Since the elevation of the president* last January, The New York Times has done some extraordinary work illustrating quite clearly the mess the country voted itself into almost a year ago now.

(The Voice of the People: Only a year ago? Holy Jesus H. Christ on the Come line at Caesar’s, what have we done?)

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However, this is definitely not part of that remarkable work.

Blame it on these bitter political times.

No, I don’t think I will. I will blame it on the unhinged maniac in the Oval Office.

Likewise, the nasty back-and-forth with Frederica S. Wilson, a Democratic congresswoman who is close to the soldier’s family, might have dissipated had she not repeatedly disparaged Mr. Trump’s intentions on national television, failing to extend him the benefit of the doubt that previous presidents had received.

What Congresswoman Wilson did was repeat, apparently verbatim, what the president* said to the widow of a fallen U.S. soldier. As we have come to expect, the president* sank to the occasion quite abysmally. At which point, the president* felt the bats stirring in his belfry again and went on a Twitter rampage, and then sent out his chief of staff to do a clumsy James Mattoon Scott imitation in the president*’s defense.

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This, of course, was a graphic illustration, as though we needed another, that the Republic is in the hands of madmen. You have to really strain those Both Sides muscles to hang this fiasco on Wilson.

In this acid political climate, “argument turns too easily into animosity,” former President George W. Bush observed on Thursday, in a speech that seemed tailor-made for the week in which he delivered it. “Disagreement escalates into dehumanization.”

From Karl Rove’s former employer. To hell with him, too.

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It all started on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump, prodded by questions about the deaths of four American soldiers in Niger, called Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. La David T. Johnson, to offer condolences. His words — that her husband “knew what he signed up for” — seemed crass, unfeeling and disrespectful to the family and were quickly revealed by Ms. Wilson, who had heard them on speakerphone.

“Seemed” is one of the magic words in journalism weaselspeak. The president* has shown on multiple occasions that he has all the empathy of a tackhammer. He is crass, unfeeling, and disrespectful. Hell, it’s what got him elected.

But apologies are not part of Mr. Trump’s vocabulary, foreclosing any possibility that he would acknowledge that he might have unintentionally offended Ms. Johnson. In an interview with Fox Business Network on Friday, Mr. Trump insisted that he had been “so nice,” and said he was “very surprised to see this, to be honest with you.” Ms. Wilson’s decision to go public with her criticism of the president, even as Ms. Johnson was at her husband’s coffin to receive his body, was a reflection of the unbridled anger and frustration among many Democrats, black Americans and others as Mr. Trump tries to dismantle Barack Obama’s legacy.

Yeah, maybe it was partly that. But, mostly, it was the congresswoman’s outrage that the death of a young man she’d mentored was being fobbed off by a president* who was otherwise more concerned if anyone noticed he’d kicked his ball back onto the fairway. And that “unbridled anger”? That’s because the president* is a white supremacist who, among the other blessings he’s brought upon the country, appointed another white supremacist to be the attorney general. Can’t understand where this frustration might be coming from.

Previous calls for Mr. Trump to apologize — after mocking a disabled reporter, disparaging the looks of a female rival, or falsely claiming that Mr. Obama had wiretapped him — have been ignored or followed up instead by a doubling down on the original comments.

And Ms. Wilson, a flamboyant, cowboy-hat-wearing Democrat, is just the kind of critic that can push Mr. Trump’s buttons.

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I give up. I’m just going to assume that the editors at the Times who OK'd this nonsense were sockless drunk celebrating Babbling Day and let it go at that.

Update: So classy.



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