It's the $208,000 for hats that makes the whole thing high art.

On a day in which He, Trump fired his campaign manager, and then fired some other dude for making fun on the electric Twitter machine of the campaign manager he'd fired, the worst news of all came out of his regular report to the Federal Election Commission report.

It has been noted all over the Intertoobz that the $1.2 million the campaign has for cash-on-hand is a.) less than that on hand for the Ben Carson campaign, which has been as dormant as its candidate for quite some time, b.) less than one would need to run a decent congressional campaign, and c.) less than he would need to buy a decent-sized house in Vancouver, h/t to Bruce Arthur for that last one. (Nicholas Confessore of The New York Times tweeted out the point that the Trump campaign has less COH than does the campaign of Dean Skelos, the former majority leader of the New York state senate, and Skelos is headed for the hoosegow for a spell.)

But the devil is in the details, and a very funny devil it is. The campaign spent $208,000 on its signature Make America Great hats, which may well go down as the Trump campaign's only lasting contribution to the political history of the Republic. Laugh, clown, laugh.

(Also, note to people covering this campaign. He, Trump is not the first guy to benefit from the phenomenon of voters who believe he is above corruption because he's rich. Up in the Commonwealth—God save it!—people voted for generation after generation of wealthy WASPs for that very reason.)

The obvious solution is for the Republican Party to throw He, Trump overboard and nominate somebody else, even if the somebody else is Tailgunner Ted Cruz. Nobody in the party likes him, but at least he'd get whipped in a more conventional campaign and, in the aftermath, the party could make the argument that it still had some measure of self-control and some semblance of self-discipline. But, thus far, the Never Trump effort hasn't shown any more evidence of corporeal form than the Trump campaign has. It's hard to see these people getting this together a little more than a month before a convention that already is looking like a Category-5 shitstorm.

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(However, Apple CEO Tim Cook is planning to host a fundraiser for non-candidate Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, so some folks are thinking ahead.)

Given these numbers, and given that very high probability that He, Trump is probably bullshitting completely about his plans to "self-fund" the general election, the Not Funny part of the news is the fact that, if Trump can't or won't fund a proper campaign, somebody totally outside the bounds of political accountability will step up and do it. Personally, I'd rather He, Trump spending himself into the poorhouse than have a candidate who owes his very survival to someone like angry renegade hobbit Sheldon Adelson. And, of course, the other Not Funny part is that our politics are not supposed to be vulnerable to this kind of abject farce.

Public respect for political institutions, and the people's confidence in their own ability to govern themselves, both are running dangerously low. Part of this is the failure of political institutions to conduct themselves in a manner worthy of respect, but the other part is the complete abandonment of the obligations to self-government by a huge portion of the citizenry. These phenomena made up the fundamental energy beneath the Trump campaign in the first place.

Imagine what will happen if it turns out the entire Trump campaign was an exercise in cheap graft right from jump. On second thought, don't imagine that. This is the part of the whole thing that really is Not Funny at all.

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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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