Wednesday is shaping up to be another day where the President of the United States goes completely intergalactic and everyone just pretends this is normal. This is all fairly standard-issue at this point: maybe the world's most powerful man rants and raves to a scrum of reporters during ChopperTalk, stalking around the group as his face glows tomato-red even as it's backlit. Or maybe he declares that, "Nobody disobeys my orders," during the White House Easter Egg Roll. Or a high-profile magazine columnist accuses the president of having raped her, he responds that "she's not my type," and the elite political media and Democrats in the Senate just shrug. Or he orders an act of war against Iran—with unexplained legal authority—and then exposes himself in his own self-aggrandizing account of how he called the whole thing off. Ah, those last two are just from the past week.

But by 8:45 a.m. this fine June Wednesday, the president had already had a doozy. He roused himself from what was surely an uneasy slumber this morning and began to tweet. It was likely uneasy because House Democrats confirmed Tuesday night that ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller will testify before the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees next month. Also Tuesday night, a federal judge ruled Democrats can collect financial evidence on Trump's businesses as part of a lawsuit alleging he is in violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause. All this elicited a Very Presidential Wakeup Tweet.

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Too bad the Dems in Congress won’t do anything at all about Border Security. They want Open Borders, which means crime. But we are getting it done, including building the Wall! More people than ever before are coming because the USA Economy is so good, the best in history. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2019

This is some low-energy demagoguery. He kind of just vomited up the phony talking points. Democrats do not favor "open borders," he has not Built the Wall, the number of people migrating is not higher than ever, and the economy is not the best in history. But by now, we're used to the relentless lying to try to make the fiction real through pure repetition. But then Our President got stuck in a record scratch:

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Democrats want Open Borders, which equals violent crime, drugs and human trafficking. They also want very high taxes, like 90%. Republicans want what’s good for America - the exact opposite! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2019

Again, with the open borders stuff. The demagoguing about immigrant crime, even though immigrants, legal or illegal, do not commit crimes at higher rates than native born citizens. Nobody has advocated a 90 percent tax, which Trump essentially admits he is making up with the "like" qualifier. And then we learn Republicans want the "exact opposite"—so, closed borders and, like, a 10 percent tax?

But that was just the prelude. In between these slightly repetitive missives, the president announced he would be interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business Network this morning. Except it wasn't really an interview. Bartiromo—a once-normal media personality who has mortgaged her soul for access to and favor within Trumpworld—attempted to ask softball questions, but President Good Brain just ranted over her every time. He wasn't here for a conversation. The world's most powerful man was on the teevee to vent.

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Trump, in full rant mode just moments into his Fox Business phone interview, won't even let @MariaBartiromo get a question in pic.twitter.com/EzyoQxUPSW — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 26, 2019

Note how our friendly Fox Business host tried to pretend the emperor has clothes here. "Oh yes," Bartiromo stuttered as Trump ranted about how the Deep State was "spying" on his campaign and "it's a horrible thing that happened." (Never mind that the FBI obtained a FISA warrant, issued by a judge through a legal process, to surveil Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, or that Trump invited foreign spies to meddle in our next election just this month.) He then gave away the game by saying the scandal he's attempting to gin up "was a reversal of sorts" from the Russia probe—that is, it's his and his allies' attempt to counterattack. Clearly, the looming Mueller testimony is weighing heavy. Then he said Lindsey Graham is "beside himself," which adds up. Then Bartiromo reminded him that Fox has always been on his side, and she was "very vocal about it." Journalism!

Then the ranting continued.

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This is not an interview -- this is a man ranting into a telephone. Try and make sense of this! pic.twitter.com/6dU2lK9oF9 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 26, 2019

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Bartiromo can't get a question in as Trump rants about how much members of Congress like him pic.twitter.com/uDt38cJUdi — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 26, 2019

Mr. President...what? We will just pretend this is normal. "If we don't have the opening of China..." our president said, repeatedly, before he laid out his take on tariffs. China is paying them, you see, not American firms who pass the cost onto consumers who buy the Chinese goods that have tariffs on them. "I view tariffs differently than a lot of other people," Trump says. That's true: people who actually know what tariffs are disagree with his take, which is wrong.



Then Trump trashed the Fed chair he himself appointed, because Jerome Powell is not yielding to his political pressure in terms of how he runs the bank.

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Trump absolutely trashes Fed Chair Jerome Powell.



"Here's a guy -- nobody ever heard of him before. And now, I made him, and he wants to show how tough he is, okay. Let him show how tough he is. He's a-- he's a-- he's not doing a good job." pic.twitter.com/SGmFI8WxNb — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 26, 2019

Yes, the Fed chair just wants to look tough. That's all anyone is doing in our president's world: being tough, looking tough, doing tough stuff to tough people—or weak people. Whoever you need to be tough to in order to get what you want, right now. Who's gonna be tougher: our big, strong president, or the chairman of our central bank?

After semi-announcing maybe-introducing tariffs on Vietnam, and maybe-filing a lawsuit against Google and Facebook, it was time for a rant about how our president is oppressed by Twitter.

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Trump's rant about how Twitter allegedly censors him is completely nonsensical pic.twitter.com/2vTXOgv6ym — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 26, 2019

Look at how Bartiromo faux-credulously assesses the president's claim that Twitter makes it hard for people to follow him or "get out the message." If he became a liberal Democrat, the president asserted, he would pick up "five times" as many followers on Twitter. So he'd have 307 million followers? Maybe so. After all, as the president reminds us, "I'm much hotter now than I was a number of months ago."

And then it was back to Mueller:

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Trump is yelling into the phone about how Mueller "terminated the emails ... he terminated them. They're gone. And that's illegal. That's a crime."



Bartiromo pretends to know what he's talking about and tries to ask a question. Trump just keeps ranting over her. pic.twitter.com/yBK676eGmn — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 26, 2019

"Robert Mueller terminated the emails," says the president. "He terminated their text messages together. He terminated them. They're gone. And that's illegal. He—that's a crime."

It is incredible to watch an adult human who is on television for a living listen to this Fox News Grandpa ranting into the telephone and just nod along, asking "where" his deranged accusations are "in the courts." They are not in the courts. He is making it up. The words do not even make sense. This all resides in his Very Good Brain, which is rapidly deteriorating due, at least in part, to a debilitating level of cable-news consumption.

This is one side of the sprawling infrastructure of Imperial Clothiers. These folks speak to the president through the teevee and tell him he's doing a great job, and all his problems are the fault of The Fake News Media or The Deep State or The Open-Borders Democrats, and that all the Real Americans support him. Then he calls up the teevee people and rants to them about what a great job he's doing, and how this person or that person is causing all his problems, and how great it is to have the support of Real America.

And the rest of our national media watches this grotesque feedback loop of deranged propagandistic bullshit with polite silence, waiting to ask their questions about whether the president might still bomb Iran, or whatever. Because there's nothing worse than admitting this isn't just Not Normal—we're witnessing the rapid decay, and possible collapse, of American constitutional government. And we're watching it on the goddamn Fox Business Network.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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