A brief, rather amusing note.
Yesterday, while in the car listening to BBC news, I heard the tail end of an interview with Mick Mulvaney, one of Trump's numerous chiefs of staff and a former congressman from South Carolina. The interviewer, evidently, had asked Mulvaney for his opinion about Trump's acute unraveling of mind.
Mulvaney answered that the former president's advisers had once been of first-rate stuff, such as Chief of Staff John Kelly, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Hence Trump's idiosyncracies, peccadilloes and frightful eccentricities were kept largely in check.
But today, said Mulvaney, his top advisor is a former heroin addict who's now a pillow salesman.
And that's a quote.
Mulvaney neglected to mention that, as a congressman, he was a part of the incoming 2011 Tea Party caucus which agitated for prolonged shutdowns of the federal government, or that he was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, a loose association of dissociative goons who have extorted the House speakership, insisted on seating the chamber's most unhinged members on the most important committees, and are about to drive the United States Treasury into bankruptcy, default and globally reverberating calamity.
And yet Mulvaney, a youthful mayhem addict turned snake-oil salesman, wound up as a White House chief of staff.
Where he sees a psychotic break in Trump and his management affairs, I see the starkest of continuity — which launched well before Trump's ascendence.