How Bad Is It?

I said last time that he is a heinous man. In his initial days in office, it seems that his goal was to prove how right that description is. It’s more than enough that everything he wants to do is wrong. Now add to that how incompetent his is at doing it.

He wants to pardon the January 6er’s who he says are in jail longer than they should be. An atrocious thing to want to do. But then when he does it, he makes it even worse – he pardons everybody including the ones who took weapons and cracked heads, plus an international drug kingpin. How bad is that? Even some Republicans don’t like it.

He wants to cut wasteful government spending. Who doesn’t? But an utterly simplistic thing to want to do. Then when he does it, he makes it even simpler. He cuts out an enormous swath of spending, good and bad. It’s as if “Winnie the Pooh” was too complicated for him so he reverted to “Dick and Jane.” This one was so badly handled that he had to pull it back.

He wants to stop illegal immigration. A decent thing to want to do unless it’s because you’re a racist. But when he does it, he orders that parts of the Fourteenth Amendment get erased. The federal judge who struck down this wacky wielding of power called it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

As an observer and one-time tangential associate of this heinous man, a part of me says that he doesn’t care if he is able to legally carry out his policy goals. Legality ranks so low on his priority list that it even comes below giving credit to others. That part of me sees these moves as merely practice games. He’s just trying the stuff out. It’s spring training and only the pitchers and catchers have reported. Once he gets all of his incompetent sycophants seated in their Cabinet positions; and once he decimates the rolls of federal government expertise; and once he replaces all of the Inspectors General with toadies who would be less likely to report Administration wrongdoing than Netanyahu would be to convert to Islam; and given this Congress and given this Supreme Court, that’s when he will really move in. The goal is power. Unlimited power. The power to do anything. It will make the shit he’s tried to do in these past few days look like a humanitarian mission.

Then there is another part of me that wonders if maybe he’s just really stupid. Maybe there is no grand plan. Maybe he hasn’t got the imagination to have a grand plan. Maybe Occam was right – the simplest answer is the best. All the idiotic stuff he says and does? It’s because he’s an idiot.

Hence my conflict: is he a despot-in-waiting or is he a few kilowatts short of the brain power needed to do his job?

I’m not entirely sure which of those possibilities is the more frightening one. But there’s an even more bloodcurdling one – he’s probably both.