Dec. 10 Open Thread: The Wheels Have Come Off, Trump’s Driving on the Rims

When Richard Nixon’s presidency fell apart, he was at least enough of an old political hack to keep up the outward appearance of a functioning administration. Chalk that up as yet another thing Donald Trump can’t do.

After weeks of publicly courting Nick Ayers, the Karl Rove of his generation, to be his new chief of staff, Trump gave John Kelly the boot — and got turned down by Ayers. An image-obsessed lunatic like Trump realizes that makes him look like a big-time loser, yet he had no Plan B to turn to, perhaps because he didn’t realize he has no producer to clean this up in the editing room.

You’ll notice that even our trolls have stopped pretending Trump didn’t do anything. Their story has shifted to “he didn’t do anything wrong,” with “they all do the same thing” next on the menu.

This leaves the ball squarely in the Senate’s court. They have pretended for two years that everything is normal, this is all just partisan politics, and it’s getting more and more obvious that this is another grand-scale exercise in self-delusion. The same thing happened to Nixon. Once Republicans saw that he was prepared to drag the party down with him, they turned on him. This batch will do the same, because even single-celled creatures practice self-preservation.

Nobody can say how this will end, but it hasn’t stopped them from speculating. Rather than round them all up, just enjoy Thom Hartmann’s what-if column on how we could wind up with President Pelosi.

As the late, great Ralph Moyed used to say, “Fish have to swim, birds have to fly, grifters have to grift.” So it is surprising to find that Trump is running an ongoing grift on his own campaign contributors? It’s true. Trump officially began running for re-election the day he was sworn in, and has solicited money for the effort. People have actually been stupid enough to donate to a guy who pretends to be a billionaire, who turned around and showed how he got his hands on what money he does have: his campaign pays the Trump organization for renting space that it doesn’t actually use. In many quarters, this is known as “fraud.”