The Loneliest Job in the World

     Trump has been digging his own political grave since he first descended that escalator in June 2015. His collusion with the Russians goes back at the very least to 2013 when he held the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow (when he put out feelers to see how feasible it would be to put up a tower there.).
     But when all is said and done, long after Trump falls (and he will. Even the Old Testament God wouldn't be so cruel as to have this nearly two year-long Mueller probe end with a boring series of plea deals), this is what will be said about him: Donald Trump served as an object lesson in hubris. That. like Icarus, he flew too close to the sun (in this case, the incipient withering effect of daylight as provided only by a federal probe). That the worst decision he ever made was to run for president. Because, as the old adage says, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."
     And a fall from grace after years in the White House offers a lot of empty air and acceleration between that and the cold, pitiless earth below.
     And it could be said Trump deserves the lion's share of the blame for his administration's countless failures. After all, Trump has isolated himself from other world leaders of free, democratic countries, our allies, the UN, his own Congress, the American people, all living former presidents and the truth itself. Harry Truman was right when he said the presidency is the loneliest job in the world.
      He commenced his campaign by promising a wall. He still hasn't provided that for his racist, white supremacist base. He promised Mexico would pay for it until they refused. Then he doubled down and said, and is still saying, they'll pay for it through the new NAFTA trade agreement (it doesn't work that way).
     At the same time he's saying Mexico will pay for it through tariffs (which are paid for not by nations but companies, hence the People), he's blaming Democrats for not opening the purse strings. He keeps going from Mexico to the Democrats and back to Mexico like a desperate junkie looking for money for his next fix. He's the world's worst panhandler, the world's worst deal-maker and the world's worst crisis actor. No one but a few racist hillbillies wants the wall.

     And now he's threatening to call a national state of emergency to get his wall built (that won't work, either) in response to a nonexistent crisis that's making southern border residents look between the border and Washington in bafflement.
     The suspicions of who will get the fat contract to build Trump's fabled wall of Babylon and who will provide the steel aside, the plain fact is Trump never really wanted the wall. It all started as a mnemonic device concocted by Trump's aides to keep Trump's attention on immigration from the time he drifted down his Ivory Tower like a bored husband in The Mall of America. Like Reagan's risible Star Wars scheme that fooled the Soviets, it was a hare-brained scheme that just took a life of its own. (This time around, however, the Russians aren't as easily fooled as they were in Brezhnev's and Gorbachev's day).
     While meeting with Pelosi and Schumer earlier today, Trump "stormed out" after 30 minutes when he didn't get his way and probably ate 20 Big Macs in the West Wing to punish them. And then there was the eight plus minutes of magnificent bullshit that co-opted prime time last night in which Trump compressed the greatest amount of lies ever packed into such a brief period of time. It was an unprecedented prime time address that, amazingly, all the major networks decided to air. In other words, they gave one last chance to the Boy Who'd Cried Wolf 7,600 times since his Russia-enabled ersatz "presidency" began.

     This forced glorified daycare workers Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer to do their best Disappointed Parent routine immediately after to set the record straight. Meanwhile, the nation prepares for the fourth week of this shutdown. It's getting so bad, TSA workers aren't just calling in sick, they're walking off the job and entering the private sector.
     Plainly, the crisis isn't at the Rio Grande but the Potomac.