Image is Everything

Trump taking his weekend relaxation at Mar-A-Lago completely easy is apparently impossible with the entirety of the week's ghosts still flitting their digital apparitions before his very eyes on the television and the intertubes: to wit, he used Twitter to imply that both Saturday Night Live (a comedy program that has been lampooning political figures for about forty years) and the Department of Justice (an actual agency of the government concerned with supporting the Constitution, a document to which certain officials, like Trump, even make oaths to protect, owing to the essential truth that the country fortunately made by immigrants, the descendants of enslaved persons, and the persons of the indigenous nations of North America, which expanded from 13 mostly British colonies to a sea to shining sea multiethnic polyglot pan-religious congeries is a creedal nation and a notional nation held together more by the words of our founders than lines on any map) have offended him so greatly that all this unseemly Trump-unflattering fuckery needs to get prosecuted.

Or not. There isn't, likely, any path for Trump to actually screw with the First Amendment freedoms that let SNL employ a talented actor like Alec Baldwin to  unflatteringly ape Trump's worst tics and excesses. There may be brakes on Trump's ability to halt the Mueller investigation as well. But the idea that Trump needs to preserve his image is a peculiar vulnerability he seems to have. Take his hair, please! Take his claims that his orange tan comes from his "great genes" when it comes from using bronzer trying to cover his pale skin and active rosacea. And also take his weirdly specific and probably not true physical statistics stemming from his improbable health exam.

What Did the President Know and Did He Know He was Doing it?

I can't get over the idea that President Trump might not even know what the hell he's doing, even if that is the jist of several articles published about him recently. But with a sad, heavy sigh, I look at the very dumb, very obvious latest: the story from the Washington Post, now corroborated by several outlets, that Trump revealed classified intelligence produced by one of our allies to the Russians at the little meet and greet that was so weird as to be notable last week.

Sure, Putin asks him to host Lavrov and Kislyak and try to keep Kislyak on the down-low, and they talk about this and that--and Trump gets around to dishing some classified intel. Well, the POTUS does enjoy the discretion to declassify intelligence if he thinks it's warranted. It's part of the toolkit. It's right up there with firing the FBI Director--a thing he can do if he wants to. A privilege of being the executive. But why that information, to the Russians, in the Oval Office...

It would be great if we could even be assured that Trump was working with the Russians on intelligence on purpose, right? If he could just be normal and say we are working together against ISIS and this is necessary and steps were taken to not fuck everything up by contacting the ally that obtained the intelligence in question to protect the source and not burn our Five Eyes relationship...

But I don't think he is capable of that mature kind of high-functioning decision-making (whether you would agree with the reasoning of my scenario, it would be on the up-and-up). The thing with Trump is, he really is out of his league in this arena and his defining personality trait is to show off. What was he doing in the "Access Hollywood" tape, really, but crudely showing off about what he gets away with when it comes to women? He showed off for Shinzo Abe at Mar-A-Lago, even if that wasn't great security protocol.  He got giddy showing his nice Russian friends that he too, gets information, and blurted out something he shouldn't--

Plausible? Well, the alternative is he knew very well what he was doing, and intentionally wrecked some of our intelligence alliances after having done not a super-great job of conveying his competence to the IC here at home. See, when some serious person like James Clapper conveys the thought that Trump has left our institutions "under assault"--this might not just mean deliberately.  He could do untold damage unknowingly, thoughtlessly, uncaringly, too. And the intent is beside the point, because the result is the same. And we can't even take serious Trump surrogates and cabinet members at their word because this administration has shown public duplicity on numerous occasions. And we are only what, not--116 days in? It feels like an eternity, rather like you might feel if you were in the backseat of a bus being driven by a toddler. Let me be uncharacteristic and say, there is a pretty good take from David Brooks (I don't say that thing, do I?) And, the idea that Trump is just an egomaniac adult baby meets with Josh Marshall's overall Trump's Razor doctrine of assuming the stupidest when it comes to him.

But all the same, whether we think Trump is actually treasonous or just too stupid to be president, he is fulfilling the warnings made about him.

He just can't be trusted.