Trump and Ben Carson: King and court jester of our new Idiocracy

Donald Trump is the leader of the American kakistocracy — a term that means rule by the stupid, ignorant, lazy and profoundly incompetent. Sophia A. McClennen predicted this accurately in a Salon essay published a full month before Trump was inaugurated. As business professor André Spicer described it in a Guardian op-ed, a kakistocracy is "the wicked disorder that can result when expertise and ethical judgment are aggressively and systematically pushed aside."

On Wednesday, in keeping with his ceremonial duties as king of the kakistocrats, Donald Trump stood at a lectern in the Rose Garden after reportedly throwing a temper tantrum during a (very brief) meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Trump proclaimed, "I don't do cover-ups" and announced that there would no trillion-dollar infrastructure bill as long as Democrats in Congress dared to investigate him.

Along with the seal of the President of the United States, Trump's lectern was festooned with a placard that read "no collusion" and "no obstruction," and included other supposedly favorable details about Robert Mueller's investigation, at least as massaged and misrepresented by Attorney General William Barr.

The net effect of Trump's press conference was akin to a scene from Mike Judge's satire "Idiocracy" but with one key difference: Judge's fictional President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is more intelligent than Donald Trump, possesses more charisma and after his own fashion actually cares about the welfare of the United States.

Given his horrible public and private behavior and his gross defects in character and morals, Donald Trump's "no collusion, no obstruction" is the political equivalent of an attorney asking a defendant in court, "When did you stop beating your wife?" That the president of the United States must repeatedly deny engaging in criminal behavior is a de facto confession to virtually everything Trump has been accused of doing.

On Wednesday, in keeping with his ceremonial duties as king of the kakistocrats, Donald Trump stood at a lectern in the Rose Garden after reportedly throwing a temper tantrum during a (very brief) meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Trump proclaimed, "I don't do cover-ups" and announced that there would no trillion-dollar infrastructure bill as long as Democrats in Congress dared to investigate him.

Along with the seal of the President of the United States, Trump's lectern was festooned with a placard that read "no collusion" and "no obstruction," and included other supposedly favorable details about Robert Mueller's investigation, at least as massaged and misrepresented by Attorney General William Barr.

The net effect of Trump's press conference was akin to a scene from Mike Judge's satire "Idiocracy" but with one key difference: Judge's fictional President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is more intelligent than Donald Trump, possesses more charisma and after his own fashion actually cares about the welfare of the United States.

Given his horrible public and private behavior and his gross defects in character and morals, Donald Trump's "no collusion, no obstruction" is the political equivalent of an attorney asking a defendant in court, "When did you stop beating your wife?" That the president of the United States must repeatedly deny engaging in criminal behavior is a de facto confession to virtually everything Trump has been accused of doing.