How Much Shit Will We Eat? 

Before you ask yourself, “Why is the president feeding us so much bullshit?” ask, “How much bullshit am I willing to eat?”

Let me do my very best to restate in a fair and accurate way the official White House explanation as to why the FBI director was just abruptly fired: “I, Donald Trump, decided to fire James Comey because of things he did that helped me win the presidential election.” Am I missing anything there? This is the explanation that is, presumably, to be delivered by administration functionaries with a straight face in the coming weeks? “I fired him not because he is investigating me, but because of a thing he did that I praised at the time he did it, and which benefited me greatly. I also have a long track record of basing my opinion of people solely on how much they benefit me. You are not expected to notice or comment on this discrepancy.”

When the world notices and comments on the discrepancy, the President of the United States starts tossing out wholly unrelated insults at political opponents.

There is political disagreement, and then there is someone treating you like a shit-eating dumbass. Trump has treated the American people, broadly speaking, as shit-eating dumbasses, but his base of support there may not last; more specifically, he is treating Congress as shit-eating dumbasses, and even more specifically, he is treating Republicans in Congress as shit-eating dumbasses. He is acting in ways that are so obviously corrupt that they cannot be hidden, and then giving obviously false explanations for his behavior, on the assumption that the Republicans in Congress will back him up on anything as long as they can get some tax cuts out of it, and therefore he has no need to moderate his behavior. I hate the fact that I have been reduced to appealing to the morality and conscience of Republican congressmen, of all people, but: Come on. All of you are standing on stage in front of the entire world, shoveling shit into your mouths, putting down the spoon, and saying, “Yum, I love this sugar! Sure doesn’t taste like shit to me!”

Do all of the Trump administration’s enablers imagine that they will make it out of this with their reputations intact? They won’t.