Are We Feeling Any Better About It?

If so, Matt Taibbi is here to slap us on the back of the head.

Sure, we've had some unstable characters enter the White House.

[...]

But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of the familiar alternating power structure, surrounded by predictable, relatively sober confederates who managed the day-to-day. Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead. He takes office at a time when the chief executive is vastly more powerful than ever before, with nearly unlimited authority to investigate, surveil, torture and assassinate foreigners and even U.S. citizens – powers that didn't seem to trouble people much when they were granted to Barack Obama.

  Rolling Stone

And yet, we have no recourse at this point but to accept it. So, while we're digging in and regrouping, we're going to need some levity. May I offer that none of the other possibilities - perhaps with the exception of Ben Carson (and we will probably get him in the cabinet) - would have been as amazingly dumbfounding to watch.

Also, perhaps as a friend of mine and I discussed yesterday, Trump can actually make good on his promise to bring manufacturing back to America and put people to work: build that wall. It will take a lot of steel to get across the entire southern border of the US. Steel manufacturing can come back to America.  And building that wall will provide years of work for laborers. Perhaps they can come up with a design that would rival the Great Wall of China for beauty and wonder. It can have fabulous gateways at each major road into Mexico.  (Don't let the builders see the plans, or at least tell them there'll be locks and guards.)  A wall to keep out "undesirables" is a ridiculous bullshit idea, but as an art project that rekindles the American economy, it just might work.  

Shunned during election season by many in his own party, President-elect Trump's closest advisers are a collection of crackpots and dilettantes who will make Bush's cabinet look like the Nobel committee.

OK, to be fair, the Nobel committee has become a joke all its own. We probably need another comparison.

And, while these clowns will bring untold instability and leave ruin in their wake, they will be just as awesome (awe-ful) as Trump for viewing.  Have you ever watched a fire totally engulf a building?  If so, you know what I'm talking about.  If not, how many times did you watch the videos of the planes hitting the Twin Towers?

The head of his EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, is a noted climate-change denier. Pyramid enthusiast and stabbing expert Ben Carson is already being mentioned as a possible Health and Human Services chief. Rudy Giuliani, probably too unhinged by now for even a People's Court reboot, might be attorney general. God only knows who might end up being Supreme Court nominees; we can only hope they turn out to be lawyers, or at least people who played lawyers onscreen.

There you go, Matt. That's the spirit.

Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, I felt sure Trump was en route to ruining, perhaps forever, the Republican Party as a force in modern American life.

Matt shouldn't feel too badly. I read lots of pundit speculation that the Republican party was history because of Trump.

Now the Republicans are more dominant than ever, and it is the Democratic Party that is shattered and faces an uncertain future.

And they deserve it.

Indeed they do. Neoliberalism has been killing the world.

America's cultural elite, trained for so long to think in terms of artificial distinctions like Republicans and Democrats instead of more natural divisions like haves and have-nots, refused until it was too late to grasp the meaning of the [approaching] rage-storm.

Most of us smarty-pants analysts never thought Trump could win because we saw his run as a half-baked white-supremacist movement fueled by last-gasp, racist frustrations of America's shrinking silent majority. Sure, Trump had enough jackbooted nut jobs and conspiracist stragglers under his wing to ruin the Republican Party. But surely there was no way he could topple America's reigning multicultural consensus. How could he? After all, the country had already twice voted in an African-American Democrat to the White House.

And THAT is what's so strange to me. Given what we just saw, how did Obama get a second term? Was it just that no Republican establishment candidate spoke their language any better than the Democrat establishment? There's something there that does not compute. Could it be that it was the woman candidate that brought the venom raging to the surface? Black Lives Matter?

It's too late for any of us [journalists] to fix this colossal misread and lapse in professional caution. Now all we can do is wait to see how much this failure of vision will cost the public we supposedly serve. Just like the politicians, our job was to listen, and we talked instead. Now America will do its own talking for a while.

No. Trumpism will do the talking. America has a tiger by the tail. And journalists are going to get very little access, if any.

Pundits were speculating that Trump TV was the goal of the Trump campaign so that when he inevitably lost to Clinton, he would be positioned to outFox Fox. He didn't lose to Hillary, and Trump TV is still coming.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.