DES MOINES, IA—It really is time for many of my fellow citizens to go into the concussion protocol—or, at the very least, to take the next couple of plays off. The country is undergoing a nervous breakdown, and one that it is coping with by arming itself heavily. I've lived through these kinds of manic episodes in our politics before, but never have I lived through one of them in which the president* himself is Patient Zero. El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago has unleashed every predatory impulse in the national Id, and he doesn't have either the will or the intelligence to control what he's loosed.

On Thursday, this jamoke showed up outside a migrant shelter in El Paso. He did not come there to deliver fresh clothes and baby food. From KVIA:

Police confirmed an incident occurred around 7 p.m. Wednesday in the 900 block of Stanton near the Casa Carmelita shelter. In a social media post, Casa Carmelita said the man "was sitting in his truck wearing blue latex gloves, and brandishing a knife." The shelter also said "police recovered a loaded gun, ammo, and a bag of white powder from his person."... Images posted to social media showed the man with a pickup truck emblazoned with Trump's name and a likeness of the president as 'Rambo' on it, as well as the name of Texas Senator Ted Cruz; photos also showed Central patrol officers drawing their weapons and taking him into custody.

A knife. A loaded gun. Ammunition. A bag of white powder. And he is arrested and then released because "no criminal offense had been committed." And Tamir Rice is still dead. Anyway, the jamoke here clearly was emboldened by the president*'s comments surrounding the debacle of his appearance in El Paso. What was there to do but to arm yourself and drive your Trump-festooned truck downtown to scare the daylights out of people who already are traumatized?

Meanwhile, in Ohio, shit got very, very real. From 19News:

“We got here and this is what we saw, but it was in flames, you know? It was done, there was nothing that could be saved” she told 19 News. The Frases, an interracial couple who lived there for 23 years, saw something else: A misshapen swastika on a garage and blue spray-painted racial slurs on two of the neighbor’s cars. “I got sick twice. That is what happened. It was like this didn’t just happen. I don’t understand it,” said Angela. That is what investigators are working to understand. The electricity to the home was shut off and the gas had been disconnected at the meter. On Wednesday, it was shut off at the street.

“Because of the spray paint on the garage, there were some racial slurs and a swastika that was spray painted on that. We are not gonna tolerate that kind of activity and behavior here,” Sheriff Travis Hutchison told 19 News. Clearly, if race is involved, it just adds to the pain of losing everything for the Frases. They were questioned by investigators, but stress there had never been any problems in the past. If it is found to be a hate crime, they say they will not rebuild and move on. “It just makes you wonder why, cause I don’t know what to do I don’t have. Where do we begin again?,” asked a bewildered Angela Frase, summing up the family’s situation.

Where do we begin again?

Where do we all begin again?

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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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