I should describe it as he and his fanboys live in an alternative reality. It's like a multiverse that is somehow currently visible. But it will fade away and the reality will return and he and them are gone.
No matter how bad even the worst of American presidents were -- no matter how inept
James Buchanan was, no matter how corrupt
Warren Harding was, no matter how deleterious
Woodrow Wilson was, no matter how asleep at the wheel Ronald Reagan was, no matter how malaprop-prone G. W. Bush was, no matter how bland
Franklin Pierce and
Millard Fillmore were, even no matter how paranoid and secretive Richard Nixon was -- absolutely none of them deliberately and explicitly went out of their way to destroy the country. None of them had as one of their right-hand men a person who said, out loud, in public:
The third, broadly, line of work is deconstruction of the administrative state. ... If you look at these cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason and that is the deconstruction. The way the progressive left runs, is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.
This man deliberately selected the worst-qualified people to do the job. On purpose. Is this how you
"run government like it was a business"? If you were the CEO of a Fortune 10 company and purposely chose department heads who didn't know what the hell they were doing -- indeed, you bragged about it -- how long do you think you would last in the CEO chair?
If, speaking of his foreign policy directed towards the United States, any foreign dictator had said what that man said, we would be up in arms, and rightly so. Instead,
he gets cheered on and receives a standing ovation.No matter how bad I might have thought Dubya was, and no matter how inept I thought many of his domestic and foreign policies were, even at his worst I never questioned his desire to do the right thing by this country. I never was afraid that we wouldn't be able to have an election in 2004 to perhaps prevent him from having four more years in the White House. I never was afraid that the "damage" he might have done to the body politic could not be ameliorated or even reversed with the fullness of time. But this crew (along with the Republicans in Congress, who think that this is a football game and not the fate of the country that they're toying with)? It seems outlandish, it seems hyperbolic, but believe me when I say this: I have lived in actual, real-life dictatorships and actual, real-life fascist regimes (including military dictatorships), and what is happening now in this country is mimicking them to an outstanding degree.
And without trying to invoke Godwin's Law, if you doubt that we are starting to slide into actual, textbook fascism,
look at the list from the US Holocaust Museum, and see how many items are speedily being checked off by a regime that by their own public admission is "maniacally focused" on doing this.
This is madness.