Inexcusable

Shut up, Mr. President!

We can argue policy — and we should, this being America on the eve of its 250th founding, when we commemorate the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Franklin. Very disputatious people, those Founders, but they sought “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” More impactful than any tariff, more consequential than any gummint program is the corrosive bile of the blighted soul now desecrating the White House. Words matter, especially in a society founded on documents — The Constitution as well as the holy Bible.

Donald Trump’s cheapening coarseness is a crippling sepsis in America’s body politic.

“There is the matter of his mouth,” writes Peggy Noonan, the speech writer who made Reagan sing and George Bush the elder illuminate a thousand points of light. Trump’s “hate-stoking now, in an era of political violence, is going to get someone hurt,” she writes.

Sh*t-hole countries. “Quiet, Piggy!” “Not my type.” Somalis are “garbage.” (All of them, apparently.) The governor of Colorado is a “sleaze bag” for refusing to pardon a county clerk (Tina Peters) who let the My Pillow Man rifle through election returns to somehow prove Donald Trump’s lie of a stolen election, which fostered a failed insurrection. The thugs who brutalized Capitol Police, on the other hand, are “beautiful people.”

Presidents set a tone

JFK lifted America’s sights to the heavens. Reagan brought Hollywood glamor to Washington after four years of sack cloth; moral clarity replaced abject surrender. America had nothing to fear during the darkest days of the Depression, but fear itself. Abraham Lincoln talked about “binding up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.”

This is Donald Trump today on his Truth Social: 

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.

There is just no excuse for that pettiness, unless it be a clinically damaged pysche. (We thought Nixon was crazy.) Expect the usual situational ethics from his sycophants, afraid I.C.E. will confiscate their red MAGA baseball caps if they utter the faintest reproach. This one called Trump a Nazi and that one called him Deplorable. Whaddabout? Whaddabout? POW hero John McCain and iconoclast Majorie Taylor Greene are “traitors” for falling out of lockstep. Contra Reagan, Trump’s 80 percent friends are his 100 percent enemies.

→ “Political differences never stood in the way of our love and respect for each other.” — conservative actor James Woods about Rob Reiner.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Never doubt the ability of Donald J. Trump to rise stoop to the occasion. 

Which elected Republicans will dare admonish this guy?