For those of us who still seek signs of American consensus over national conflict — the latter having seemingly appropriated quotidian politics, the daily news, and diurnal existence — there is hope. America is not nearly as torn as headlines might suggest, for a Great Uniter has arrived in the personage of Donald Trump.

That is to say, barring a diminishing tribe of almost touchingly loyal Trumpeteers, Americans are forming a thoughtful consensus: There is a dangerously halfwitted man in the White House. Among those who have come to appreciate and even promote this assessment are those who work closely with the White House's chief occupant. "Every day he looks more and more like a complete moron," said a senior administration official to the Daily Beast. Added another WH official: "If Donald Trump gets impeached, he will have one person to blame: Donald Trump."

Because he's a moron — and a reckless one at that.

Also covering the moron consensus is CNN, which found a recklessness-revealing source inside H.R. McMaster's National Security Council; a source whose comments sound remarkably like those of, well, an H.R. McMaster. "It can be difficult to advise the president effectively given his seemingly short attention span and propensity to be easily distracted," said the "knowledgeable' source, who added: "You can't say what not to say, because that will then be one of the first things he'll say."



Contributing — again — to our ever-growing national consensus on presidential moronity is none other than that model of right-winging extremism, Erick Erickson. As he observes this morning in the Washington Post: "The sad reality is that the greatest defense of the president available at this point is one his team could never give on the record: He is an idiot who does not know any better."

And there you have it — utter agreement, total harmony, a seamless consensus between a right-wing extremist and a democratic socialist who recently wrote: "[Trump's] quite efficacious and very believable defense in the face of impeachment and removal could be that he's a dolt, a walking incapability, a take-pity-on-me idiot of Rabelaisian proportions."

I have always admired and held philosophical allegiance to the now-antiquated reserve of the historiographical school of American consensus: that we as a nation are defined more by what we agree on than what we dispute. And nothing could be more agreeable, in both senses of the word, than that the moronically reckless Donald Trump is uniting us, as a people, in vigorous opposition.