyone … eh, not so much, and sure as hell not in time for the big 100 Days check-off this Saturday.

Ditto tax “reform” (i.e. the usual Republican ritual performance of oral sex on its donor class without so much as a handshake for you and me). And … and … well the list of what His Orangeness promised, in the loudest and angriest terms to his hootin’ and hollerin’ rally-goers last fall is very, very long and all but entirely incomplete, except for Neil Gorsuch.

In other words it is exactly the farce of buffoonish incompetence most of us expected when we voted Nov. 8. The only thing that is “fer sure” is that the timer on the hand grenade both the “deplorables” and the tribal conservative clod-bro culture wanted rolled into D.C. is seconds away from detonation.

At last Saturday’s “March Against Stupidity” “March for Science”, I kept thinking, “How much stupidity can an enormous, intricately complicated society withstand before something blows … fatally?”

A lot of people are watching Trump poke at North Korea, like an impaired six year-old jabbing a stick at a rabid dog trapped against a fence. None of the outcomes to this drama are good, and some are border-line apocalyptic. More to the point, confidence that either of the main guys involved are rational and competent is, well, kinda like non-existent. (I still wonder what serious humans like “Mad Dog” Mattis would actually do if Trump decides he wants to lob some missiles into Pyongyang? There are — rarely used — military codes of ethics that prohibit an officer from following an order he deems illegal or wholly unjustified.)

Most likely, like everything else on his list of batshit campaign bluster, Trump will do nothing, other than play another round of golf at Mar-a-Lago and enjoy another five or six slices of “the most beautiful chocolate cake you’ve ever seen.” But the issue is what the North Korean nutjob does in response to what he thinks Trump might do.

While enjoying the sunshine, the crowds and a lot of very funny signs at the Science march I was reminded of another detail related to a book I read last month, “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs.” Harvard astrophysicist Lisa Randall and her team have a theory about the “periodicity” of asteroid impacts on planet earth. Something big and nasty rolls in roughly every 35-40 million years. Their idea is that this coincides with our Solar System’s two million-year passage through the center plane of the Milky Way, a plane dense, she thinks, with dark matter and its mysterious gravitational effects.

She theorizes that these effects kick up a storm among the rocks and comets otherwise tumbling innocently through the Oort Belt far out beyond Pluto, sending a barrage of the stuff inward toward the Sun and colliding with earth.

And what’s this got to do with Donald Trump and the ascendance of crass stupidity to power in all facets of the government of the planet’s most technically advanced society?

Well, there this. In his fourth grade coloring book of a budget “presented” last month, the one red-lining Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment for the Arts, Big Bird, and on and on, there was the part cancelling NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission.

The main part of that mission was an elaborate project to grab material off a passing asteroid and get it back to orbiting astronauts for examination. But a facet of it was money to pay smart people here on earth, (FoxNews/talk radio/clod-bro culture’s much derided “experts”), to think seriously and propose ideas about how me might deal with an apocalyptic meteor heading our way.

The cost of the entire Mission was pegged at $1.25 billion. The part where the gubmint pays smart people down here on terra firma to work out the details of how to protect civilization from toasted dinosaur-like destruction was probably a lot … a lot … less.

But if you’re too incompetent, lazy or sociopathic to care about stuff like that, well, screw it. We gotta pare this insane spending down to compensate for whacking the Alternative Minimum Tax, which would have saved Trump roughly $25 million off the only tax return we’ve ever seen.

Stupidity is darkly funny up to the point it makes survival an open question.

 

Trump in Defeat Will Get More Erratic, Not Less.

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Among (quite a few) guilty pleasures is “Morning Joe”, MSNBC’s daily pundit Woodstock. Yeah, Joe Scarborough is a putz and a blowhard, and since it’s his name on the show, guests who are actually expert in serious things have to pretend to tolerate his stem-winding rants. But when Scarborough is modulated or (praise lord!) off on vacation, checking in with what “The Circus” boys, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, “legendary” ex-newspaperman Mike Barnicle, etc. is a far better use of my super valuable morning time than the brain gelatinizing insipidness of “The Today Show” or “Good Morning America.”

Lately, ex-CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden has been getting a lot of airtime. Tuesday morning, coming off FBI Director Jim Comey’s stunning yet-unsurprising revelation that Trump’s campaign has been under investigation since … late July, “Morning Joe’s” assembled deep thinkers were grasping for new and better ways to describe the unprecedentedness (an actual word, I looked it up) of a sitting president, two months in office!, being investigated for colluding (or “coordinating” if you’re Comey) with the friggin’ Russians to rig the election that got him where he is.

But it was Hayden, the old spy hand, who after handing it to the Russians for “the biggest W” in the history of espionage chicanery, posed the question of how this whole Trump-Russia thing began? As an old spy, he said, you always ask if what you’re seeing is the result of “malice or incompetence.”

Here the easy answer of course is, “a little of both.” But we can narrow that a bit. It was a marriage. The Russians brought the malice. Trump supplied the incompetence.

Incompetence, something a majority of voters recognized last November, is now a vivid, permanent reality that even The Wall Street Journal editorial page, akin to a Vatican declamatio to pious conservatives, has come to accept as a fact of life.

Say the cossetted white sages employed by Rupert Murdoch:

“If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods. … Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.”

It’s that intro that bothers me, because obviously it’s on the minds of anyone seriously watching the astonishing farce being played out hour-to-hour in D.C.. If Trump loses his Obamacare repeal tomorrow it will be a gut punch defeat. He will of course blame Paul Ryan and everyone down to the West Wing cleaning crew for what has been an object lesson in his incompetence and laziness. Is there a single person anywhere who honestly believes he has read or thoroughly educated himself on what Ryan’s six years-long piece of legislation will do? Of course not. All Trump wants is a bill — a victory — he can sign and wave in front of his next Red Cap rally, never mind that his shrieking fans are exactly the people getting the forced colonoscopy.

But to the Journal’s opening line. With the FBI on him, the details of his long Russian canoodle becoming more apparent every day, “health care reform” (insert laugh track here) about to spiral into a fiery grave and his approval rating dropping to George W. Bush levels, it is (very) likely Trump will become more erratic, not less.

So what is a solution to getting the media, Congress and most importantly the Red Cap Brigade to ignore all that “fake” noise and see him as The Great Leader? Well, a war of some kind might do it. And since we’re talking about a guy who only wins, a winnable war. With lots of “shock and awe”, only biglier.

The North Korean scenario is foremost on a lot of peoples’ minds because Kim Jong-un is another guy trapped in a corner, desperate and reckless. It’s another marriage made in hell. But if you need an excuse for distracting fireworks — Re: the latest TSA Homeland Security alert — a bomb on an airplane will do just about as well.

I’ve mentioned this before, because knowing what the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon know about Trump, their response to his pushing the button for military action is by no means a certainty.  Does anyone believe the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the permanent bureaucracies of the CIA and NSA haven’t thoroughly assessed the psychological fitness of their Commander-in-Chief? Are you certain they would comply with an order from … Donald Trump, oft-bankrupt casino developer, reality TV show host and inveterate liar … ordering them to place American troops and possibly the American public in harm’s way?

I’m as cynical as it gets about “aye-aye sir” toadyism and group-think, but I have an extremely hard time imagining characters like Admiral Mike Rogers (NSA) following go-to-war orders on Donald Trump’s say-so.

Trump style incompetence (born out of psychological dysfunction and laziness) may be exactly the grenade the Red Hat Brigade and tribal Republicans who rationalized him as a better choice than “crooked Hillary”, wanted rolled into DC when they pulled the lever for him in November. But I seriously doubt that quality of cynicism applies to the people who have to commit people under their command to possible death.

More to the point. As crazy and ridiculous as Trump-involved political events have been these past two months, it has been notably quiet in terms of international crises. Experience tells you such lulls are always broken.