The Madness of President Donald

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/08/the-madness-of-president-donald.html

The Madness of President Donald
He insists Obama is an evil mastermind determined to undo him—and a moron who engaged in wildly illegal and ineffective actions.
Rick Wilson
03.08.17 1:00 AM ET


Donald Trump’s latest lunacy—his claims that President Obama tapped his phones—is shoving America toward a full-scale institutional and perhaps even constitutional crisis.

In the White House, the Bannon-Miller Axis of Weasels is ready to merrily watch the world burn for the sake of pleasing their master’s mercurial moods and their own dark nationalist fantasies. For them, these outbursts aren’t bugs, but core features. They want the Trumpbartian war over all else, and, contrary to what official Washington tries to believe, they want him ragey and dangerous, which is why they’re feeding his paranoid talk (perhaps made vivid for him by his own eavesdropping instincts) about President Obama “tapping” him in Trump Tower.

In Congress, the breathing room Trump’s not-totally-insane speech to Congress bought Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell has already been shortened by this President predictably and colorfully departing the rails just a day later.

For the intelligence community, it was one more chapter in the war Trump and Bannon have waged on them since the first days of the Administration. Bannon’s desire to purge the intelligence community and reshape it into a Muslim-and-Mexican Hunting Agency has already pushed career professionals in the IC to their breaking points. One said to me this weekend, “Trump has a pair of twos, at best. The IC has a royal flush.”

The remnants of the conservative right watch as the Trump Troll Party grunts tweet-derived talking points from an obvious madman, abandoning principle, reason, fact, and intellectual rigor. The irresistible, gravitational draw of his charismatic lunacy has pulled even smart conservatives into its field. I had a heated series of messages with a conservative writer this weekend who wouldn’t even bring himself to acknowledge that this absurd moment was a creation of Trump’s fevered imagination and fueled by a Trumpbart conspiracy fantasy. It perfectly illustrated the post-logic right; they will contort themselves beyond recognition to back up even the most ludicrous propositions if they can scream “but Obama!” and “lock her up!” and “but the MSM!”

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Trump is stress-testing Congress, hard. He expects their full-throated defense of this madness to shatter the sky with its volume. He expects his media allies to turn this into a Watergate-style scandal against Obama to distract from the beets-and-vodka reek covering his business dealings, his senior advisors, and the pro-Putin claque that surrounds him in his Kremlin outpost on the Potomac.