It was Lyndon Johnson, who knew of that which he spoke, who once said, “Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but stand there and take it.” The current president* is the jackass. But we repeat ourselves. The hailstorm is coming from judges and courtrooms from Washington to New York and back again. The latest burst of hail comes from a federal appeals court in Washington. From the Washington Post:

The request followed closely on the heels of Friday’s conviction of longtime Trump friend Roger Stone. Testimony and evidence at his trial appeared to cast doubt on written replies from Trump to Mueller about the president’s knowledge about attempts by his 2016 campaign to learn more about the release of hacked Democratic emails by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. “Did the president lie? Was the president not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation,” General Counsel Douglas N. Letter said. “The House is trying to determine whether the current president should remain in office. This is unbelievably serious and it’s happening right now, very fast.”

If the president* lied to Mueller’s people, that’s the entire ballgame. Couple that with the obvious campaign of extortion surrounding the Ukraine enterprise, and the campaign of deception deployed to cover it up, and you’ve squared the circle. The president*’s people are caught, and therefore, he is. The president* will have nothing to offer anybody even if he wanted to do so, which I don’t think he does. Everybody will be running for the ratlines and, frankly, I don’t think the president* has the speed to catch up.

And that’s not even to get into the possibility that he—or nature itself—may be crafting a medical bailout for him even as we speak. (Reports are that he received the Fed chair in the residence today, and not in the Oval Office. Edith Wilson, white courtesy phone, please.) The rivets are all popping and the gears are springing loose. And now there’s a whistleblower from the IRS charging that a political appointee at Treasury may have monkey-wrenched an audit of either the president* or of Vice President Mike Pence. The hailstorm’s getting stronger, and the jackasses are running out of room.

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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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