Less applicable, however, is the entertainment factor since the events playing out on planet Earth continues to be the  pathetic and dreary tale of a once  promising new species not being able to live up to its full potential.  In short, as opposed to acting as an evolved species that was able to take full advantage of the unique intelligence and incredible creativity they were born with, they descended into the suffocating void of selfishness, small-mindedness and other self-destructive traits,  preventing them from being  able to see beyond their immediate self-interest and grasp the larger vision of being a successful species at the forefront of an evolving world.

A case in point is the tragedy currently being played out in the United States of America, that once great country and former leader of the free world that is currently at the receiving end  of a dire prediction come true  as it was once made by an American newspaper columnist by the name of H.L. Menken (1880-1956)

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Enter Donald J. Trump, the 47^th President of the USA, elected on November 5, 2024, by 49.9% of the popular vote, versus 48.3% for his opponent, the hapless Kamala Harris.

A moron is sometimes described as “a person who is notably stupid or lacking in good judgment”, and based on what he has demonstrated during his previous term – and even more so after 6 months in his current term – DJT excels in both categories. This concerns the leader of a country who is actively trying to demolish  his country’s international  reputation,  trust and prestige while ignoring  its constitution,  undermining its democracy and  decimating its governance. Aided and abetted by his hand-picked flock of toothless  sycophants  masquerading as federal officials and who’s only qualification is their blind fealty to their lord and master –  I can’t think of a better way to describe the chaotic wherewithal of the person currently in charge at the White House.

The real issue of course is not D.J. Trump, an intellectual clodhopper with  the  mental disposition  of a 5-tear old toddler and the personae of  a carnival barker; he simply can’t help himself.  The problem lies with the people who voted him into office (again), as well as the roughly 1/3 of the US eligible voters who did not vote  because they were  either too lazy to vote or just could not care less about the state of democracy in their country.

So here we have the MAGA crowd, a so called “populist” movement at the core of his support. They have shown themselves to be essentially a xenophobic anti- immigrant movement with the stench of racism that blames many of the things that are problematic in the US – e.g., crime, illicit drugs, cost of living, lack of affordable housing etc. – on people that are not native to their country, and even more so if they are there  illegally, as well as being non-white, non- western or- in particular – of the Muslim persuasion.

The less said about MAGA the better, but if I can draw one conclusion from their collective prowess to Make America Great Again it is the suspicion that education did  not figure  prominently in their individual  ability to think for themselves and make an informed decision  about what kind of person might be the best choice for serving the interests of their country as their president.

As it is, this quote by Thomas Jefferson might seem appropriate:

“The government you elect is the government you deserve.”

The most amazing thing about this political tragedy is that – after having endured  the first 6  month of  his farcical reign as their country’s president – there isn’t some massive national protest brewing to turf him out of office at earliest opportunity – and before it is too late and the dictatorship he is actively trying to estalish will  prevent any such action with the maximum of brutality.

Be afraid, be very afraid …

Following a recent mea culpa admission by co-author Tony Schwartz of Donald Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal, for realizing that this superficially positive and flattering portrayal of Trump’s approach to business glossed over the incredible shallowness of the main character, and so ended up promoting what appears to be a charlatan entrepreneur into the status of (for some) credible presidential candidate.

In addition, in the case of the current  President of the United States we appear to have the actual instantiation of what has been described in the field of psychology as the the Dunning–Kruger effect:

This effect manifests itself as a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.

We were subsequently treated to Michael Wolfe’s 2017 book Fire and Fury, a presumed  reasonably accurate sketch of Trump’s first year in office, showing a largely  dysfunctional administration around a clueless president who is so out of his depth that you can’t help but to feel sorry for the folks assigned to assist him through the daily turmoil of trying to keep him in some semblance of presidential demeanor. One particular astute observation from it, as provided by White House staff that Wolfe has interviewed, was that to interact with Trump can be akin to “… trying to figure out what a child wants”.

Now, former G. W. Bush speechwriter and Republican columnist David Frum has published his new book Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, described by the SF Chronicle as “a persuasive and detailed account of how Trump is undermining American institutions, including the presidency itself”.

Frum is no light-weight Republican; he is as astute as they come, as evidenced by the following analysis of Trump’s first year in office, and his warning that despotism doesn’t necessarily begin with violent disruption.  “It can come on little cat feet”

The thing to fear from the Trump presidency … is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.

Frum is not holding back either when it comes to his opinion of the quality of the man now in charge of the White House, and has summarized him as follows:

… an amateur, a charlatan, a con artist, a manipulator, a poseur, a serial fibber if not outright liar, a vulgarian, a swindler, a skimmer and a trimmer, a man-child lacking character, intelligence, integrity, judgment, clarity of thought, a coherent philosophy or a worldview and management and organizational skills.

Now that is a lot of ugly name calling, but the scary thing  is that none of this surprises me in any way. Just watching Trump during a TV appearance, now or in the past during his presidential campaign, leaves me with an instant feeling of unease – well, distaste, really – and reach for the mute button on the remote to avoid the insipid bombastic language, or just the sound of a bragging, brawling, or denigrating tone of voice. Combine this with the pouting face, the silly hairdo, and you are presented with an image of a larger than life windbag, someone with an obnoxious personality so  devoid of any real substance that it would suck all the air out of the room the moment he entered it.

Lastly, as stated by David Remnick in a January 15th article in the New Yorker titled “The Lost Emperor” ….

…. there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is and the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.

While much of this commentary makes the Trump presidency sound like something akin to a toxic spill – and equally difficult to contain – it  can be claimed that  much of this negative appraisal of  is based on anecdotal accounts,  and then primarily by biased individuals who simply don’t like him to begin with.  But for those not convinced by now that Trump is in fact the blowhard that millions of Americans have  already made him out to be, you may want to read a Newsweek article from  October 18, 2016,  written by Kurt Eichenwald and titled  A People’s History of Donald Trump’s Business Busts and Countless Victims, .  Trump’s specialty, it seems, was  to snatch huge fistfuls of cash from a companies that were about to go broke, wiping out the savings of millions of people who had invested in them after he had convinced them to do so.

God  – or somebody – help  America, and in the process the rest of the world.

On the other hand, I wonder if Americans have figured out yet that, while Trump is now in the  US President’s seat doing his thing,  this might not be  quite his own thing as there is a puppet master in the White House, pulling the strings he needs to pull to have Donald do his bidding for him and his paranoid anti-Islam ideology.

I’m referring of course to alt-right-wing  and rabid-Islamophobe Stephen K. Bannon who in 2015 was described by a Bloomberg Newsweek article about him, “The Most Dangerous Political Operative in America”, and more recently referred to by the Guardian as “The man who once imagined a ‘global war’ between ‘the Judeo-Christian west’ and ‘jihadist Islamic fascism’. This man is now Trump’s top adviser.

And so I’m wondering what if Trump might not be quite his own man because it’s not the Russians that have the goods on dear Donald, but Steve Bannon does, having dug up some highly compromising information on Dear Donald through his Breitbart News dirt-mining research team known as the Government Accountability Institute, or  GAI.

Earlier, Bannon, in his capacity as executive chair of Breitbart News LLC, had hired discredited author Peter Schweizer, the president of  GAI,  after being very much impressed by his best-selling publication of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.

Schweizer, who began his career as a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, digging through Soviet archives, led the conservative GAI group that is said to have close ties to the Mercer family – called in 2015 by the Washington Post one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics – as well receiving substantial support from other right-wing sources such as  Charles and David Koch.  In conducting its “fact-based” research the GAI team  has access to resources that include an “after-hours” deal to use European internet infrastructure equipment worth 1.3 billion to comb the internet including the secretive Deep Web for information (read “dirt”). And if it is true that Bannon through the GAI has found some real dirt on Trump,  it would not be inconceivable that he and his alt-right cronies are able to put this to some good use by advancing their own ideological ends.

I’m not sure how else to explain the fact that there is a NON-ELECTED individual talking into the ear of the president all day, as well as why Trump is allowing Bannon as a regular attendee to the National Security Council ′s Principals Committee, a Cabinet-level senior inter-agency forum for considering national security issues. This move has been  severely criticized by several members of previous administrations and was called “stone cold crazy” by Susan E. Rice, Barack Obama’s last national security adviser.

But regardless of what Bannon and the GAI may or may not have on Trump, it remains to be seen how the latter – as a person with NPD** – is able to tolerate the presence of Bannon without being able to control him, especially now, when more and more attention appears to be focused on Bannon’s role in running the country. Having to share the limelight with another human being is not something Trump is capable of, so stand back and wait for this situation to come to a head.

(*) Described at the time by George Bush as “some weird shit …”

(**) Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a form of pathological narcissism, first diagnosed by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, in 1968. A rigid pattern of behaviour that drives a lifelong quest for self-gratification, NPD is characterized by a grandiose sense of self-importance, an insatiable need for attention and a chronic lack of empathy.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. (H. L. Mencken, 1880-1956)

Given the subject matter I am addressing today the flavour of this post can’t help but be more appropriately in tune with the cantankerous creature that I am naturally, and more comfortably, from myself.

Hitherto I have always attempted to present a range of rational arguments that were meant to be -if anything – food for thought in a world that appeared to be sliding into a soul crushing display of idiocy, to the point of self-destruction.

And what a fool I am – a Don Quixote of  mediocre intelligence, astonishing naivety and brazen assumptions about the nature of the world and all that can be found in it – in being so wrong about the depth of despair the world appears to have sunk to!

Just so we know where I stand on this, I find the world and all that can be found in it a place of incredible beauty and wonder, but then only if we were able to subtract that horrible insipid creature homo sapiens from its inventory, including all its dastardly deeds since the beginning of time. Other than that, I consider it an absolute privilege to be a part of it. Speaking of the true meaning of “a chance of a lifetime”, but, oh, how we are squandering this opportunity!

I look forward to soon being able to get back to writing about my foolish yet  guardedly  optimistic assumptions about the meaning and nature of the larger world. But before I get there I want to metaphorically throw up  some of the indigestible misery that I am forced to ingest much too frequently,  by being exposed to the actions of my fellow creatures, thanks – but no thanks, really – to the tragic but inescapable fact of being a member of the same sorrowful species.

So let me throw this one up large, as it has been sticking in my craw for some time: how could there have been enough  US citizens of eligible voting age to elect a moron of the magnitude of a Donald Trump to be their next president?

This is either a case of severe voter fraud, or there is in fact some truth to the rumour that many  Americans have been changed into zombies. The latter would be true given that even with half-a-brain it should have been clear that this self-aggrandizing individual is no presidential material anywhere,  unless we’re talking about marginal countries such as North Korea or Zimbabwe – hellholes of human misery by any other name – where  leadership  appears to be mainly a function of intimidation and bullying, requiring no intellectual capacity at all.

The absolute tragedy now is that it appears that the folks who can least afford to have a  windbag and pathological narcissist like Trump at the helm of their country have in fact given him the keys to to the White House: this is tantamount to the chickens electing Colonel Sanders to look after their interest. They have jumped from the frying pan directly into the fire, when – by “draining the swamp” of Wall Street lobbyist – he is now putting Wall Street kingpins directly into government. As reported by Forbes the other day:

… Trump announced Gary Cohn (who was seen as the successor to Goldman’s current chief executive Lloyd Blankfein) will be joining his cabinet as director of the National Economic Council and an assistant to the President for economic policy. Cohn’s appointment means there will be a trifecta of former Goldmanites in the Trump administration. Former Goldman partner and mortgage trader Steven Mnuchin has been named Secretary of Treasury by Trump. Steve Bannon, a former Goldman banker, is his chief strategist.

How confused can you get, America?  Your government will be run directly by the sharks raised and educated at Goldman Sachs, predatory capitalism’s finest specimens. Guided by the motto “To Take from the Many to Give to the Few”, these  are the folks that get up in the morning for the sole reason to stuff their own pockets  – and those of their cronies – with other peoples money, and by hook or by crook it seems.

They are the very miscreants that precipitated the September 2008 financial crisis that almost brought down the world’s financial system.  They did this by selling sub-prime mortgage derivatives out of the front door, touting them as the fines investment instruments ever, while shorting these stinkers through the back door, knowing full-well they were absolute garbage to begin with. How low can you go?  And: NOBODY WENT TO JAIL FOR THIS!

It took a huge taxpayer-financed bailout to shore up the financial industry. Even so, the ensuing credit crunch turned what was already a nasty downturn into the worst recession in 80 years. To think that these types of characters would now switch their allegiance from their own pocketbooks to Joe Six-pack – and in particular the under- or unemployed and destitute – is a stretch only attempted by anyone even more naive than I am.

Excuse me now while I look for some mouthwash to get the sour taste out of my mouth.