I don’t know why, but this week seems to have been the low point of what is not yet a full year of having the Pennywise of rodeo clowns in the highest office in the land. For reasons we’ll try to enumerate in a moment, this week has brought into sharp relief the consequences of the Russia-ratfcked, utterly racialized, hock-a-loogie decision that 63 million of our dimmer fellow citizens made to hand the presidency over to Donald Trump because they’d been fed indigestible fried crud by their favorite radio and television stars for the past three decades. When I hear Jeff Flake moaning that he doesn’t want the Republican Party to become “the party of Donald Trump and Roy Moore,” I am compelled to point out that the Republican Party has been the party of Donald Trump and Roy Moore for 30 years. It’s just been waiting for Donald Trump and Roy Moore to come along. It is to laugh, and then it is to weep.

The obvious nadir came on Tuesday, when the president* stopped on the way to his helicopter to essentially argue that it is better to put an accused child molester into the Senate than it is to elect a Democrat. From The New York Times:

“We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat, Jones,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve looked at his record. It’s terrible on crime. It’s terrible on the border. It’s terrible on the military.” The president suggested that the passage of time, and the fact that Mr. Moore’s accusers did not come forward earlier, should call into question the accusations. And he noted that Mr. Moore has been elected repeatedly by voters in Alabama. “I do have to say, 40 years is a long time,” Mr. Trump said as he left for a five-day Thanksgiving vacation at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. “He’s run eight races, and this has never come up. So 40 years is a long time.”

What a sewer this man is.

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Of course, there is his ridiculous ongoing Twitter feud with Lavar Ball, a feud that scraped the bottom of the barrel on Wednesday with the president tweeting “IT WAS ME!” at the elder Ball, who is quite a piece of work in his own right. It is safe to speculate that this little exercise in petulance and rage is at least in part an attempt to deflect attention from the fact that Robert Mueller’s footsteps are ringing louder and louder in the corridors of the White House. But still, a president* of the United States calling the father of a basketball player “a poor man’s Don King”?

What a festering landfill this man is.

Then, I came across this little tidbit in The Hill, which, for me, anyway, sent this week into depths beyond which no light can pierce.

Mark Leach, who manages the Shenandoah stores for Delaware North, said NPS and park managers had no role in the wine purchase decisions. He said they simply encourage him to buy local products. The Trump winery is located about 30 miles from Shenandoah. “Primarily, we try to buy from Virginia,” he said. “They ask that we carry regional products as much as possible.” Leach said he hasn’t bought Trump wine since the summer. “We sold it throughout much of 2016 and we did a purchase of the rose back in May or June, primarily because the distributor we purchase from had some,” Leach said. NPS spokesman Jeremy Barnum stressed that it was Delaware North that decided to sell the wine, not the park.

Yes, I’m sure that the name on the label absolutely had nothing to do with the decision by Delaware North to peddle the president*’s brand at a gift shop on land that belongs to all of us. There is a virulent and very contagious strain of corruption that infected every part of the public sphere when this president* was inaugurated.

What a reeking, lifeless wasteland this man is.

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Not that it matters. The Republican Party will live with him just as it will live with the concept of Senator Roy Moore (R-Food Court) if it has to do so. The Republican Party is the corrupt vehicle of corrupt interests and has been for so long that the party and the interests are no longer distinguishable from each other. A whopping percentage of Americans are opposed to the tax plan that the Senate is about to pass. On Wednesday, Senator Lisa Murkowski, briefly an independent voice against the shredding of the Affordable Care Act, announced that she would support a tax plan that did away with the individual mandate, which effectively would shred the Affordable Care Act. She’s also very high on drilling for oil in ANWR. The only real problem that the Republicans have with the president* is that his corruption is too obvious, too garish. It scares the donor class. It makes the good crystal rattle.

The only real problem that the Republicans have with the president* is that his corruption is too obvious, too garish.

Never in my lifetime have the politics of the country seemed so removed from the people of the country. Never in my lifetime have the people of the country seemed so removed from its politics. Never in my lifetime have political decisions seemed so removed from their consequences. An election driven by fear and hate and abandoned wrath has produced dangerous chasms into which the entire system may one day fall, and nobody appears to have any idea what to do about it. Adam Serwer’s brilliant piece in The Atlantic is as good an explanation as any about what happened last November, and what may happen as a result.

It was not just Trump’s supporters who were in denial about what they were voting for, but Americans across the political spectrum, who, as had been the case with those who had backed David Duke, searched desperately for any alternative explanation—outsourcing, anti-Washington anger, economic anxiety—to the one staring them in the face. The frequent post-election media expeditions to Trump country to see whether the fever has broken, or whether Trump’s most ardent supporters have changed their minds, are a direct outgrowth of this mistake. These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.

You cannot run a democracy on that basis. You perhaps cannot even run a nation, at least not one that doesn't devolve steadily into savagery. These were not unavoidable choices. We made them in the clear light of day. What a poisoned country we have left ourselves.

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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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