President Trump as a “Brain-eating Disease.”

In the other room I hear Trump bloviating about what a wonderful job he’s done about making us a “great, beautiful, crime free country” again.   I have fantasies of parting his hair with a meat cleaver.

His bluster is mostly B. S. at best or misleading or untethered to reality and just plain lies.  What is soul sapping is he seems to pay even less adherence to the truth as time goes by, so much so that the press can’t quite combat it.   He keeps belching forth more mind pollution than our reportorial devices can dissipate.

The Washington Post will need to hire more fact checkers just to handle this one short speech.   And many citizens won’t believe them anyway.  That’s the problem with our traditional belief that truth will prevail in the market place.  Many think the custodians of political truth are so corrupt that they’ll take whatever cockeyed version Trump can come up with as more real.

Another problem is it’s usually so much easier to just make up something than to disprove it these days.  Trump creates new realities with a whim, which take numerous bull dozers of reality checkers to knock down.

And then Trump counters with a simple “fake news” accusation and the score is about even.

Like when Trump claimed three million illegal residents voted.  It takes just one sentence to claim, but it takes a lot of work to actually disprove it.  Think of the work Obama had to do in proving he was born in Hawaii.   How absurd was that?  Trump never produced a shred of evidence, just a crap heap of innuendo was all it took to gain a large following.  I imagine Trump was so surprised that it worked so well he began seeing a path for himself to the presidency.   He saw how easy many of us could be had.

His brag fest this morning shows he has come to the point where reality is whatever suits him.   He assumes that if he repeats it often enough, and bolsters it with more fabrications here and there, his truthiness will win out.

I don’t think that’s entirely impossible.   It’s actually been working pretty well.  Think of the high consumer confidence ratings these days.  I believe much of it is the belief that Trump the businessman will make our lives better.   I believe much of that will be proven false, but that might take months and I wonder how many of his fans will believe the evidence.

I got my title  “brain-eating disease” from Thomas Friedman in an article suggesting we all need to focus on something other than Trump more often.    A columnist and prolific writer of thought-provoking books assessing present trends and the future (a mind set in stark contrast with Trump’s), he describes the president placing commentators  “into a terrible choice: either ignore it all and risk normalizing Trump’s excesses or write about him constantly and risk not having the time to learn and report about the big trends now reshaping the world”.

There is so much happening all over the world that we become increasingly ignorant of because of our 24/7 focus on Trump.

Friedman takes a healthy breather by focusing on impressive technological developments in India, but I fear my case of the Trumps is worse than his.  I feel that the disease has taken hold sufficiently that I’m now an addict beginning to wonder whether they have begun chapters of Trumpaholics Anonymous yet.

I can not think about much else until I come to believe that Trump’s fall is imminent.  Despite the sense the Mueller investigation is slowly tightening a noose, I continue to see Trump in control of the game.  Until I see him in a real pickle, I’ll keep trying to figure out what’s happening with him and how much the brain-eating disease is spreading or being contained.

That’s all this addict can do.

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Those of you who actually can see your way clear to look at that vast complicated world outside of Trump’s Gothic City-like Underland might want to check out Friedman’s article on the impressive tech developments in India  here.  It’s a shock to me as I lived in India for 10 months in 1966/67 and thought India, so slow moving, poor and tied to its past, would never change much.