I decided it would be fun to break down today’s incendiary New York Times Opinion Piece. I’ve gunned it through my finely tuned bullshit detector and translated it line-by-line from its original Republican. Here are the results:
President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
The ship is going down, folks.
It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
We know he’s guilty. We know you hate him. We know we’re about to get our asses kicked.
The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I just thought everyone (including our foreign adversaries) should know that the Executive Branch of the Federal Government is in a perpetual state of low-grade coup d’etat, and the President of the United States is literally too stupid to recognize it.
I would know. I am one of them.
I’m a rat in a room full of ass-covering cowards.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
To be clear, we’re still a bunch of craven assholes. We want nothing more than the rich to get richer, and we’re totally cool with ripping babies from the arms of mothers if it means racist old white people will keep voting for us.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
Even ass-covering cowards need a sense of purpose, and we’ve found ours in continually preventing a narcissistic half-wit from accidentally starting World War III.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
Don’t you see? By being traitorous and disloyal to the worst human being to ever hold the office of President, that somehow makes us the good guys.
The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
The President of the United States is a psychopath. No, really. He’s an actual psychopath, and we don’t know if it’s better or worse that he’s also easily manipulated and painfully fucking stupid.
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.
I am either completely full of shit, or I have a childlike grasp of contemporary Republicanism and such crippling levels of cognitive dissonance that I refuse to recognize how Donald Trump epitomizes the ideals long practiced by conservatives: closed minds, rigged markets, and selfish people.
In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
We’re absolutely terrified that he’s gonna fuck up the economy and we’ll end up like the rest of the poors.
Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
Again, we’re totally cool with his dumbfuck military parades, as long as we get our blank check to fuck up the environment and those sweet, sweet tax cuts for the wealthy.
But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
Honestly, we’re amazed we got those tax cuts, because the boss can’t even tie his shoelaces.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
All of the narcissistic underlings that play golf with me will privately admit that even they aren’t as bad as the President. Most are working hard to protect their fiefdoms from the impending collapse of the administration.
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
Oh, did I mention the President has an undiagnosed major neurocognitive disorder with paranoid features?
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
While I’m at it, here is further evidence effectively demonstrating to everyone (including our foreign adversaries) that the President of the United States is suffering from significant cognitive decline.
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.
Thank god we’re here to save you all from this man. Don’t you see we’re the good guys? Why are you all so mean to us? We’ve gone to such great lengths to mop up after a paranoid psychopath with dementia who happens to hold the most powerful elected office in the world. We want a cookie. Can we have a cookie?
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
We believe that we’re the adults in the room, which totally confirms that we also believe the President is non compos mentis.
The result is a two-track presidency.
The result is a shadow government.
Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
If you think Trump tickles Putin’s balls in public, you should see the kneepads he breaks out in private. It’s downright treasonous!
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
I am very likely either the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Treasury, or the Attorney General.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
*twirls evil mustache* Then again, maybe I’m the Director of National Intelligence.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
Whoever I may be, I am also a gaping asshole of such infinite magnitude that I would describe this shit show as the work of the “steady state.”
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
Oh yeah, I totally buried the lede. We had super secret cabinet-level meetings about removing the President of the United States from office, but then we figured, nah, let’s get those tax cuts.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
We’re not gaslighting you. You’re gaslighting yourselves!
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
We hereby nominate Senator McCain for Republican Sainthood — and let’s use the word “lodestar” for no particular reason, because that seems totally fine and not at all a thing that closeted Republicans wish could be their porn name.
There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit: ‘Murica.
