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In making, once again, my morning sortie to the Snake Pit—my current term for the place where I catch up on the daily dreadful drip of awful accountings emanating from the trump-sphere—that house of horrors whose migraine-inducing potential is always lurking in the shadows, a headline caught my eye concerning the president’s latest pronouncement regarding his, as it turns out, imagined “ultimate” authority to overrule states’ governors and reopen the  businesses within their boundaries at whim. With my ears still ringing from the sting of yesterday’s news of trump’s unwillingness to authorize funds to save the postal service from insolvency, this new bit of baloney begs the question whether to bite the bullet and bail or to bury the angst beneath yet another layer of bullshit-buffering bravado.

trump’s attempt to prosecute his pique at Jeff Bezos by punishing the postal service amounts to an abuse of presidential powers; beyond being inappropriate, it’s also un-American. His claim of unlimited presidential power vis a vis re-opening the economy is not only outlandish, it also betrays his profound ignorance of constitutional law. The president’s foolish claim would be laughable were it not for the fact his ignorance undermines states’ decision-making ability by making it, as writes Neal K. Katyal, Georgetown law professor and former acting solicitor general of the United States , “harder to concentrate accountability and decision-making where it belongs, in the states.”  Writing in today’s New York Times, Katyal reminds us of the Supreme Court’s having ruled 30 years ago that “when it’s unclear who the decision maker is, ‘the accountability of both state and federal officials is diminished.’”

But beyond the headlines delineating the distressing developments of the day, I return once again, as I often do, to pondering how on earth a once-seeming sane country such as ours (while acknowledging some may not agree with this assessment) could have drifted so far and so rapidly from sanity.

From covfefe to covid, the president’s bewildering response to the crisis has now grown viral in its own right, evolving as it has into a hybrid covfefe-19 of mind-numbing proportions, yet his numbers still fail to fall as one might expect were large segments of the electorate more capable of comprehending his crackpot course.

This haunting phenomena may be viewed as the natural outcome of Republicans’ diligently draining the depths of the gene pool in their determined drive to diminish the electorate to the level of trump-like simplicity requisite to maintain their hold over a public for whom their relevance no longer has meaning.

This dumbing-down of the educational system by means of successive waves of Republican-sponsored  tax-reduction scams-turned-laws, beginning during Ronald Reagan’s administration and continuing to the present day, is finally revealing its true cost to the country as evidenced by the unquestioning adherence to trump dogma of folks lacking the ability to detect or comprehend incoming signals indicative of extreme cognitive dissonance that the more astute or intellectually curious might find suspect.

trump supporters, particularly those swooning to the hypnotic spell of Rush Limbaugh, most televangelists and the stable of Fox News propagandistic provocateurs, seem especially vulnerable to such utter bullshit.

But the spell they live under is not confined to the uneducated alone—well educated professionals are also susceptible to it. I was informed only yesterday, by a close relative, concerning someone we both know who, despite higher-than-average intelligence, good education and a proven track record in a successful career, believes the moon walk was a hoax! Apparently, ignorance respects no socioeconomic distinctions.

There has long been an undercurrent in American life of suspicion in science and hostility toward the intellectual segment of the population. This phenomenon is not confined to our culture alone—the history of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia serves as a chilling reminder of what can happen when a society loses its moorings. trump and those like him, while not yet bold enough to round up the educated and quiet their voices, would like nothing better than to silence the voices of the Fourth Estate, as evidenced by his continual attacks on what he terms “fake news” and its purveyors.

The Republican Party under its present leadership would, given enough rope, not only destroy our democracy, it would also forever alter our cherished way of life. It is sometimes difficult to fully appreciate change, since it usually occurs gradually. Witness how much a child can grow in a short period of time and consider how differently those changes are perceived by those who were away during that period and then returned to see the changes all at once. That difference in how changes in one’s perspective can alter the way change is perceived may also be appreciated through the study of history.

In a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to congress on the fourth of July, 1861, he described the purpose of the federal government thusly, “to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial burdens from all shoulders, and to give everyone an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

Were trump capable of stating his true aims with such eloquence, he would likely say the purpose of government is to “lower the condition of all men save those who serve my purposes, to place the artificial burdens on everyone’s shoulders save those who adulate me, and to  give no-one save those who sing my praises an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

Tim Konrad

2020.04.14