The Washington Post provided the cherry on top. Apparently, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago spent the entire flight to the Winter Palace eating huge chunks of the furnishings on Air Force One. If the Post's reporting is accurate, it's a wonder that he wasn't taken off the plane trussed up like Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad. Trump's young presidency has existed in a perpetual state of chaos. The issue of Russia has distracted from what was meant to be his most triumphant moment: his address last Tuesday to a joint session of Congress. And now his latest unfounded accusation — that Barack Obama tapped Trump's phones during last fall's campaign — had been denied by the former president and doubted by both allies and fellow Republicans. When Trump ran into Christopher Ruddy on the golf course and later at dinner Saturday, he vented to his friend. "This will be investigated," Ruddy recalled Trump telling him. "It will all come out. I will be proven right." "He was pissed," said Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company. "I haven't seen him this angry."

Let us pause here for a moment to recall that the person to whom the president* vented, Christopher Ruddy, first came to national notice by peddling the theory that the Clintons had Vince Foster murdered. Ruddy wasn't just a casual observer, either. He was the source point from which this particular toxin got into the mainstream. He even accused Ken Starr of being part of "the cover-up." He was so central that 60 Minutes devoted a segment to debunking his nonsense. Apparently, there is no corner of the fever swamp in which the current president* is not welcome.

Trump, meanwhile, has been feeling besieged, believing that his presidency is being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures — not to mention the media, which he has called "the enemy of the American people." That angst over what many in the White House call the "deep state" is fomenting daily, fueled by rumors and tidbits picked up by Trump allies within the intelligence community and by unconfirmed allegations that have been made by right-wing commentators. The "deep state" is a phrase popular on the right for describing entrenched networks hostile to Trump.

Ensconsed in Camp Runamuck, the president* is a voracious consumer of angry paranoid junk food. We are all now living in Talk Radio Hell.

This latest episode began, of course, with the Twitter frenzy of early Saturday morning, when the president* accused his predecessor of having tapped—or, more accurately, "tapp-ped"—his wires in the Trump Tower. There followed a serious of mystified comments from inside and outside the White House which culminated in an appeal by FBI director James Comey—yeah, that guy again—to the Justice Department, in which Comey asked his superiors to reject the president*'s charges. On Monday, the White House trotted out Sarah Huckabee Sanders, perhaps the world's worst surrogate, to shoot back at Comey. It did not go well, via The New York Times:

A White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked early Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America" whether Mr. Trump accepted Mr. Comey's contention. "I don't think he does," she said. "I think he firmly believes that this is a story line that has been reported pretty widely by quite a few outlets," said Ms. Sanders. She went on to cite several news reports about the F.B.I.'s investigation into links between Mr. Trump's associates and Russia. George Stephanopoulos, the ABC News host interviewing Ms. Sanders, pointed out that the articles Ms. Sanders cited did not back up Mr. Trump's claims that Mr. Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped the month before the election.

Well, OK, then.

There is no telling where this ends. There are only three possibilities as to what happened. First, the president* doesn't know what in hell he's talking about and is just trying to distract us all. Second, the previous president engaged in nefarious dirty tricks on behalf of the Democratic candidate and then, shrewdly, declined to make the results available to the public or to the Democratic campaign! (That evil genius!) Or, third, the previous administration got some information that was alarming enough to convince some federal judge or judges that the situation demanded further investigation. None of these three options is comforting.

Pool Getty Images

The obvious fact is that the executive branch of the government is beginning to eat its own entrails. The president* has made open war on the intelligence community, and on the agencies over which he is ostensibly in charge. He has appointed people to run agencies that they actively despise, or that their utter incompetence is guaranteed to cripple. (Or, in the case of Betsy DeVos at Education, they can be both.) The destruction of the administrative state is well underway, and the administrative state is fighting for its life in the only way it can. This seems to afflict the president* in some visceral way, causing him to spiral even further out toward the far fringes of American thought, and it seems to frustrate him into a kind of ungovernable rage.

Meanwhile, Beggar's Day is coming for obvious anagram Reince Priebus, the comically out-of-his-depth White House chief of staff, and the attorney general has had to recuse himself from a controversy he started himself. This may be what Steve Bannon wants. It may even be what Vladimir Putin wants. (Although I'm coming around to David Remnick's sharp insight that it's really the Russians who are the dog that caught the car.) It can't be good for the country, though.

In truth, the really fascinating element of this great carnival of fools is the behavior of the Republican Party. Watching Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan whistle their way past the graveyard of American democracy on their way to constructing the deregulated, privatized oligarchical hellscape of their dreams is like watching two men building a mansion in the middle of Chernobyl. Even this weekend, the Republicans who expressed vague regrets that the president* had gone around the bend did so in such a way as to keep one foot in the crazy.

The standard Republican position is, "let's investigate everything," which is a way to keep the president*'s basic charge alive while deploring the fact that he made it. The reaction of Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who is one clever climber, was quite typical. From CNN:

Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, a frequent Trump critic, said the President should publicly release the FISA Court order that would have been needed if his phones were legally tapped by the government. And, if Trump believes his phones were illegally monitored, he "should explain what sort of wiretap it was and how he knows this," Sasse said in a statement. "We are in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of public trust, and the President's allegations today demand the thorough and dispassionate attention of serious patriots," Sasse said. "A quest for the full truth, rather than knee-jerk partisanship, must be our guide if we are going to rebuild civic trust and health."

Deep between the lines of Sasse's statement, you can discern the one unifying principle of the Republican Party in 2017. From its chaotic Executive through its occasionally baffled congressional majorities, the Republican Party has continued its eight-year project to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama. Right now, at the congressional level, it manifests itself in legislation that will undo the Obama administration's primary accomplishments. In the executive, apparently, it is going to manifest itself in attempts to sling mud at what was a scandal-free presidency.

This is what unites all Republicans, including people like Ben Sasse, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and all the rest of them who have made hay in "deploring" the actions of a lunatic presidency without doing anything substantial to stop it. This is what not even Donald Trump can make them let go.

Update (2:45 PM): Amazingly enough, Andrea Mitchell hosted Mr. Ruddy on her teevee program without mentioning that Ruddy left any credibility that he ever had under a tree in Fort Marcy Park 20 years ago.

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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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