But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 38.

We have had our moments with presidents in my time. We never knew how sick Jack Kennedy really was, or how close to the edge LBJ came, or how drunk Richard Nixon was, or how deep into the fog Ronald Reagan really had descended, especially in his second term. We didn't find out about most of this until long after the presidents in question had finished their stints in government housing.

But I swear to god, the depiction of Camp Runamuck in this Washington Post story reads like something out of the ancient chronicles about a mad king and the court that pretends to believe his delusions because it's the only way to hold the realm together.

The mystery tax cut is only the latest instance of the federal government scrambling to reverse-engineer policies to meet Trump’s sudden public promises — or to search for evidence buttressing his conspiracy theories and falsehoods. The Pentagon leaped into action to both hold a military parade and launch a “Space Force” on the president’s whims. The Commerce Department moved to create a plan for auto tariffs after Trump angrily threatened to impose them. And just this week, Vice President Pence, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House all rushed to try to back up Trump’s unsupported claim that “unknown Middle Easterners” were part of a migrant caravan in Central America — only to have the president admit late Tuesday that there was no proof at all.

Though Trump’s claim was not about suspected terrorists specifically, he and his administration seemed to imply — again with no evidence — that his hypothetical “Middle Easterners” may have intentions to commit terrorism. Pence sought to back up his boss’s claim, saying Tuesday morning in a Washington Post Live interview that it is “inconceivable that there are not people of Middle Eastern descent in a crowd of more than 7,000 people advancing toward our border.” But just hours later, Trump admitted to reporters during an Oval Office event that he has no evidence to support the claim about the caravan. “There’s no proof of anything,” Trump said, “but there could very well be.”

It's bad enough that White House chief of staff John Kelly seems to be roaming the West Wing these days, starting random hooleys with whoever happens to be at hand . But what the Post describes is something close to King Canute and the tide, or the moment in Woody Allen's Bananas when the revolutionaries win the war and declare that everyone in San Marcos must change their underwear every day and wear it outside their clothes, so the government can check. "Reverse-engineering" policies. Holy Clinton Rossiter, does this make sense to anybody?

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Couple this on the crazy train with the revelations in Bob Woodward's book that people sneak documents off the president*'s desk so he won't misunderstand them and invade Finland, or change the American unit of currency to bear claws. How do people stand this? I know everybody always says that working in the White House is like working in a closed biosphere of wonkitude. But at least the biosphere is generally secured to planet Earth. Now, the president* blurts something out onto the electric Twitter machine, or babbles some word-like sounds into a microphone, and some poor sap has to concoct a policy to match up with whatever soap-bubble notion has floated around the presidential gray matter that day.

A 10-percent tax cut while the Congress is in recess? Why not? Draw up a plan. Have it delivered by unicorn. The system is not just blinking red, to borrow Richard Clarke's famous formulation. It's blinking red and the sirens are blaring, and all the radios are tuned to the Emergency Broadcast System. As Melville astutely noted, a madman can beget more madmen. But at least, in the book, the white whale was real.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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