TWGB: MAGA Take the Wheel

 

Today's testimony makes clear that Trump wanted to go to the Capitol with the armed mob, despite warnings not to do so from his advisors.

When the Secret Service ruled out the possibility, the former President erupted in anger in the Suburban he was riding in. pic.twitter.com/Ef69CAenn6

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 28, 2022

It's the small tantrum-y details that stick out in Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony yesterday that actually made it feel very real to me. The shit-fit in the Suburban. The ketchup dripping on the wall. One of the filthy secrets of Trump World seems to be that their man actually does behave like a toddler, a shocking little rage-beast--except because he's fully grown and powerful, they don't know what to do about him.

The answer should never have been: make him president and then cater to his whims. After his having become president, he did any of a number of things that were simply, obviously, not normal. And yet the people around him closed their eyes, like trying to ignore a toddler. Someone who was a pain in the ass--but would grow out of it. Who would, is Susan Collins put it, "learn his lesson."

But not addressing the angry elephant in the room endangered our country. That's the big part. He didn't care if his own vice-president was killed. He didn't care if there were guns at the rally--after all, they weren't going to kill him. They were there for him!

Why in the world didn't people explain what Trump was doing all along? Because, for the most part, they were going along with him--accomplices. But I have to also imagine some part of it was sheer embarrassment.  Forget whether what he has done is presidential (my retort to Trump's bashing of the "Unselect Committee" is that he has been an "Unpresident"), he has demonstrated he doesn't even act like a normal person. I think the shock of him and his willingness to go further, wilder, immobilizes some moral sense in the people around him, like a magnet spinning a moral compass wildly out of control.

Not to excuse them. But the phrase "grown-ups in the room" always sounds disjointed when the president of the US was not one of them. 

In other news, Giuliani and Mark Meadows sought pardons. They knew what they had been involved in was criminal. Did they also consider it was in service to a gigantic evil toddler?