Todd Gitlin, Moyers & Company

I’m the last guy to turn my eyes away from the sub-Shakespearian maneuvers that may (or may not) be shuffling personnel behind closed doors in the White House. I confess myself tempted by the pastime so widespread in kingdoms and autocracies — rumor-mongering, or at a higher level, the conspiracy theorizing that enables us to pretend that the opaque has, momentarily, become transparent. In recent days, I couldn’t for one moment tear myself away from the recent on-screen dramas starring former FBI director James Comey and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. (It was a particular pleasure to hear Sens. Ron Wyden, Kamala Harris and on one occasion, even Marco Rubio, intimate that they know more than they’re letting on about what the Attorney General was unwilling to say.) I confess that from time to time I devour transcripts of the pratfall performances of Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and (bring her back!) Kellyanne Conway. I search through transcripts looking for revealing moments of semantic evasion, subject-changing, non-denial denials and non-responsive responses.

Modesty is not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of either Alan Dershowitz or Donald Trump. Still, it’s remarkable that they should resort to the identical words to express their respective self-infatuations.

The Trumps’ nine-day journey outside the United States was “incredible, historic…because it truly was an extraordinary week.” It was “unprecedented.” “We’ve never seen before at this point in a presidency such sweeping reassurance of American interest,” said press secretary Sean Spicer.

For getting a sense of what Americans think, decent polls, for all their deficiencies, are better than wild guesses. So consider the findings of a major poll that last month looked into the question of whom to believe, Trump or the major media. It ain’t pretty.

The home page of Breitbart.com, the quasi-official voice of Steve Bannon’s White House, is a virtual stew of menace, a pit of monsters, an unending onslaught of apocalyptic horsemen rearing up at full gallop, coming straight at you, drawing closer…. But what the Breitbart reader is not being warned against is poisoned water, eviction, a melting glacier, a rising sea, a pauper’s grave, a burning cross, a bank swindle or a loss of medical care. Those are the kind of fears that afflict liberal wimps brainwashed by “the enemy of the people.”