Seeing Trump

Former Texas Congresswoman Kay Granger (Photo credit: Getty Images)

Congresswoman Kay Granger of Texas, aged 82, and first elected in 1997, vanished from Washington, DC. Disappeared.

She was there one minute, and gone the next.

Whose job was it to notice?

Whatever the answer may be, it was not the national political media, who prowl the marble hallways of Washington’s congressional offices like little fish upon the reef.

All of this went down two years after George Santos, a real-life imposter and fraud, was elected to Congress not that far away from the front door of The New York Times.

Here is a nibble from Politico about the details of l’affaire de Granger, and the fruits of the DC geriatric protection society:

And it’s not like the proximate issue was unknown. Between Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein, the conversation about elderly and possibly impaired politicians was already roiling Washington, which ought to have pricked up people’s radar.

But even without the details of cognitive health — which are dicey to report on because even impaired people have good days, because political allies are often in denial, and because actual doctors won’t talk — it seemed odd: Just how did a 2,000-member strong press corps allow a well-known lawmaker to vanish from the scene for months? It’s the kind of omission that fuels the endemic distrust toward Washington and the news media.

Does it make you wonder or think what else the media and America’s elected officials might be missing?

Donald Trump did two things on Friday.

First, he petted and scratched Chuck Schumer’s head and extended his small Trump paw for licking:

Next, he went to the Justice Department, and pissed all over the rule of law with fevered declarations about revenge, conspiracies, locking up his opponents, and the illegal media that are a threat to America because they don’t worship the king.

What is the sin of America’s broken media?

What is the failure?

It’s simple.

Over a 20-year basis, the American political media working for news organizations increasingly controlled by giant syndicates was unable to deduce who did and did not believe in the United States of America as a continuous project founded on ideas that were the rock — or were supposed to be.

It is broader than the media.

Here is America’s fool secretary of state:

How many Democratic votes did he get for confirmation?

The correct answer was all 47 Democratic votes.

This moment demands coherence and guts.

It demands integrity and fierceness.

Something terrible is happening in America, and there are too many anesthesiologists working in media and politics.

Shhhhh!!!! Don’t worry!

Have you heard that before?

Donald Trump’s presidency is already in a state of collapse and crisis.

His incoherence, lack of discipline, focus, basic competence and connection to the grassroots can be excused by his winged monkeys like Laura Ingraham on Fox News. She said this week that Donald Trump is “good for business,” and to “ignore” the market uncertainty:

But everyone will experience what is coming, and already is.

Real damage will find its way to everyone in America. When the scar is left everyone will have a specific place to look and remember what MAGA did to them and our country. There will be no hiding the mark or the cost.

These are the days of Marco Rubio and JD Vance, ICE Barbie Noem and Elon Musk and his ‘children of the corn.’

They will not last, but the stench will long linger.

There are questions at hand that matter.

Let’s face them because the American media isn’t capable of either asking them, grasping them, or contextualizing them with few exceptions.

Would Donald Trump kill his enemies if he felt that he could?

Would he have people who would try and please him by killing for him?

What about locking up his opponents?

What about torture?

Would Marco Rubio ever say no? Would he resign over anything?

What about Pete Hegseth? Would he order the US military to fire weapons at the American people?

Has anyone ever asked him if it is possible for a Democrat to love their country?

Of course not.

There are no questions ever asked that probe for deeper truths and meaning.

This seems to be a moment when whatever happens next becomes the prelude to next and next and next.

The question isn’t where does it go, but rather, what makes it stop?

Are we to expect restraint from Trump and Vance?

Are we to expect wisdom from his henchmen?

Each day, madness swirls from dawn to dusk as Donald Trump produces his masterpiece.

He sits in the center ring with a whip in his hand behind the most powerful desk in the world, but somehow, for so many fools whose job it is to see him, he remains a mystery.

He remains invisible. Just one more Kay Granger. There, and then gone into the mist.

The difference between the two is that when Kay Granger put her head down at night she likely never dreamed of the wall, and who she wanted to line up against it.

Trump does.

You know that by now, right?

Or, am I wrong?

An exaggerator suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)?

Soon we will know.

What are this man’s intentions?

Maybe someone should ask Elon in an unguarded moment what he thinks American society might be like 10 years from now.

I’m thinking that it doesn’t align with a human vision. That’s too bad because I remember reading somewhere that we were a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

---

---