MONIKA BAUERLEIN: Trump Is Going Ballistic Because the Walls Are Closing In

By Dilip -
The whistleblower system is designed to alert the top brass to abuses inside the bureaucracy. But what happens when the top brass are themselves the wrongdoers?

Politicians who lie, obfuscate, or dodge the rules for strategic reasons are nothing new for us, or for you... But Trump is a different story. Not only does he crash through the guardrails of law and common sense, he may no longer understand what they are. As David pointed out recently, the most telling part of the infamous call with the Ukrainian president came when Trump demanded that Volodymyr Zelensky look into an utterly bizarre conspiracy theory that holds that Russia did not hack the DNC’s servers

David wrote: It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s BS as, well, just BS. After all, Trump will publicly say anything to escape responsibility, change the subject, or cover up misconduct…But when he was speaking to Zelensky, he was not in front of an audience. In private, he was expressing a priority and making a specific ask (or demand). And that [request] focused on Zelensky producing information to confirm an utterly batty idea. 

Trump regards this absurd idea as true. Why? Because he wants to. Because he needs it to be real. Because he does not care about reality. It was one thing for Trump to push Zelensky to come up with muck on Joe Biden and his son. That sort of material was within the realm of possibility (and it could probably be made up, if it doesn’t exist). But to concentrate on the servers conspiracy theory? This transcript shows that Trump is a prisoner of his own self-deception, a man untethered from the world of facts. It might be more reassuring if he was only an inveterate liar.

The problem, in other words, is not just a president who will say and do anything that seems advantageous to him regardless of truth, decency, or the constitutional order. It’s a president who may no longer understand that these things exist. And this is a problem that the systems we’ve relied on to constrain the powerful are not designed for. The last couple of weeks have shown that accountability is far from assured for a president who considers himself unbound by the rules. Consider that the story of that phone call almost didn’t come out ... read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/10/war_on_truth/

Do our leaders want to certify political assassination?

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