Poor Rex Tillerson. The secretary of state’s week began with President Trump boasting that he could beat him in an IQ test—intending to prove, one assumes, that the president is not a “fucking moron” after all, and ended with Sen. Bob Corker suggesting that the press was attempting to castrate old Tillie. Between these assaults on his mind and body, Tillerson was left to ponder, along with the rest of us, how to cope with an increasingly unhinged head of state. Consider: Just last week, the commander in chief not only gleefully eviscerated the Affordable Care Act, he also did his best to sink the Iran nuclear deal, a pact that even such disparate characters as Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin have signed on to.
But just because we are hurtling toward the abyss, is there not time for the merest soupçon of levity? Who could suppress a chuckle at the report that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has a special flag flown from his office building when he is at work, and that this banner is taken down when he goes home to have supper or walk the dog? (A staffer purportedly rides the elevator to the seventh floor and then climbs up the stairs to the roof to let this freak flag fly.) And what about Trump’s sober statement that he met with the president of the Virgin Islands? Hey, big boy! Guess who is the president of the Virgin Islands? Got a mirror? And then there was the laugh riot that ensued when running dog Mike Pence skedaddled out of an Indianapolis Colts game. The president, confirming that he pulls the strings animating this marionette, tweeted, “I asked @VP Pence to leave stadium if any players kneeled, disrespecting our country . . . . ”
Apparently, it isn’t just “Liddle” Bob Corker—as the president called him in a daffy Tuesday tweet—who thinks that Trump is rapidly going off the deep end. In order to quell the rumors that tensions at the White House have reached a fever pitch, Chief of Staff John Kelly was trotted out by Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the briefing on Thursday. “Hey, don’t look at me, fellas!” he seemed to be saying when he explained to the assembled reporters, “I was not brought to this job to control anything but the flow of information to our president.”
But all of the above pales in comparison with the truly vital issue of our time. Speaking Friday at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., the president thundered, “We’re getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don’t talk about anymore. They don’t use the word Christmas because it’s not politically correct. You go to department stores and they’ll say ‘Happy New Year’ . . . . Well, guess what? We’re saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.” You know what, Mr. President of the Virgin Islands? You go right ahead and scream “Merry Christmas” from the Gucci department of Bergdorf Goodman so loudly it will rattle the Vetements racks at Saks in Brookfield Place—that’ll show Little Rocket Man who the boss is.
Even Trump’s pal Steve Bannon said, according to a report released last week, that he thinks Trump has only a 30 percent chance of finishing out his term. Bannon also warned the pres to look out for the 25th Amendment, which allows the Cabinet to replace a president in case of incapacitation, which I guess in this case would mean they’ve decided that he’s nuts.
Does the big guy himself have an inkling that the sycophants around him are capable of plotting his demise? Last Wednesday, Vanity Fair reported that Trump vented to his former security chief, Keith Schiller, “I hate everyone in the White House! There are a few exceptions, but I hate them!”
So do we, Mr. President. So do we.