We now return you to our regularly scheduled insanity.

What shall we deal with first? That the president* is alleged to have once hit on the wife of a Hall of Fame hockey player? Or, perhaps, the current episode where a co-star from his reality TV show gets canned from a White House job and then sets off a major security alert by attempting to, as they say, “storm the residence,” which is a great phrase that it is a pleasure to type. This little escapade was so batshit bananas that even the ever-too-classy Robin Roberts felt prompted to reach back to her ballplayer days and throw some serious shade.

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Start your morning with Robin Roberts hitting Omarosa with the bye Felicia pic.twitter.com/Ut7HEekip6 — philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) December 14, 2017

Of course, down in the more serious depths of Bedlam, we have this lovely little nugget from The Washington Post, wherein we discover that the White House intelligence briefings are now being tailored so as not to warp the president*’s fragile little mind.

Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House. The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government.

I feel better now.



Trump has never convened a Cabinet-level meeting on Russian interference or what to do about it, administration officials said. Although the issue has been discussed at lower levels at the National Security Council, one former high-ranking Trump administration official said there is an unspoken understanding within the NSC that to raise the matter is to acknowledge its validity, which the president would see as an affront.

First of all, it is the job of the NSC to present the president* with actionable intelligence whether that unsettles the president*’s guilt response or not. The people at the NSC who operate on this “unspoken understanding” should get out of intelligence work immediately. That said, this is what my old friend, the late George Reedy, wrote about in his seminal The Twilight of the Presidency when he described “the air of unreality” that surrounds even the most well-intentioned and competent presidents. It is, of course, multiplied by an order of magnitude because it is happening with a president* that is psychologically unstable.

But, as for the president* himself, this situation, as the kidz say, is not normal, and it’s dangerous, especially considering the fact that the Republican Party in Congress is now dead set on delegitimizing Robert Mueller’s independent investigation of that very scandal. The Russians attacked this country and it is the object of one of our two major political parties to prove that it didn’t happen, and the appropriate intelligence operatives are too timid even to bring it up to an emotionally fragile president*.



But, the hell with that. Let’s talk about The Wall—the big, beautiful Wall with the big, beautiful Door. It turns out that, starting in 2007, the federal government long has been stealing people’s land in order to fence up our southern border. The folks at The Texas Tribune partnered up with the ProPublica posse and went out riding the range, seeing what those varmints were up to.

Homeland Security circumvented laws designed to help landowners receive fair compensation. The agency did not conduct formal appraisals of targeted parcels. Instead, it issued low-ball offers based on substandard estimates of property values.

Larger, wealthier property owners who could afford lawyers negotiated deals that, on average, tripled the opening bids from Homeland Security. Smaller and poorer landholders took whatever the government offered — or wrung out small increases in settlements. The government conceded publicly that landowners without lawyers might wind up shortchanged, but did little to protect their interests.

The Justice Department bungled hundreds of condemnation cases. The agency took property without knowing the identity of the actual owners. It condemned land without researching facts as basic as property lines. Landholders spent tens of thousands of dollars to defend themselves from the government’s mistakes.

The government had to redo settlements with landowners after it realized it had failed to account for the valuable water rights associated with the properties, an oversight that added months to the compensation process.

On occasion, Homeland Security paid people for property they did not actually own. The agency did not attempt to recover the misdirected taxpayer funds, instead paying for land a second time once it determined the correct owners. Nearly a decade later, scores of landowners remain tangled in lawsuits. The government has already taken their land and built the border fence. But it has not resolved claims for its value.

And, as always, the kind of justice you got here depended solely on the kind of legal help you could afford.

Retired teacher Juan Cavazos was offered $21,500 for a two-acre slice of his land. He settled for that, figuring he couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer. Rollins M. Koppel, a local attorney and banker, did not make the same mistake. A high-priced Texas law firm negotiated his offer from $233,000 to almost $5 million — the highest settlement in the Rio Grande Valley. “We got screwed,” said Cavazos, 74.

So, no, I’m not sanguine at all about what this administration* may do in order to build its big, beautiful Wall with the big, beautiful Door. Talk about storming someone’s residence.

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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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