Escalating war on reality

By Frank Rich

... He makes Roseanne Barr look like Theresa May. Just when you think he is going to let go of Sharpiegate after five days and concede that there was never (as he said) a “95 percent chance probability” that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama “very hard,” he’s at it again, summoning a Fox News reporter to the Oval Office to try to enforce his fantastical meteorology. His tweet storm is threatening to outlast the actual storm. What’s next? Will he send Al Roker to Guantanamo? Will he lavish emergency aid on Alabama, perhaps to bolster the campaign of whichever Republican is anointed to take down Democratic Senator Doug Jones in 2020? Or — to repurpose a Jonah storyline from Veep — will he show up an hour late for a public event and insist that everyone else has it wrong because daylight saving time has already ended? Trump could become the first president ever to be publicly corrected by both the National Weather Service and the timekeepers at the U.S. Naval Observatory.

... there may be more of a method to the madness of Trump’s “congratulations” to Poland on the 80th anniversary of the German invasion. Far from being one of his typical displays of utter historical and geopolitical ignorance, this tweet may have been a heartfelt expression of his genuine conviction that there are “very fine people on both sides” when Nazis launch a blitzkrieg.

Whether this latest uptick in lunacy is attributable to psychological, medical, or political factors — or some combination of the three — is unknown. But whatever is going on, it’s clear that it reached a new plateau a few weeks ago when the word “recession” crept onto his addled radar screen and he realized that blaming his own Fed chairman, Fake News, or Obama would not let him off the hook if a slowdown becomes reality next year. Given that this international anxiety will remain unresolved until Election Day no matter how much he reworks economic charts with his Sharpie, Trump may just be getting started ...

As Edmund Luce of the Financial Times pointed out this week in a powerful column about “the surrender of America’s adults,” it’s not just senators like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, and Bob Corker who have retreated from taking real action against Trump despite their periodic furrowed-brow expressions of “concern” over his latest outrage. No less wimpy are departed Cabinet members like Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis, who have continued to withhold public criticism of a president they obviously thought was a danger to the nation. Mattis has said he is doing so out of a “duty of silence” to the administration he served. As Luce points out, the departed Secretary of Defense may also have a duty to shareholders: “Shortly before Mr. Mattis launched his memoir, he rejoined the board of General Dynamics, one of America’s largest defense contractors. Mr. Mattis’s worth to GD is inversely related to the value of what he can say about the future of U.S. democracy. The more he speaks against Mr. Trump, the likelier his company will suffer” ...

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/frank-riche-sharpiegate-trump-war-on-reality.html