See? This is where we are now. You try to get a few hours sleep and then you wake up to the fact that the President* of the United States—or someone tweeting in his name—publicly has left himself open to charges of tampering with a federal witness and flirted in the classic p*ssy-grabbing sense with obstruction of justice. Here's the idiocy du jour.

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Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems, of historic proportion! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2017

The venality of this administration should shock nobody at this point; venality has been the business plan of the president* ever since he stiffed his first subcontractor. But it's the sheer mudbrained incompetence of this crew that is a continual surprise, at least to me.

When Richard Nixon was tampering with witnesses and obstructing justice by arranging for the hush money to be paid to his personal crew of burglars —"What I mean is, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten…I mean, it's not easy, but it could be done." —he did so speaking in low tones to John Dean and his words were recorded on a covert taping system about which nobody was ever supposed to know. This guy does everything but hold a freaking telethon for Michael Flynn, former RT political analyst, who is now panhandling the Justice Department for immunity. He does everything but hire a brass band and throw a parade. Does he really not care what happens? Caution to the wind! Watch this drive!

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The problem, of course, is that while the president* and his misfit band of Triple-A pirates are at work doing whatever it is they do in a working day, the country is sliding toward a serious political convulsion. The nomination of Neil Gorsuch to be an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court is still probably going to happen, although the convulsing nation is going to make the process bloodier than even I anticipated it would be. (Gorsuch is doing himself no favors by being something of a dick. Apparently, he declined to meet privately with either Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois or Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada, both of whom are Democrats, women, and people of color. This is not a good look.)

The Senate Intelligence Committee is indirectly at war with its counterpart in the House of Representatives, the chairman of which has been allegedly functioning as a White House double-naughty spy instead of a lawmaker. The FBI is still scrounging around for answers. And the president*'s approval numbers have taken on all the sunny promise of a plague ship. In response, the president* gives his daughter a job in the White House, tweets out an appeal to a guy he fired to keep a lid on what that guy knows, and signs an "executive order" naming the 10 top trade cheats in the world. What precisely does this "executive order" order? Does he mean that, as an executive, he has numbered the trade cheats in order, one through 10? And this all happened before noon on Friday.

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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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