Reality is pitching a novel that no editor would buy.

First, there's this morning cable TV couple—who really are a couple, as it turns out. Then, there's this big-time New York real estate guy who's been around the celebrity long and loudly enough that they made jokes about him in the first season of Law and Order, but who had a second life as the host of a reality show in which he got to pretend to fire people. So this guy runs for president and the couple are some of the only people who take him seriously—who suck up to him, one might say, were one unkind. Through a fluke of the Electoral College, the guy gets elected.

(At this point, the editor starts wondering how fast he can shuffle Reality toward the elevators.)

The guy turns out to be pretty bad at the job and he starts behaving erratically in public. Alarmed, the TV couple begins sounding a warning that the new president may be three sandwiches short of a picnic. The president then tweets about the woman of the couple bleeding from her face at a New Year's Eve party he'd hosted in Florida. The entire political establishment howls in outrage because this is both weird enough and trivial enough to become a Thing. The president responds by leaking that the couple had begged him to squash an unflattering story about them in the nation's most famous supermarket tabloid, the one the president had cited in accusing the father of one of his rivals of being linked to the Kennedy assassination.

The editor, by now, has thrown Reality out a window. Which, pretty much, is where we're at right now in our politics. Reality has been thrown out the window.

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I stayed away from the Joe and Mika and Donald And Whoever saga because it was being ably handled all over the Intertoobz and because it was so clear that the president* had gone, in the immortal phrase of the late George V. Higgins, as soft as church music, that there wasn't really much to add. But the events of Friday morning, when the whole bit about the story in the National Enquirer bubbled forth, have pushed this thing into a different order of magnitude. The entire government now seems to be teetering between Game of Thrones and some sort of gangster reboot of The Beverly Hillbillies. The president* seems like appetite and Id run hopelessly amok.

There is an instability in all the institutions that's encouraged from the very top. And this is the context in which deadly serious decisions are being made about healthcare in this nation, and about the franchise, and about going to war some place, for some reason, over something the president* saw the night before on TV.

Nobody would buy this story. Except that we all did.

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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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