Trump is hanging America from a piano wire

Trump is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act so that "order" may be "restored" to peaceful Democratic cities undergoing a mysterious criminal "invasion" — doubly mysterious, since he also claims to have stopped The Invasion of the Swarthy People — the criminally inclined — in its entirety.

At any rate, Trump says "if the governors and mayors won’t do their jobs, then I will. I’ll send in the troops." Earlier, in the summer breeze, and when living was no easier, he said  “maybe the Insurrection Act is what it takes when cities are out of control," especially in cities where troops and federal officers have since created uncontrollable mayhem.

This week, Trump broadened his dragnet by narrowing his threat. Democratic cities of millions are no longer a lone target; their handfuls of elected Democratic officials are as well. "Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!" Same goes, he added, for Portland's mayor and his state's governor.   

Others to follow, lots of them, each with a name preceded by a qualifying, blue-checked D., while the R governor and mayors' more numerous incidents of red crime go largely untargeted. But (decreasing) crime and (halted) invasions of the blue sort aren't actually of ultimate interest to Trump.

That lies elsewhere. The nihilistic hellscape he envisions intrigues the gangster in him because it exhilarates, because he knows of nothing intelligent to do, and because all his homeboys want him to bang away at what he is doing. In the matter of Colors, in time the gangster will get not only to more blue but purple and red, too, his Project 2.0 being a nationwide snake pit.

That's "just Trump being Trump,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham. And he's right. A gangbanging despot does what a despot's gotta do, and Trump's gotta bang the entire country into dark submission and tortured oaths of loyalty. Because a variously personality-disordered, pointedly psychotic gangster is what he is.

The South Carolina senator says that Trump just being Trump means his threats to jail a governor and mayor are mere rhetoric. Recent history says his threatened prosecutions of a former FBI director, a state attorney general and a sitting U.S. senator transcended rhetoric for the first target, and DOJ still has marching orders for the others. [Update: Comey’s prosecutor just indicted NY A.G. Letitia James.]

Yesterday, Trump added Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal to her contractual list of political hits. "[He] should be investigated, and Justice should be sought," he said. "He should be allowed to speak no longer!" — he should be "allowed" a 9-x-12 space where his screams can't be heard.

Doubtful is that miserable Democratic politicos are loving the company of universities, law firms and corporations included in Trump's catalog of horrors. Flip through its pages and likewise seen are the illicit shuddering of vital government agencies, the abrupt firings of agency heads, the malicious investigations of "disloyal" government workers ...

the withholding of congressionally mandated funds for science, public education, infrastructure, green energy, disaster response, foreign aid — and the sick, potentially murderous pulling of security details from family members of a Democratic president and now-unloved, regime 1.0 officials facing Iranian death threats.

Sen. Brian Schatz says he's "embarrassed" by his Republican colleagues for being unwilling "to say that you shouldn’t jail your political opponents." Embarrassing to the point of scandalous dishonor is that Schatz's fellow Americans are, by and large, standing down against Trump's persecution of political opponents.

Often heard is that such persecution is wrongheaded because it could boomerang on the persecutors whenever the persecuted return to power, which assumes that comes to pass before the persecutors do. Also heard is that such persecution is wrong because it's unlawful, or at best, petty.

Neither objection confronts the deep, transparent evil of Trump's increasingly tentacled persecutions. His demands and DOJ's follow-through are indeed wrong and wrongheaded. But forget the legalities, forget the what-goes-around and the pettiness of it all. Above all, his conduct is deeply sinister.

Trump is heaving two centuries of sociopolitical progress into a lunacy-lined ashcan; he's taking the long arc of America's moral galaxy and bending it toward fascistic injustice. No American is safe from his metastasizing malignancy, nor is any aspiring national virtue.

Each is hanging from a piano wire. Or the wire is dangling overhead. And they haven't even attempted a coup.

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Cross-posted in Substack.