The highlight of the now daily arse-showing at the White House Thursday morning probably was the president*'s disquisition on economics in which he invited The Economist to join him in an impromptu séance after which the bloody-toothed shade of John Maynard Keynes arose from the grave and stalked Pennsylvania Avenue, howling for gin and a good lawyer. To wit:

"Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven't heard it. I mean, I just… I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It's what you have to do."

He just came up with it the other day. Jesus. Now I know why Kissinger was sliming around the Oval on Tuesday. He was probably teaching the president* the secret to talking to the portraits in the hall. Because, by all accounts in the nation's leading newspapers, the president* may be going, in the immortal phrase of the late George V. Higgins, as soft as church music. Here's The New York Times:

In the weeks that followed, he grew angrier and began talking about firing Mr. Comey. After stewing last weekend while watching Sunday talk shows at his New Jersey golf resort, Mr. Trump decided it was time. There was "something wrong with" Mr. Comey, he told aides.

And, from a massive tick-tock in The Washington Post:

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia's effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists.

And, finally, from Tiger Beat On The Potomac:

He had grown enraged by the Russia investigation, two advisers said, frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn't disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said.

Oh, that terrible moment when you look around and the nation's elite political press is fitting you for a straitjacket, and all the scapegoats have been stolen. It took the Vietnam War to destroy Lyndon Johnson. It took Watergate to make Nixon this batty. The current president* has been driven off the rails by a couple of tough episodes of Morning Joe. And there still hasn't been an actual crisis confronting him that he didn't create for himself. I am not reassured by this.

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But just because he's barking mad doesn't mean he still can't do considerable damage, especially since the Republican Party, and especially its congressional majorities, remain invertebrate. The president* has made a point of assaulting every democratic institution that (theoretically, at least) could check his power.

On Thursday, it seems, he's planning to delegitimize democracy itself. From CNN:

An action that Trump has discussed since the beginning of his administration, it will be spearheaded by Vice President Mike Pence and controversial Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach…Kobach, who helped on the Trump transition team, is a lightning rod for critics who have accused him of extreme racism and having ties to white nationalists. Kobach is almost single-handedly responsible for some of the nation's strictest immigration laws in at least a half-dozen states -- he not only writes the laws, but advocates for them and battles on their behalf in court. He is often cited as the chief architect of what Arizona's SB 1070, which was passed in 2010 and led to protests and state boycotts for encouraging the profiling of Latinos and other minorities. The Arizona law requires police to determine a person's immigration status when there is "reasonable suspicion" that they are not legally in the US; it was partially upheld by the Supreme Court, but had other sections struck down by the court in 2011.

It kills him, it absolutely rips out his liver, that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Whenever CNN goes to a commercial every night, he climbs down off the ceiling and stews endlessly about how that could happen. Of course, it couldn't have, not legimately, anyway.

And now we have a national commission dedicated to validating the president*'s megalomania, and it's being handed over to one of the franchise's primary arsonists, a guy who only this week got his thumbs screwed by a federal court. From The Kansas City Star:

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson on Wednesday upheld an earlier order from a federal magistrate judge requiring Kobach to hand over the documents to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of an ongoing voting rights lawsuit against his office. Robinson, who is based in Kansas City, Kan., was appointed by President George W. Bush. Kobach met with Trump in November and was photographed carrying a document labeled as a strategic plan for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The photograph revealed a reference to voting rolls. The ACLU has sought access to the documents, contending that if Kobach lobbied Trump on changes to federal voting law, it would be relevant to the case.

So the executive order is the culmination of an ongoing bag job that began at the same time that Camp Runamuck opened its gates in January. However, it has its basis in the fragile psyche of a very dangerous man who raves at his television set when there is no other audience available and who would howl at the wind if it disturbed his hair.

This is King Lear with a nuclear strike force.

Update (12:26 p.m.): Yeah, this is normal. From Time:

"CNN in the morning, Chris Cuomo, he's sitting there like a chained lunatic. He's like a boiler ready to explode, the level of hatred. And the entire, you know the entire CNN platform is that way. This Don Lemon who's perhaps the dumbest person in broadcasting, Don Lemon at night it's like – sometimes they'll have a guest who by mistake will say something good. And they'll start screaming, we're going to commercial. They cut him off. Remember?"

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. And over 80 percent of Republican voters in an otherwise catastrophic poll still love the guy.

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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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