Dear Leader Don

It’s exhausting to try keeping up with all the lies, insults and breaches of common decency coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., or wherever Air Force One takes the man currently inhabiting the most powerful office on Earth. But the job is made even harder by a White House staff that’s infected, snout to tail, by Trumpism and all that it implies.

As The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, shortly before President Trump’s Memorial Day weekend trip to Japan, the White House sent word that the USS John S. McCain warship, named after the late senator’s father and grandfather (both admirals), was to be “out of sight.”

God forbid the draft-dodging chief petty officer be forced out of his safe space and confronted with reminders of an American military hero who stood for honor and principle

above partisanship and self-aggrandizement.

So, tarps covered up the ship’s name; a barge was moved to block Trump’s line of sight; “McCain” servicemen and women were sent on leave, lest their commander-inchief catch sight of caps showing upon which ship they served.

Trump didn’t ask for it himself, but he may as well have; staffers molded in his miserable image did just what they had every reason to think he wanted. Thursday, he said that while he personally “would never do anything like that,” whoever did was “well-meaning.”

Right: They meant well by scratching the Dear Leader’s itch for vindictive payback against a dead national hero, by shielding a fragile ego from the mere name of a man far better than he.

Forget the ship. How low have we sunk?