To the right is a kind of political mugshot I ran across the other day; it's the most telling portrait I've yet seen of the brooding, exhausted, smoldering paranoid who haunts the White House, plagues the world, and offends every conscience of decency.
Here is a spent man, a physical wreck and psychic monstrosity — the shattered embodiment of yearslong corruption. Far from being the man of vigor he promised on the campaign trail, he is broken shell. And far from being the man who would make America great again, he's only reversing the greatness of his predecessor.
Decades of grifting and carnival barking have eaten away his native humanity; all that is left is a black hole of despair, debauchery and primal screams. Its last victim? Donald Trump.
Well, him and perhaps a third of America, the "so-called real Americans [who] are screwing up America," observes the conservative columnist Bret Stephens. These are the Trumplandians; Americans who are "complacent, entitled and often shockingly ignorant on basic points of American law and history," who "are the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning." And in the fulfillment of a dark Trumpian dream, they should all be deported, advises Stephens. (The problem, he notes: "Who would take them in?")
Even Trump realizes that the vast majority is agin him. Yesterday, in a characteristically twisted tweet which inadvertently acknowledged just how cornered he is, he wrote, "The Fake News Media hates when I use what has turned out to be my very powerful Social Media — over 100 million people!" In other words, more than two-thirds of America (population: 325 million) can't stomach the ill-bragging gnome.
Alongside that tweet came his characteristically disingenuous tweet that he's "being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!" And so "Trump has started the clock on the Rosenstein firing watch," said a Republican strategist to Politico, who added, "This is feeding the private discussions in the GOP about the president's state of mind."
His state of mind? Look again at the above portrait. There you will see a trollish neurotic and bloated windbag that's about to blow. Go ahead, Donald. Fire Rosenstein, indeed fire 'em all until you descend to a Justice Department bureaucrat as corrupt as you. It's your right. And then your right, mirabile dictu, will become our revenge.