The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre of Rational Thought

“Please get me up, my friends... No payrolls. No wells. No coupons. That would be entirely out. Pardon me; I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant. Look out. Look out for him. Please. He owed me money; he owes everyone money.” - Last words of Dutch Schultz, 1935

(By American Zen’s Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

Yes, I know it's Valentine's Day. My wife keeps having to remind me why everything in America turns pink starting the day after Christmas. But I'm a political writer. Deal. And I have something else to say that doesn't involve forced declarations of love through processed sugar and questionably aromatic, rotting vegetation.

     Aside from Donald Trump getting "elected" President of the United States, the 2016 general election should be remembered for one thing if nothing else: It was an extraordinary case of 127,000,000+ voters who were willing to overlook or be blind to the palpably obvious corruption and unsuitability of both major candidates. I hate to be the one to break it to you, folks but there is no either/or. We had, once again, forced upon us the choice between two elderly crime waves masquerading as humans.

     But for one brief shining moment, it looked as if we at least had a choice between an actual intelligent human being and a gibbering buffoon. That was the night of the first presidential debate between wedding buddies Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

     Aside from screaming about 400 pound guys on their beds hacking into the DNC's servers in a transparently pathetic attempt to deflect and distract attention away from the real culprits (i.e. the little bastard sons of Vlad Putin), Trump even used the first of the three presidential debates to give himself a pat on the back for being the powerful wealthy white man who racially profiled the President of the United States. Essentially, Trump was Sheriff Joe and the president a Hispanic motorist pulled over and asked to turn over proof of his citizenship and still not being believed.

     Because Trump is never wrong, even if he always is. Just as he's still right in calling for the death penalty of the Central Park Five 28 years ago after taking out $85,000 in full-page newspaper ads calling for their immediate execution (In kind of a mini pre-Facebook moment when the greed of the largest newspapers in New York City, in an attempt to look nonpartisan and disinterested, got the better of them despite the recklessness of the message.).

     You old farts 40 and older remember the Central Park Five, don't you? They also said they were innocent. For over a decade. Only, unlike Rob Portman and David Sorenson, the most beloved serial wife beaters who ever walked into the White House, they were. Take away the money, fine clothes and gilded trappings of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and you'd have an episode of COPS.

     You see, Dear Reader, the problem with Donald Trump isn't so much the presentation, which is adolescent on a good day: It's the fact that he's a true believer of his own bullshit. Like David Chadwick, Israel's most admired stalker and no-talent bum, earnestly believing he is "superior in every conceivable way" to the proprietor of this blog, Trump honestly and earnestly believes to this day that the Central Park Five should have been executed without even the benefit of due process. This results in his belief that all white men and conservatives deserve the benefit of the doubt while biracial Presidents free of personal scandal are lying about their birthplace even when such evidence to the contrary was released way back in 2013. White nationalists and neonazis are "very fine people" but all-around good guys like Colin Kaepernick are "sons of bitches" for kneeling during the anthem to protest black people getting killed by plainly racist cops.

     Birth certificates and DNA evidence be damned! I said it, I believe it, that settles it!

     And such delusion and an inability to admit to being at fault and to apologize for making rash statements gives us things such as Charlottesville, San Juan, outlandishly elaborate combovers that fall apart with a puff of wind and clownishly long ties that he still won't tie properly.

I am plaintiff and not defendant.

This attitude, and Trump's phantasmic grip on sanity, are why Trump's legal counsel are feverishly trying to negotiate with the Mueller team, which is in a very strong position and doesn't have to negotiate with anyone, not even the Oval Office: During this nine month-long ordeal of the Mueller investigation, Trump has been positioning himself as a victim and even a possible plaintiff, rather than a defendant in a very serious federal probe. Paul Manafort tried that and crashed and burned like the Hindenburg. His old boss personally released the Nunes Memo, which actually implicated the FBI moreso than it exonerated Trump.
     He still believes he won the popular vote (if one arbitrarily removes 3-5 million votes from illegal aliens), his inauguration crowd was the biggest on record, that he's accomplished more than any first year president, that the Dow was doing great until recently because of him, that 2017 being the safest year for air travel on record was because of him doing nothing about it, that he's a stable genius and that black people love him.
     As New York Magazine concluded last year- Trump's no liar: He's simply delusional and is not grounded in reality. His public and private statements sound like the incoherent ramblings of a dying Dutch Schultz after he was gunned down in 1935- They're a bunch of non sequiturs not even tenuously strung together with even a gossamer thread of thematic unity. Trump tells these falsehoods even in private when he doesn't have to.
     He still believes Obama was born in Kenya, that the Central Park Five are guilty, that he won the popular vote if you assume massive and unsubstantiated voter fraud, that Hillary conspired with the Russians to sell them 20% of our uranium and that it wasn't him on that Access Hollywood tape in which be bragged about sexually assaulting women.
     Perhaps now you'll understand why Trump's lawyers are hoping that he won't have to open his pie hole to Robert Mueller. It would be like opening Pandora's Box in a JPL wind tunnel. And the only thing that's scarier than Trump honestly believing these things is that 25% or more of his 2016 voters believe it. But no one's fact-checking them. And they will be left behind for us to deal with long after Trump's buried under the ash heap of history.
     Because if there's just one lasting legacy Trump will leave behind after this abomination of a presidency, it's this: He will be the first "president" who so completely convinced so many to hate the truth when it merely becomes inconvenient, to con so many tens of millions of people to jettison whatever tenuous notions they ever had about basic logic and cognitive thinking as long as doing so promises to piss off liberals. Like all great con men, Trump's indelible impact on America will be in his faithful singing his praises long after their pockets have been picked clean, in lovingly remembering when company's over that nice man in the nice suit who took their life savings for a Bible he never had or ever will have to sell.