In honor of All Hallows Eve I’d like to point out that a Republican senator has called the downward spiral of the Trump administration a horror movie. He isn’t wrong. No less an expert than Stephen King has pronounced the Trump horror show scarier than anything he’s ever written.
Instead of “The Shining,” we are living through “The Tarnishing.” You can close the book on a King story, and Halloween comes just once a year, but President “It” shows no sign of fading from view. He’s like the scary creature from SNL — The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.
The testimony by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman about the Ukrainian quid pro quo may have put another nail in the Trump administration’s coffin, but what interested me was a too little remarked sin.
We are all too familiar with the president’s displays of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, and wrath. But even worse may be his incredible sloth. I doubt if historians keep records to determine the laziest presidents, but if they did Trump would surely hold all the records.
He doesn’t have carefully thought out policies, he has whims and prejudices. He doesn’t give speeches, he rants, ad libs, and wings it. He doesn’t read to acquire information, he calls cronies on the phone or simply makes up whatever facts he needs.
He is obviously too lazy to do the hard, tedious, work of governing, the horse-trading, the give and take, the coalition building. So he just hauls off and causes crises. He declares victory and removes troops, allowing enemies to gain and allies to lose. He claims a wall has been built where none exists. He claims trade deals will be easy or tariffs will work, then changes the subject rather than deal with the complicated nuts and bolts. Too much trouble to learn anything.
Most presidents work from dawn to dusk, then slog through briefing books all evening. Over time they age visibly. Trump lolls around the residence till noon, watches TV and golfs in the afternoon, and tweets in the rest of the hours of the day and night. He doesn’t seem to be getting older, but fatter, suggesting his downtime is spent with buckets of KFC.
He doesn’t debate or elucidate complicated issues; he repeats the same formulas, catch phrases and slanders — Make America Grate, Lock Her Up, Loser, Fake News, No Collusion, No Obstruction, No Quid Pro Quo, It’s a Disgrace.
Trump has fired everyone who might tell him to read or study or rethink an issue in order to avoid self-defeating behavior. So, now he’s surrounded by toadies as lazy as he is, encouraging his bad behavior. Several of them seem to be implicated in his self-serving crimes. We’re talking about you, Rudy.
Even here, his modus operandi is slothful. Some criminals actually exert some effort — art forgers, counterfeiters, safe crackers, embezzlers. Even muggers work up a sweat. Trump is too lazy to steal his own elections. He gets foreign adversaries to do it for him, in the same way he uses undocumented, illegal alien groundskeepers to prune his golf resorts.
When the president is plotting impeachable offenses, he’s also too lazy to bother to cover them up. Laws are broken in plain sight. He releases an edited transcript (which he may have been too lazy to read) of an incriminating call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, then claims it is complete and that he’s been exonerated.
But it says right on the document it is not a complete transcript, and a dozen people were listening in at the time. Some tried to prevent his crooked deal from being struck, Vindman objected to the transcript being altered or the original being hidden on a secret server.
It’s possible Trump’s laziness is a contagious disease. His followers, on display at his rallies, are especially torpid. They come to hear him repeat his golden oldies, as if he was a geriatric Beach Boy or Monkee, to clap on cue, to hate his fake enemies, to cheer for his fake successes, and to wear the same hats with the same slogan.
Equally lazy is a party that once boasted individuals with a variety of ideas. It is now made up of cloned, lackadaisical yes-men who repeat whatever absurdity the Sloth-in-Chief spews into the twitter-sphere. They are aided and abetted by a lazy state media apparatus that treats every syllable of their idol as gospel and indulges in knee-jerk attacks on anyone who expresses a divergent view. Frailty, thy name is FOX. It’s a lazy way to make a living. Trump good, Everyone else bad.
A new low came when Laura Ingraham, echoed by John Yoo, decided decorated military veteran Lt. Col. Vindman blew the whistle on Trump’s quid pro quo because he was a foreign-tongue-speaking, Ukrainian espionage agent working against America.
How much effort would it have taken to discover Vindman had been born in Ukraine, then a Russian-speaking, Soviet Socialist Republic, to Jewish parents. The family fled the Soviet Union for freedom in 1979 when he was three, a decade before the Soviet collapse.
Ingraham and Yoo, the Riefenstahl and Goebbels of FOX, might have understood his fluency in the languages of his family didn’t make him a spy but an immigrant, and that knowing Russian would have proved useful in his dealings with the Ukrainian government as a national security professional, one trying to protect the adopted country for which he spilled his blood?
Separating truth from propaganda is obviously too much effort for FOX News apparatchiks whose sole function is to repeat the smears of the president and parrot the party line. In this case the party in question may be as much Putin’s as Trump’s. Lazy, lazy, lazy.
It may be a living, but it is also a sin, one once thought deadly. The question now is who will pay for such transgressions — an amoral administration? Or the democracy they are sinning against?