Trump has done to the presidency what the Nobel committee did to the Peace Prize in 2009

They drew back the curtain to reveal the cheapness of the thing. Turned it into a cheap joke.

In fact, they may have drawn back the curtain on the entirety of creation. What kind of world awards Donald J Trump the most prestigious position for mankind on the planet? Sometimes I can hardly believe it still. That office won't be prestigious after he leaves. Reagan and George W took it down several notches, but Trump is taking it out of the running altogether.  When you're too much of a clod for even George W Bush to have anything to do with you, you know you're at the bottom of the heap.

Donald Trump won the White House campaigning against established expertise. He doesn’t like to read beyond a page or so. His brain trust is more “Fox & Friends” than American Enterprise Institute, his influences more Bannon than Buckley. Even so, a clutch of pro-Trump intellectuals has emerged to issue manifestos, launch journals and publish books, attempting to impose a rational framework onto this most impetuous and incurious chief executive. They want to believe that the president embodies worthy objectives beyond his own personal benefit and political survival — that there really is something noble called Trumpism, not just someone crass named Trump.

  WaPo

Then I beg to differ with calling them intellectuals.

In their recent books, Trumpist thinkers spend less time offering specific, persuasive defenses of the president’s tenure than relentlessly attacking his opponents — liberals, establishment Republicans, Never Trumpers and any nonbelievers whose perfidy has rendered Trump not just necessary but inevitable.

That Washington Post article is essentially a review of several pro-Trump books. Suffice to say that not all authors are intellectuals.

Turn now to the New Yorker.

Interrupting a previously scheduled “Briefing on Drug Trafficking on the Southern Border,” President Trump called reporters into the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon and personally announced the grounding of every Boeing 737 Max in America. The move surprised White House advisers, two of whom told the Washington Post that Trump had earlier agreed to allow the Federal Aviation Administration, which has the legal authority to ground the planes, to make the announcement. Why was the United States acting so long after other countries had ordered the planes out of the sky, following a deadly crash in Ethiopia? Is this really how America’s air-safety decisions are supposed to be made? Nobody seemed to know. But one thing was apparent: Trump—a self-styled aviation expert, who cites his ownership of a Boeing 757 and his brief time running the Trump Shuttle airline, which went bust, in 1992, as the basis of his expertise—had once again inserted himself where he loves to be, right in the middle of a big story.

[...]

On the merits, no one seemed to disagree with the move. And yet the announcement in the Oval Office, followed by a lengthy rant about there being “no collusion” with Russia and about the border wall that the President says he is building, even though he isn’t, seemed so Trumpy.

“You have to look at everything through the prism of his narcissism,” [attorney and husband of Trump aide Kellyanne, George] Conway told me. “This is all about him exercising his authority and power to be at the center of attention, and, for whatever reason, he’s decided he’s going to get the most juice out of exercising this decree on this day in this way. That’s the way he makes himself important and special; there’s an arbitrariness to it.” Isn’t that pretty much the definition of a “banana republic”? I asked.

“Yes,” Conway responded. “It would make it a banana republic.” But he went on to offer an important caveat to the remarks he made at Georgetown. “If it were not for the inherent checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution,” Conway said, “we would have a banana republic. But that also makes him an inherently weak President, because the office requires you to have the power to persuade. Ultimately, you become a powerful President only if you are able to persuade others to go along with you. His narcissism means he has to retreat to the people who worship him. He cannot reach out and persuade, like every other President tries to do. His narcissism causes him to be a weak President, and the checks and balances mean he is a weak President. And that’s why we don’t have a banana republic.”

  The New Yorker

We're almost there. Trump resembles no one so much as those third world banana republic dictators, demanding attention and worship.

Conway spent much of Wednesday evening on Twitter complaining about the long stream of untruths that had come from the President in recent days, from the ridiculously pointless (refusing to admit his flub of the Apple C.E.O.’s name) to the acutely relevant (“NO COLLUSION!”). “Have we ever seen this degree of brazen, pathological mendacity in American public life?” Conway asked his Twitter followers. News outlets, including Fox News and The Hill, wrote stories about Conway’s Twitter storm, which included a call for a “serious inquiry” into the President’s mental health.

[...]

Up on Capitol Hill this week, however, two key votes demonstrated Conway’s point about the weakness of Donald Trump and the incredible shrinking Presidency his massive ego might well be bringing about. Although he acts like an all-powerful strongman, Trump could very well make himself the first President in decades to leave the office with less power than it had when he entered.

Well, that would be a good thing. Not necessarily worth the price we're all paying for it, but good, nonetheless.

On Wednesday, even as the Boeing 737s were being ordered to land, the Republican-controlled Senate was voting to rebuke Trump on a major foreign-policy issue, invoking the rarely used War Powers Act to demand that the Administration halt its military support for Saudi Arabia’s ongoing war in Yemen, with seven Republicans having joined Democrats in supporting the move.

Which may explain the timing of Trump's announcement grounding the planes.

Also on Wednesday afternoon, Trump seemed to go out of his way to sabotage his chances for a deal on a second major vote, a measure rejecting his emergency declaration about the southern border. Last month, Congress refused to go along with his demands for billions of dollars in border-wall funding, and Trump issued the declaration as a way to get his money anyway. But even many reliable Republican congressional allies of the President found his argument impossible to justify, given the explicit power the Constitution grants Congress to make spending decisions.

[...]

[T]he votes showed that Trump is not yet a tyrant, an autocrat, or a king. The courts may eventually overrule Trump on the constitutionality of his declaration. In fact, it’s quite likely that they will. In the meantime, the midterm elections gave Democrats control of the House and the ability to force Republicans to publicly oppose the President on measures—such as those presented this week on the President’s powers to make war and spend government funds—that a Republican-majority Senate would have never even brought to the floor. If the Constitution’s system of checks and balances requires a President who is, above all else, a persuader, then Trump is failing.

[...]

The Senate now has at least Twelve Angry Republicans, as our tweeting President might call them. That they were prodded to take a stand against Trump at all was a political disaster of the President’s own making. Republicans, including the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, who eventually went along with the President’s emergency declaration, privately begged Trump not to go through with it. It was an ego play, a Trumpian gesture from the start. This is exactly the point George Conway made when he texted me about the emergency vote, on Thursday. Trump’s declaration was just like everything else about his Presidency, Conway wrote: “No strategy, no logic, just fleeting, narcissistic whim.”

Still, extremely dangerous.