Opinion

We have all become so hypnotized, desensitized, bored, angered, and abused by President Donald Trump that at this point, it's far more productive to point to what Trump won't do, won't say, than all he will.

On Thursday evening, Trump meant to bring the country to a standstill with a presidential address, something normally reserved for Space Shuttle explosions, 9-11, or the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. In a country at war with Iran, at war with inflation, warring against wages and underemployment, and mostly at war with itself, Trump talked about the only issue that moves him: how the world perceives him day to day.

I watched the horror show that was Donald Trump’s address to his base Thursday night, the one not covered by ABC and NBC on their traditional over-the-air networks (the ones fewer and fewer people watch, anyway).

It was a predictably appalling display because it showed the depths to which the president will sink to rig the midterms and save his base of absolute power. Six years after the 2020 General Election, he still pretends he got screwed out of his rightful victory despite every court in the land finding his claim lacked even the thinnest degree of merit.

It was one of those stories that causes barely a ripple of interest anymore, one that we’ve become so inured to that it passes almost unnoticed but that would trigger a massive investigation/impeachment hearing were this any other administration.

Here was the New York Times headline on Tuesday: “Trump Paid $2 Million by South Korean Company Facing Trade Investigation.”

During my Capitol Hill days eons ago, I made friends with a handful of Secret Service agents. It was during my crazy Dewey Beach summers on the Delaware shore.

Once in a while, depending on how many beers I had, and they had, I'd ask them questions about the job, what it was like, and who they liked and disliked. They rarely budged on disclosing any details.

We are, right now, dealing with a war overseas with Iran that has done so much damage to our country’s reputation, military, and economy that the ramifications, serious as they are now, will likely only get worse in the years ahead.

At home, gas prices are climbing. Food prices and mortgage rates are rising. Wildfires are burning across the West. Tornadoes have torn through states like Illinois and Indiana, already shattering annual records. Flooding has once again devastated communities in Texas, Kentucky, and other parts of the Midwest.

Tonight at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.”

For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger.

Some of the less imaginative in the media refer to the "Blue Tea Party" to label the zeitgeist that is taking hold of the nation as young Democratic Socialists are making noise, winning elections, and being "nice" about it.

Please. This wonderful development, long in the making, is hardly a retread of the Koch-financed, centrally planned, tri-corner hat, muzzleloader-carrying red coats of the 2010s. The Tea Party was little more than a corporate response primarily to the Black president, moderate as he was, who wanted to moderately raise taxes on the rich.

Todd Blanche walked into the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning carrying the worst résumé any attorney general nominee has had in modern memory. Bar none — and bar is not a pun because Blanche could be disbarred.

How far down we have sunk.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later, we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

You cannot be a prominent spokesperson for Donald Trump and not live in a liminal space of existential hypocrisy, and so perhaps one shouldn't be all that hard on White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, who had a less-than-fantastic holiday and summer-opening; it is, after all, her job to defend this administration and all it does.

But, of course, have no doubt that despite all appearances, Leavitt is an adult and will be held accountable for her words, especially when, through her own breathtaking hypocrisy, she so deftly hands the Left the exact messaging it needs to build momentum toward November.

The frustrating thing about telling the truth is knowing that you’re right, but that it ultimately may not make any difference to the people who need to hear it the most.

Welcome to my job amid the last 11 years of Trump's blight on all of our political norms — most significantly in the way he’s abused the members of the media.