Donald Trump is a very stupid dumbass. Like even for a pampered inheritance baby, he’s exceptionally dumb! Just a big idiot. His brain came out of a can with the word “Hormel” on it. He’s stupider than shit. A stiff breeze could beat him at checkers.
This is not news to literally anyone, but it’s nice to be able to just say it, you know? I can say—or type, or screech in the middle of the produce section of my local supermarket—that the president of the United States of America is a salt-cured degenerate moron who couldn’t reason his way out of a T-shirt, and the freedom to express this truth goes at least some small distance toward mitigating the horror of it being true. It’s even sometimes kind of fun.
In this respect I am lucky; not everybody has this freedom. Like for example, reporters at respectable publications like the New York Times (or Washington Post, or Politico, Wall Street Journal, or whatever), who must cultivate sources in Trump’s administration and/or keep open the possibility that their publication might interview the president himself someday, generally cannot publish a sentence like “Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is a big dumb crap-bag who does not have two neurons to rub together beneath the roadkill fox he pretends is his natural hair,” even though it’s true and possibly even flattering to the president. They have to come up with less explicit ways of communicating this fact. Like, for example, when you need to say that the leader of the free world struggles to maintain a level of conversational impulse control that would not bedevil even a dim kindergartener:
Some of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers fear leaving him alone in meetings with foreign leaders out of concern he might speak out of turn. General McMaster, in particular, has tried to insert caveats or gentle corrections into conversations when he believes the president is straying off topic or onto boggy diplomatic ground.
Likewise, the people who work for Trump directly: Even when they speak anonymously to those reporters, the norms and manners of national politics strongly pressure them not to come right out and say that the president is a paste-munching pinhead literally too stupid even to comprehend that the world contains more knowledge than he was born with. What if he finds out who said it? I mean, we are talking about a guy whose command of English basically only includes his own surname and the phrase “You’re fired,” here. Piss him off and he’s sure as hell gonna yell at least one of those two things at you, if not both!
Yes, for these groups, it is better to be polite. But you can see the problem, here. Donald Trump issues a new reminder of his toxic asininity almost hourly, and there are only so many ways to put a complimentary gloss on the basic fact that he is like if somebody drilled a hole in Andrew Dice Clay’s head and dropped a lit M-80 into it. Only within the past fortnight he has impulsively fired the director of the FBI, contradicted his own spokespersons on the reason for firing him, all but admitted he’d done it for the express purpose of obstructing justice, and blabbed highly classified intelligence information to Russian officials inside the Oval Office, possibly compromising an important intelligence source in the Middle East. Now we have learned that the fired FBI director, James Comey, had an ass-covering trail of receipts showing Trump tried to pressure him to drop an investigation into one of Trump’s own cabinet members, which of course would be illegal as hell. (Also, for whatever reason, his stupefyingly stupid belief that exercise depletes the human body’s fixed lifelong store of energy re-entered the news.)
This is to say, virtually all the national news, right now and pretty much since the election, is about how hopeless and malignant an imbecile Donald Trump is. And with each day it becomes more clear that the primary activity within Trump’s White House is the frantic all-consuming effort to mitigate, contain, distract from, or profit off of the president’s very extreme stupidity. I wrote a couple months ago about the strain this places on the language abilities of the types of politics insiders who spend their entire adult lives speaking in euphemism and outright bullshit. If they are fraying around the edges, now, who can blame them!
What I am saying, here, is that we are racing toward the day when an administration flack will break down and yell, “Look, the president’s a fucking horse’s ass, okay? He’s fucking stupid! He’s dumber than hell! It’s like talking to a jar of mustard! I know forks—multiple forks!—that could think circles around him! When he sits up too fast you can hear the bean rattling around in his head! What the hell do you want from me???” And then even the reporters who do not have the freedom to write this in their own words will just be able to put it right there, in quotes, in their publications. We’re getting there! We’re getting very close!
God, it will feel great for them. To just be able to print the baldest truth in the most straightforward terms! It will be like an orgasm so powerful it shatters your teeth.
If this day arrives prior to the nuclear war, that will be terrific.