The guy thinks he’s a bloody king, ruling by decree.
See how he flourishes the pen in his little hands, the triumphant smirk when he holds up the parchment in its fine leather-bound folder for the Photo Op.
The guy has a fourth-grade vocabulary, strong on words of derision, like a playground bully, so it devolves upon the Rasputins and consiglieres to actually write the decrees.
Even with the better minds of the regime providing the words and sentences, the meaning isn’t always clear to the guys with the guns and badges out there at the checkpoints.
Who gets stopped at the airport and why? Chaos reigned. Protests formed. Lawyers sued. Hold that guy! Let that one go! Run! Stop! Shoot! Don’t shoot! A Texas mosque was burned to the ground. A federal judge suspended the king's diktat. The department of Homeland Security defied the judge.
The civilized world hasn’t experienced anything quite as bizarre since the first time President Yeltsin got drunk and tried to climb a tank.
But the White House was ready with its own set of alternative facts: “It’s working out very nicely,” the despot said. “You see it at the airports, you see it all over.”
The parchment shower continues, the fine leather bound folders keep streaming out of the oval office and into the corridors of power in Trumpistan. He thinks he’s making law but he’s just making noise. It’s just more of his reality television, which is not real at all. He is still the spoiled brat who owns all the best toys, still the hot little pre-adolescent with raging hormones and no attention span.
Uncertain of what they’d been ordered to do, the uniforms and badges became thugs. A Sudanese graduate student at Stanford University was blocked for hours from entering the country. She is a permanent, legal resident. She was ultimately released to go about her business, but others like her are still in detention and their keepers don't know what to do with them. Police in banana republics are better informed, better behaved.
The kakistocrats are just beginning to shift into high gear. Already they have thrown into entropy the agency that is supposed to keep our air safe to breathe and our water safe to drink; the agency that manages federal public lands, supposedly on our behalf; the agency professionals of the Department of State; the intelligence community; and what remains of public education in this sorry, failing country.
He issues sweeping edicts. When they are unclear, and they always are, neither the king’s horses nor the king’s men can offer any clue, any hint of clarity. Their alternative facts contradict themselves. They flail and fume and flounder on.
Meanwhile, a new stack of parchment in fine leather-bound folders has been delivered to the office of the king, and a new batch of big pens for his small hands.
