Remember all those rallies out in The Heartland, where economic anxiety drove all those back-row folks to show up and cheer about locking her up and throwing them out and how a greasy Manhattan real estate tycoon, he alone, could fix all of it? Those were really something, weren't they? Remember the promises he made? The big, beautiful Wall with the Big, Beautiful Door? Remember about what was going to happen on The First Day he took office?

He was going to tear up the deal with Iran.

He was going to begin to repeal and replace Obamacare.

This has not been a good day for those things that the president*promised to do on his first day in office.

And, naturally, none of this is his fault. His people are leaking like sieves that he really, really wanted to not re-certify the Iran deal, but then, as The New York Times has it, there was…something.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly condemned the deal brokered by President Barack Obama as a dangerous capitulation to Iran, but six months into his presidency he has not abandoned it. The decision on Monday was the second time his administration certified Iran's compliance, and aides said a frustrated Mr. Trump had told his security team that he would not keep doing so indefinitely. Administration officials announced the certification on Monday evening while emphasizing that they intended to toughen enforcement of the deal, apply new sanctions on Iran for its support of terrorism and other destabilizing activities, and negotiate with European partners to craft a broader strategy to increase pressure on Tehran. Aides said Mr. Trump had insisted on such actions before agreeing to the consensus recommendation of his national security team.

Personally, I don't think he could tell you the names of his entire "national security team." ("Ah, Mad Dog and the other guys.") Personally, I think he probably threw an incoherent, uninformed shit-fit and then signed whatever they put in front of him. But I'm a front-row kid, so what do I know?

But it was the demise of Mitch McConnell's last-ditch attempt at passing his big tax-cut bill, the one that stalled because of its idiotic healthcare provisions, that set the president* into a paroxysm of hilarious rationalizations.

"You had 52 people, you had 4 no's… Now, we might have had another one, someone in there. But the vote would have been if you look at it, 48-4. That's a pretty impressive vote by any standard. Yet you have a vote of 48-4 or something like that and you need more. That's pretty tough."

Majority rule is now apparently rigged.

This, of course, was leavened by some blame-dodging worthy of Patches O'Houlihan.

"We're not going to own it, I'm not going to own it," Trump said. "I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We'll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us and they are going to say 'how do we fix it, how do we fix it' or 'how do we come up with a new plan?"

The unified Republican control of the federal government is now going to dedicate itself to pure vandalism, a course that will do untold injury to an untold number of Americans, because it is being led in the executive by an incompetent buffoon. Remember that day he was sworn in, when he said this:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

That means you have to execute faithfully all those laws passed under the Constitution, which the Affordable Care Act was. The Republican majorities in the Congress have worked diligently for seven years to demolish it, both in Washington and outside of it. They have managed on every occasion to step on their own dicks with remarkable enthusiasm.

(The last grand jete happened on Tuesday, when senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Shelley Moore Capito, Republicans all, announced that they would vote against proceeding to debate on McConnell's last-ditch repeal-and-fck-you proposal. Maybe keeping all the Senate's women out of the top-secret planning sessions wasn't the best idea.)

I think he probably threw an incoherent, uninformed shit-fit and then signed whatever they put in front of him.

That's what the Republicans "own" now—a campaign of destruction for its own sake. The president* has pretty much thrown up his hands on everybody else.

This makes for some interesting intramural knife-fighting as well. In his regular press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, teed up the Senate as the place where his brilliant plans all come to naught. From Business Insider:

"We've done this in the House — we passed our simultaneous repeal-and-replace bill," Ryan said. "We think that's the solution, we think that's the best way to go, and so we're just gonna have to wait and hope that our friends in the Senate can figure out how they can get a bill passed, get it into conference, or whatever, and get something passed."

This, of course, is the same guy who pulled his first healthcare bill because he couldn't get a majority even out of his extremist conference. Then Ryan made it even more destructive, and his lunatic conference passed that. It died in the Senate because no senator gets re-elected from a carefully gerrymandered district, and no senator has a political death wish that the senator would like to take out for a walk any time soon. Paul Ryan's legislative and policy genius remains one of the more stubborn of Beltway myths. Anyway, Ryan's washing his hands of this nonsense, too. They're all going to put on masks and gloves and do their dirty work and leave as few fingerprints as possible.

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How long can this burlesque of government go on? The president* knows nothing and cares less. The congressional majorities are now monomaniacal and the living definition of the danger of "faction" that Mr. Madison warned us about in Federalist 10. (My pal Michael Goldfarb, watching the action from afar, has a terrific podcast on precisely this point.) Everyone is pretending that the president* continues to be credible as a national leader because they're too afraid not to point out that he's one rubber nose short of being a rodeo clown. The country is rudderless, lurching from one self-inflicted crisis to another, and it has become plain that handing the entire governing apparatus over to the Republican party as it is presently constituted is an open invitation to a complete governmental collapse.

(It's not just Washington, either. In Wisconsin, where Republicans enjoy a similar monopoly on political power, those jamokes can't even pass a budget, although I'm a little partial to this solution as described by a radio station in LaCrosse. At the very least, it would mellow folks out.)

Goldfarb points us to a significant passage that Mr. Madison wrote about what can happen to republics who allow factions to proliferate.

It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations. By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

But, of course, Madison was a Virginia planter's son and he went to Princeton.

Front-row kid.

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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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