The Trump White House has entered its final stage: complete meltdown
The last days of the Trump presidency increasingly resemble the fictional presidency in the movie Monsters vs Aliens. In case you missed this 2009 animated masterpiece, President Hathaway (voiced by Stephen Colbert) responds to an alien invasion with a team of unlikely heroes, among them a giant-sized TV reporter from Modesto, a cockroach-turned-mad-scientist, and an enormous blob of Jell-O.
One of the running gags is that the president has installed two red buttons in his situation room. One is to make his morning latte, the other to launch all his nuclear weapons. He can never remember which is which.
In the final month of Donald Trump’s time in the Oval Office, he has at last assembled his own team of outsized odds and ends, self-aggrandizing wingnuts, and brainless lumps of gelatin. You can decide for yourself if this latest incarnation of his “elite strike force” of advisers is more likely to launch all the nuclear weapons or make a fresh cup of coffee.
At the center of the team to save Planet Trump are the unhinged characters of Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, who reportedly met with the soon-to-be-ex-president in the White House over several hours on Friday.
Both Powell and Flynn have previously been fired by the reality TV star turned president – who, after all, built a public persona around firing people on The Apprentice. But on Planet Trump, firings are not as final as they appear to be, which surely means it’s not too late for the Mooch to extend his 10-day record of service to the nation.
Powell was ejected from the elite strike force of lawyers just one month ago for her outlandish claims that Joe Biden won the presidential election with mysterious “communist money” and the support of the long-deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.
But that was so November. Now, as the New York Times first reported, Powell’s outlandish claims are the basis for Trump’s desire to name her as special counsel to investigate the Venezuelan plot.
Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, told reporters on Monday that he saw no need to name a special counsel
to investigate either the election or Biden’s son Hunter.
But it is only a matter of time before Powell disinters the Chavismo corpse once more. Specifically, a couple of days: Barr leaves his office on Wednesday, mysteriously a few weeks before everyone else in the Trump administration.
Friday’s surreal bull session included Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, who has the distinct honor of having been fired by both Obama and Trump – a rare point of agreement between the yin and yang of the American presidency. Flynn lied to Mike Pence and the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, pleading guilty to the felony as part of the Mueller investigation.
Newly pardoned by the man who fired him, Flynn is now reportedly advocating for Trump to invoke martial law to rerun the election. This would normally be key to executing a Chavista coup, but is obviously now the victim of a Chavista coup.
One of the ringleaders of this madcap gang is Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock, who left the online retailer last year claiming that he had romanced a Russian agent on behalf of “the Men in Black”. Good luck making sense of that, or Byrne’s latest venture: what he calls “a team of hackers and cybersleuths and other people with odd skills”. For Trump’s favorite news channel, OAN, this constitutes an “elite cybersecurity team”.
It’s quite possible that “elite” means something else on Planet Trump. It’s also possible there are giant-sized TV reporters in Modesto.
Byrne, who tweeted that he was part of the long White House session with Flynn and Powell, says that Trump is being lied to by his own advisers and that his buddy can still win the election he so clearly lost.
“It is 100% winnable. No martial law required,” he tweeted. “Sydney [sic] and Flynn presented a course that I estimate has 50%-75% chance of victory. His staff just try to convince him to do nothing but accept it. As a CEO, my heart broke to see what he is going through. He is betrayed from within.”
It must have been heartbreaking to sit in the bunker, watching reason and the constitution push their way into the conversation, while our brave reality TV star battled against his own disloyal lackeys.
Sadly the sickness is not confined to the Oval Office and will outlive its current occupant. Back on Earth, there is no chance of Trump successfully ordering the military to intervene in the election, and no chance of Congress overturning the electoral college. But these pesky facts won’t stop the Trumpista movement that is now the Republican party.
Take Clay Higgins, the duly elected representative for Louisiana’s third district. Higgins is a reserve law enforcement officer with a strained relationship to reality, having made his name videoing outlandish Crime Stoppers messages that his own sheriff told him to stop.
“If Biden is inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States on January 20th, it will mark the final hour of conspiracy to dismantle the American election process, and the first hour of conspiracy to dismantle America,” Higgins tweeted on Sunday.
Normal presidents treat their final weeks in office like a presidential marshmallow test. While they may want, desperately, to opine about everything the president-elect is doing, they delay their gratification for their memoirs.
They may be hoping for a postpresidential mission or at least some post-presidential reassessment of their place in history. But they maintain a dignified silence to buy themselves a little dignity after leaving office.
That’s clearly not the Trump plan. There are no post-presidential missions, or historical reassessments. There are only more outrageous threats and tweets to cap a brief political career overflowing with outrageous threats and tweets.
This is the self-defeating, nonsensical house that Trump built.
“What idiot designed this?” President Hathaway asks his advisers about the twin red buttons in Monsters vs Aliens.
“You did, sir,” says a general.
“OK. Then go fire someone,” the president shoots back.
Soon, there will be nobody left to fire. Or rehire. There will just be a Donald Trump, surrounded by a room full of wackadoodle theories with no staff to pretend to take them seriously.
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist
This is the selfdefeating, nonsensical house that Trump built