Ilana Novick, AlterNet

Donald Trump has nursed petty, personal grudges his entire life. Previously, their impact was limited to his businesses and anyone who had the misfortune of working with him. Now that he's president, however, he's free to indulge his vindictiveness on the world stage, with some help from his team of enablers.

Anti-Trump Republicans love to claim Donald Trump is an aberration, a fake conservative destroying their ideals of individual liberty, small government and even smaller taxes with a cavalcade of lies. Conservative senators like Lindsey Graham and John McCain grandstanded last week about the GOP's broken health care policy and the erosion of senatorial norms. But what these speeches conveniently ignore is that Republicans have been lying to their constituents for years.

In the not-so-distant past, vampires and zombies were fixtures of American pop culture, a night on the couch with "The Walking Dead" or the "Twilight" franchise. But in the age of Donald Trump, these creatures have moved from our screens to a much more terrifying home: Congress.

Donald Trump loves the 1980s. After all, that was when his celebrity rose in New York, when Trump Tower was built, when The Art of the Deal was published, and when he first learned he could get away with flagrant racism (Central Park Five, anyone?). So we shouldn't be surprised, as Paul Krugman points out in his Monday column, that Trump's latest fumbling attempt at an accomplishment in his first 100 days, a "massive" tax cut plan, includes another greatest hit of the Reagan era. Supply-side economics, aka trickle-down economics, is the lie that deep tax cuts for the rich will spur them to jump-start the economy for everyone/support the poor/make unicorns shoot out of the sky.

Most presidents have a broad team of advisors whose job it is to carefully weigh domestic and foreign policy decisions. Our current commander in chief prefers watching hours of Fox News and firing off a few missiles in Syria when his favorite anchors report plunging approval ratings. It is, as Paul Krugman writes in Monday's column, governing by publicity stunt—cheap ploys for attention and approval, with no overarching strategy.