Yesterday, the vaudevillian absurdities just kept rolling at that annual convocation of clinical zaniness, CPAC.

The apprentice-celebrity star of the show was of course Trump, who delivered the day's most laughable one-liner: that he had pulled off "the most successful first year in the history of the presidency.” In his defense I must say that that claim would be true, if it were true. Reality, however, would disagree. In fact his incredibly successful first year included zero accomplishments by Trump himself: the tax cut — the only major piece of legislation to come out of 2017 — was the exclusive creature of the Republican Congress, the seating of Neil Gorsuch on the supreme bench was the exclusive thuggery of Mitch McConnell, and the healthy economy was the near exclusive achievement of President Barack Obama.

Trump did, however, showcase his unequaled vileness by mocking war hero and dying senator John McCain. "Remember, one person walked into a room when he was supposed to [vote] this way … and he went [another] way…. Boy, oh, boy. Who was that? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to be controversial, so I won’t use his name, okay?" What a sick, vindictive, infantile jackass is Trump. The one upside is that when his time comes, we'll all be ethically free — even ethically obligated — to be just as cold-blooded.

The runner-up in yesterday's clinical zaniness was Sen. Ted Cruz, who remarked, "If you set aside the noise and the political circus" — you know, minor stuff, from providing sensitive-intel access to uncleared aides to indictments and the continuing corruption of Trump's "best people" to wrecking democratic norms and undermining American institutions — "and if you focus instead on the substance, I am deeply gratified with what this Republican president, Republican administration and Republican majority have been able to accomplish." Cruz spoke as a Reichstag member would have in 1942: "If you set aside the noise and circus of the Holocaust, the Gestapo, the millions dead, I'm deeply gratified that our Führer has made the trains run on time." (And Trump hasn't even done that.)

The winners in the category of belly-laugh paranoia and free-floating pettiness were Wayne LaPierre and second NRA banana Dana Loesch. LaPierre went full Joe McCarthy, seeing "European-style socialists bearing down upon us" from every angle, plotting a "captive society" and reordering the "fundamental concept of moral behavior," such as making it unproblematic for a deranged teenager to slaughter more than a dozen schoolmates. Who is behind this 21st-century dystopian plot? Dana Milbank kept track: George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, the FBI, the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the intelligence agencies, Democrats, the media, Hollywood, universities, Black Lives Matter, those always wicked elites and … Keith Ellison. Ms. Loesch, added Milbank, incited the audience to hiss at reporters present, charging that "many in the legacy media love mass shootings" because "crying white mothers are ratings gold." A KKK rally looks like an Oxford seminar compared to LaPierre-Loesch's bottom-feeding.

The skin crawls when one is so cruelly reminded that these are the imbeciles, jackasses and real-McCoy lunatics running the country. We have no precedent, hence history offers no guide as to the probable aftermath. The only recommendation I have to offer is that the words of the pledge of allegiance be modified in 2021, for the next generation: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all — and heaven forfend that we should ever forget the bone-chilling malignity of the Trump administration."







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