The Non-Job of the Un-President

He wants you to look away again.

He wants you to keep from thinking about one basic question: Doesn't he have a job to do? Wouldn't it keep him pretty busy?

Too busy to do nationwide campaigning for people in his party to the extent that he has? Any of you over 40--do you recall when a sitting president has had time to do such wide-open campaigning for mid-terms?

I don't. And that's because 45 doesn't think of himself as actually having a job. He thinks of himself as being a mouthpiece and having others take care of the messy part--governing--so he can perpetuate his power.

The only way he thinks he can do that is to do what he thinks he does best--vilify other people, lie, exaggerate, and gain cheers from the semi- and falsely informed on the stump, where he can actually see those who admire him. They fuel his every step, and without it, he is the embodiment of an empty shell.

There is nothing on his desk, not even the controversial matters which presidents are supposed to decide upon because they are the essence of what a president's supposed to do--make decisions and take responsibility, the latter of which is completely foreign to him. White House assistants shield him from them, if Bob Woodward's depiction is correct, out of fear that he will do something genuinely catastrophic that can't be called back. He reads nearly nothing. He doesn't think he has to, because he believes that everything he has always thought about reality is correct.

And that's why--and I've not heard anyone say this yet, amazingly, at least not in these words--he has no idea of what he's talking about, even when he's trying to say what's true. None. Zero. He lives in a world gone by, one he wishes had ever been so. And yet, millions hang on his every word. They are his plaything, and that's just the way he wants it. He can say anything to them, and has, and they will eat it up.

He says he tries to tell the truth. He tries. He can't help but lie, in other words. He works his best at altering reality because he is reality in non-real form.

I keep coming back to a line from the movie "Back to the Future": This is nuts.

He is the un-president. He claims the constitutional power to undo everything Obama did through executive orders; to insult anyone he wishes; to make people afraid of something; and to play golf while he waits for something else he feels like doing, as long as it doesn't make him uncomfortable. If it does, he yells at someone and blames someone else, so they provide non-cover for his non-mistakes.

This madness has two more years to go, at least. Today, as we vote, we can arrest some of it by putting a Democratic majority back into the House of Representatives, to provide something of a barrier against legislative nonsense (and to commence badly-needed investigations, far more open than those of Robert Mueller, wherever he is).

That is the hope. Things will not, cannot, get better, though, until we are done with this monster. We now prepare for that.

Two more years and we cannot look away. In fact, we'd better not. Our capacity for outrage had better not be exhausted.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark