The difficulty some people have in taking the full measure of the Very Stable Genius

Just like with cabinet members and White House staff, Trump's legal team is in chaos. John Dowd, longtime inner-circle strategist, is gone.  Then there was the giddiness among his shills about Joe diGenova and Vitctoria Toensing coming on board, but that's been scuttled, due in part to the notable smell of conflict of interest, since Toensing is representing Blackwater founder Erik Prince.

The shills will find some way to spin it. They always do.

At American Greatness, they spin the tariffs as sound policy based on the primacy of some proverbial small-town blue-collar family huddled at the kitchen table with a stack of bills and a calculator. Kurt Schichter's Townhall column this morning (you can look it up if you'd like; I ain't linkin'.) lamely attempts to persuade readers that they shouldn't be dismayed by the recent omnibus bill-signing, much less consider it a deal-breaker. I say lamely, because his column is shot through with acknowledgements that Trump, in customary fashion, stayed disengaged from the crafting process until it was too late and his choices were shut down government or sign the damn thing.

It's particularly delicious to hear about (I didn't see it firsthand; been ages since I've watched one minute of Pirro's show) the dustup between Jeanine Pirro and Ann Coulter. Coulter was desperate and furious at the same time, barely able to get her head around the depth of betrayal to which her idol had stooped. The Wall has been her singular focus since she lost her mind a few years ago, and now it's as remote a possibility as it ever was. And then there was Pirro, who wanted to put, for all intents and purposes, the entire onus on Congress. They weren't "supportive" enough of Trump's "agenda," you know.

Then there's the field day Anderson Cooper has been able to have in the last few days, scoring interviews, on on CNN and one on CBS News, with the two women (that we know about) who were having concurrent affairs with the VSG in the middle of the previous decade, while the VSG's third wife was changing the diapers of the baby she'd just had.

We all know about the Lake Tahoe golf tournament where both affairs got started.

What is telling is the parallels in the women's accounts of their first visits to the actual Trump home.


He said this to Stormy Daniels:

Anderson Cooper: Melania Trump had recently given birth to-- to a son, just a few months before. Did that-- did he mention his wife or child at all in this?

Stormy Daniels: I asked. And he brushed it aside, said, "Oh yeah, yeah, you know, don't worry about that. We don't even-- we have separate rooms and stuff."

This account of someone else's visit to his apartment involves the same kind of moment:

McDougal also tearfully recalls feeling guilty when she went to Trump's apartment in Trump Tower and he showed her Melania Trump's bedroom.

McDougal thought it was odd that Trump's wife slept in a separate bedroom.

'I thought maybe they were having issues,' she said.

Trump, in these vignettes, seems to be at the shrug-off stage of a long-established pattern:

Of all Ivanka Trump’s similarities to her father, perhaps the most evident is the effect of her childhood on her current disposition. Donald Trump, who grew up in Queens and attended military school, endeavored to make his name in Manhattan and has displayed an affinity for men in uniform. Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, has long shown the scars inflicted during her parents’ divorce. “Even before the divorce, Donald did nothing for the kids,” one old friend of Ivana and Donald Trump told me recently. “When they were on vacations or on summer break, he had a habit of disappearing in the morning and not coming back until night.” Another longtime associate of the family told me that he would often lament Donald Trump’s parenting to his face. “I would say, ‘Donald, would you even know if your kids were in Europe?’ And he wouldn’t, because he didn’t [know] when they were.”

I guess, if we're really going to stretch things to the point of impossibility, we could chalk Donald Trump Jr.'s wife's filing for divorce, on small factor in which was DJT Jr.'s affair with a Celebrity Apprentice contestant, up to mere coincidence. But isn't it far more likely that he was merely growing into the kind of "man" for which his father had provided the role model?

I'm reminded of another Townhall column, this one from about early 2016, I think. It was by Doug Giles, a Florida-based writer who shares with Schlichter the felt need to pump his conservatism full of an extra dose of testosterone. His pieces are often full of references to big-game hunting, cigars, good bourbon, and theoretical situations in which he'd have to beat guys up to defend his daughters' honor. The column I'm thinking of was called, "If Trump Is So Bad, Why Are His Kids So Awesome?"

Doing any rethinking of that premise, Doug?

There's no way to minimize the impact of this mindset on the state of, and prospects for, the Republican Party. By virtue of the dualistic nature of American politics, the GOP is still the home of the only good guys on the scene - Ben Sasse, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Marco Rubio (he who is coming in for a recent lava flow of vitriol from the thugs putting the sobbing Florida high school kids up to their campaign of gun-control grandstanding). I'm trying to think of others. Some House members, maybe? Not my representative, apparently. His TV ads proudly tie him to the Trump "agenda." This is sad. The first time I ever even heard of Luke Messer, I stood beside him at a small gathering for a mayoral candidate in my city. I chatted with him a bit and found his conservative bona fides to be in order. I think he'd like to speak in terms that weren't adulterated by Trumpist populism, but here we are. Mike Pence, then Indiana governor, was also in attendance. Which brings me to another cause for dismay. Yes, I understand his job requires it, but I still cringe when Pence starts in to that Trump-as-great-man dog vomit.

To reiterate what LITD has said perhaps over a hundred times since the summer of 2015, our times are being defined by a narcissistic, shallow, bombastic, rudderless blowhard whose overriding motivation in life is to be praised. It sets the agenda for the Left that hates him, the former conservatives who have swallowed the tribalist Kool-Aid and are now faced with the irreversible erosion of their intellectual integrity, and those of us who all along saw a path by which we could have ushered in an actually fine era, where not only sound policy but character and nobility prevailed.

Look squarely at what we have imposed on ourselves. What set of conditions did we, over the course of decades, put in place to bring us to this juncture?

Holy Week, the denouement of Lenten season, is a fine time to look squarely at things. Of course, there's the cross. Remember one of the last things our Lord said, prior to "It is finished": "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."