No really, how bad does it have to get?

No really, how bad does it have to get?

By Tom H. Hastings

James Comey was fired by Trump, of course, because he was looking into Trump’s role in conspiring with Putin to fix the 2016 election. What?! Prove it!

OK, how about Trump saying after on NBC that this was his reason for firing Comey? He said he was “thinking about this Russia thing” when he decided to fire him. If Barack Obama had done anything similar while president, he would have been impeached by the Republican Senate.

Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, lied under oath to the United States Senate about meeting with Russian officials while working on the Trump campaign, and yet was not impeached, relieved of duty, fired, or even censured. If Bill Clinton had lied under oath, even about something as completely personal and unrelated to national security as having as affair with an intern—oh—that’s right, he was impeached by the House (though it failed in the Senate) for exactly that.

But seriously, how can we ever believe Trump? He said he’d never fire VA Secretary David Shulkin: “We’ll never have to use those words on our David,” Trump said at the time, using his thumb and index finger to pantomime firing a gun. “We will never use those words on you, that’s for sure.” Uh-huh. That was summer. By late winter, Shulkin was axed. In-between, Shulkin did nothing wrong except fail to promote a for-profit corporate takeover of the Veterans Administration.

What we see is a terrible joke, and the US is now the laughingstock of planet Earth. John Bolton? Worst national security adviser choice ever, says Jimmy Carter and most of the rest of the world.

At least Team Trump is the most rotated in-out merry band of transients in US history, with the average shelf life somewhere near mayfly duration. The Reverend Jamie Johnson, Trump’s erstwhile Director of Community Outreach at Homeland Security was notorious for his racist assessment that “America’s black community” had “turned America’s major cities into slums because of laziness, drug use, and sexual promiscuity.” Nice, Trump. At least he resigned in November from the White House Whack-a-Mole gameshow. The churn is record-breaking.

How on Earth does the Cocksure Commander-in-Chief manage to mangle the truth at every turn? Easy! He just says what he wants to be true and god-forbid-someone factchecks. His huckster salesman schtick never goes away.

“You take Pulse nightclub,” he said Feb. 28. “If you had one person in that room that could carry a gun and knew how to use it, it wouldn’t have happened, or certainly to the extent that it did.” Um…there was an armed guard there, an off-duty cop, who exchanged gunfire with murderer Omar Mateen. Trump blurts his fake facts without even blushing.

So whether you like James Comey or not (full disclosure: I do not, after he threw the election to Trump by his last minute announcement as the most limelight-seeking FBI Director possible that he was investigating Hillary Clinton for criminal conduct, right before the election in 2016), it should be obvious that we are indeed suffering under an unfit-for-duty pathologically lying narcissist in the White House, a flim-flam man who brings along the bottom-of-the-barrel staffers, many of whom leave under a cloud or even indictment—and he can feel his time is coming.

Can we wake up soon? Please?