I have recently witnessed a back-to-back demonstration of notable nitwittery: Donald Trump’s idiotic 90-minute-long D.C. press conference, arranged for the purpose of lauding the accomplishments of the first year of his second term, followed the next day by a bucket of WTF at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
As is always the case, Trump spoke of himself in superlatives. At his bizarre review of one of the most sickening years in American history, he assured us, “I have a list of accomplishments like no one has ever seen before.”
I think there are few people who would disagree with the only true thing he said during the entire press conference. No one in this country has ever seen anything like the year we have just endured. The accomplishments that no one has ever seen before include the emergence of a Gestapo designed to abuse, terrify, arrest, deport, and kill innocent people all over the country. We have definitely never seen that kind of accomplishment before. We have never seen a president accrue over a billion dollars in grifted and grafted emoluments. That is something we have never seen before, either. We have never seen a president insult the member nations of NATO continually. We have never seen a president slap 100 percent tariffs on former allies. We have never seen a president terminate all forms of humanitarian assistance to those in need both at home and abroad. We have never seen a president demand that Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and Greenland surrender themselves to him so he can add them to his real estate portfolio. We have never seen a chief executive brutalize his own people and then demand a Nobel Prize. We have never seen a president go on a personal revenge campaign against principled public servants who had the poor judgement to point out his criminality. Never before have we watched an utter buffoon park his fat kiester behind the Resolute Desk and use a Sharpie to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
Clearly, he has plenty to tout.
Some beleaguered, anonymous staffer worked hard to create what appeared to be a “book” of Trump’s many accomplishments, held together with a large binder clip. The president whose feats of derring-do are unlike anything anyone has ever seen before spent some time riffing about the strength and dangerousness of the binder clip, because that is what intellectually impaired old gasbags do. After removing the clip, he flipped idly through the pages for a few seconds and then, with a shrug, tossed his compendium of accomplishments onto the floor.
I have searched everywhere for the hardcover edition of Donald Trump’s “Catalogue of Wonderous Deeds,” but perhaps Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller decided that “Drank many Diet Cokes,” “Ate lots of fast food,” “Slept through sycophantic cabinet meetings,” “Demolished the East Wing,” “Concealed the Epstein files,” “Kidnapped foreign leaders,” “Released 1,600 hardened criminals from prison,” “Killed a bunch of fishermen,” “Arrested and detained five-year-olds,” “Repeatedly violated the Constitution,” “Smeared his name all over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and then closed it after no one but Kid Rock would agree to perform there,” and “Took $71 million of your tax dollars to pay himself for the pleasure of playing golf at his own resorts,” did not necessarily require a wider audience.
His signature word salad was, naturally, rife with lies. He claimed to have slashed drug prices “by as much as 300, 400, 500, and even 600 percent,” when the average fourth grader knows that a price slash of 100 percent would result in drugs that cost nothing. A drug that costs nothing cannot be further discounted. No wonder the man has had to declare bankruptcy so often—basic math is beyond his grasp.
And then there was the stroll down Faux Memory Lane to that long ago, nonexistent day when his adoring imaginary mother told him that he had enough natural talent to become a professional baseball player. One certainly wishes that he had chosen a career in the dugout rather than becoming the raging career criminal and totalitarian that he is today.
As if that performance weren’t bad enough, he later boarded Airforce One and took the Donald Trump Cavalcade of Crap to Davos.
In Davos, Trump proclaimed that he would be going to war with Denmark and Greenland and that he would levy even higher tariffs on anyone who tried to stop him. He ranted that were it not for the United States entering World War II, everyone in Switzerland would be speaking German. Perhaps Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt forgot to tell him that in fact, everyone in Switzerland does speak German—it is one of several official languages, each of which are spoken by the Swiss.
Following that ridiculous diatribe, he went on to announce that he had somehow created “the best stock market in history.”
As Mr. Dow Jones was praising his own superhuman ability to control the stock market, the market itself went into freefall. The Dow and S&P indices dropped 870 and 500 points respectively, and the Nasdaq slid 561 points. Evidently, investors like neither tariffs nor taking other countries by force in order to steal their resources.
The slippage in the stock market appeared to be all that was necessary for TACO to retreat from his idiotic threats. He hastened to announce that he was scrapping the plan to invade Greenland, and then in typical Trumpian fashion, alluded to the contours of an outline of a framework of a deal, whatever that means. This was Trumpspeak for, “I have no plan for this because I never have a plan for anything, even though the imaginary plan that I don’t really have is superior to whatever actual plan is currently in place.”
Let us be clear: There is no plan. There is no deal. American military bases and mineral extraction rights were already in place before all of the threats and chest beating, but as he remarked, he just likes to own things.
It is important at this juncture to remind you that Donald Trump cares about three things only: money, power, and attention. His needs are simple and few: He wants it all. The only thing that causes him to check his insanity, however briefly, is a drop in the stock market. It is that straightforward.
This is good to understand, because big investment firms and individual investors with exceptionally high net worth can manage Donald Trump’s bad behavior by pulling their money off the table: out of the market; out of the gaudy, grifty Trump ballroom; and out of all of the other vanity projects that he intends to complete as part of his ridiculous self-glorification spree. If they stop tithing, eventually he will dry up and blow away.
Trump concluded his remarks by announcing the formation of the Donald J. Trump “Board of Peace,” which appears to be his delusional alternative to the United Nations and another utterly transparent attempt to get the Nobel Committee to fork over a prize that he does not deserve and will never receive. Most of our traditional allies have declined the invitation the join the Board of Peace, even though membership can be theirs for the low-low price of $1 billion each.
So, it certainly was a first year unlike anything that anyone has ever seen before. It was a year in which a dangerously deranged bigmouth resumed the presidency. It was a year during which a lifelong sociopath with dementia sat behind the Resolute Desk concealing his cankles and acting as the unwitting tool of the despicable Stephen Miller. It was a year in which a cabal of criminals joined forces to annihilate democracy.
Donald Trump is right: We have never seen anything like this before in the United States of America. We have never before seen the reemergence of an administration that is so stupid, so fascistic, and so relentlessly evil that one can only pray that we never see it again.
