(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

Of all the coverage of Camp Runamuck that has emerged since the pandemic began, The New York Times had a story this week that was particularly unnerving. Evidently, the president* now exists in the White House in an zone of isolation that registers as somewhere between an episode of The Twilight Zone and a performance of The Emperor Jones.



He has been up in the White House master bedroom as early as 5 a.m. watching Fox News, then CNN, with a dollop of MSNBC thrown in for rage viewing. He makes calls with the TV on in the background, his routine since he first arrived at the White House. But now there are differences. The president sees few allies no matter which channel he clicks. He is angry even with Fox, an old security blanket, for not portraying him as he would like to be seen. And he makes time to watch Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s briefings from New York, closely monitoring for a sporadic compliment or snipe...

...Aides said the president’s low point was in mid-March, when Mr. Trump, who had dismissed the virus as “one person coming in from China” and no worse than the flu, saw deaths and infections from Covid-19 rising daily. Mike Lindell, a Trump donor campaign surrogate and the chief executive of MyPillow, visited the White House later that month and said the president seemed so glum that Mr. Lindell pulled out his phone to show him a text message from a Democratic-voting friend of his who thought Mr. Trump was doing a good job. Mr. Lindell said Mr. Trump perked up after hearing the praise. “I just wanted to give him a little confidence,” Mr. Lindell said.



That’s just sad. But I remain unsympathetic. There isn’t a word in there about the people who have sickened and died on his watch.

Mr. Trump rarely attends the task force meetings that precede the briefings, and he typically does not prepare before he steps in front of the cameras. He is often seeing the final version of the day’s main talking points that aides have prepared for him for the first time although aides said he makes tweaks with a Sharpie just before he reads them live. He hastily plows through them, usually in a monotone, in order to get to the question-and-answer bullying session with reporters that he relishes.

This would be madness even in the best of times. But it is sheer lunacy to have the country led by an angry shut-in at a time of plague and economic depression. The 25th Amendment is a dead letter; can you imagine a majority of this Cabinet voting to remove him, let alone the supine Republican caucuses in the Congress? But the fact remains that it is precisely this situation for which the 25th was designed. The 25th doesn’t say anything about physical illness or mental instability. It simply refers to a president who is “unable to discharge the duties of his office.”

Mr. Trump became enraged watching the coverage of his 10-minute Oval Office address in March that was rife with inaccuracies and had little in terms of action for him to announce. He complained to aides that there were few people on television willing to defend him. The solution, aides said, came two days later, when Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden to declare a national emergency and answer questions from reporters. As he admonished journalists for asking “nasty” questions, Mr. Trump found the back-and-forth he had been missing. The virus had not been a perfect enemy — it was impervious to his browbeating — but baiting and attacking reporters energized him. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Mr. Trump told White House correspondents in answer to one question.

And thus did he invoke the 25th Amendment against himself.

This is what the 25th is for. OLIVIER DOULIERY Getty Images

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “The Coming Of The Strange Ones” (Shabaka Hutchings and the Ancestors): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans. Programming Note: because this year’s Jazz Fest was cancelled, the mighty, mighty ‘OZ is running two weeks of live sets from Jazz Fests past. And, mon dieu, it’s awesome.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s a 1946 British public health warning about staying home if you have the flu. Poor auld fella starts firing down medicines until he gets to the castor oil. He is then struck dumb and a stern-voiced narrator has to leap in and warn folks to stay in bed. History is so cool.

I, too, am made nervous by the notion of Larry Summers’s getting anywhere near national fiscal policy again. However, I am assuming that Joe Biden has other economic advisors. I am made even more nervous by the rumors that, somehow, Janet Napolitano has entered the vice-presidential mix. I mean, let’s not get the entire band back together, Joe.

On Friday, the president* once again stated his determination to stiff the U.S. Postal Service. His stated reason is that, somehow, Jeff Bezos is getting a break on packages. However, Biden was smart to intimate that wrecking the USPS is a fine way to keep vote-by-mail from happening this fall.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, CNN? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Researchers studied the endocasts of skulls belonging to hundreds of dinosaurs and extinct birds. They used CT scans of the animals' ancient skulls to create endocasts, which act like an imprint of the brain in the skull, reflecting brain sizes (since brains don't fossilize). Then, they compared the brain sizes with brain measurements of modern birds in a large data set...

Before the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, the researchers discovered that birds and large dinosaurs had brains that were very similar in size. But some birds went through what the researchers refer to as a "scaling" event after the dinosaurs went extinct. Birds were some of the first animals to recover and repopulate the empty landscape after the dinosaurs disappeared. They diversified and evolved in this setting, and some of the birds that started out larger in size experienced what's called "a scaling down." Their bodies shrank in size, but they kept the big brains of their larger ancestors.

Check out the big brain on birds! Clearly, they lived then to make us happy now.

I hope all of y’all are doing fine. Blessings on your families, too. And I send the condolences from the shebeen to Senator Professor Warren on the loss of her brother this week. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and don’t drink no bleach now, hear?

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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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