If you want to know what the trump card is in the Trump deck, it is CRISIS! And, of course, he is playing that card now. But it is worse than a tactic. It is acid thrown in the face of the republic. It is one more way he is making normal democratic governance not only impossible, but increasingly hard to remember.

To understand how far Trump has moved the goalposts, imagine if he had said in his inaugural address that he was considering adopting national emergency powers to deal with a fabrication. Actually, it has gotten all too easy to imagine, because we are only two years into this national fiasco of a presidency and here he is on the precipice of doing it, after having already shut down part of the government. And this is regarded now as just more Trump presidensicalism. Well, more of this is the same as more poison. And poison is determined by the size of the dose. We are getting quite a dose. Talk about a national overdose epidemic.

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Near-continuous hysteria is like a colicky baby who won’t stop screaming. It prevents normal functioning of the household and makes everybody increasingly crazy. For Trump, this is the point. Instability on every side gives him room to maneuver and distracts everyone else from what it is he is doing.

The only real crisis we are facing right now is Trump, and he is the last person to handle it.

Put in your earplugs. It’s up to us.