A small epiphany today: Trump himself is the shiny object that distracts us, while his handlers...

[Hekate]

....and the GOP are busy busy busy creating things for him to sign.

And he'll sign anything. It looks presidential.

Trump is out front acting as crazy as a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide, throwing off bits of fractured light like a disco ball -- and while he is indeed dangerous in and of himself, he is ALSO the shiny object that keeps us and the media distracted from the real shit that is taking place in Congress and elsewhere as the GOP and white nationalists really disassemble our country.

They'll eventually discard him for Pence, but meanwhile he is just incredibly useful.

[scarletwoman]

1. Excellent! This cannot be emphasized enough!

[Frogg]

2. Spot-on!

I listen to the main talking points every night on msm and the real stuff that is going down is obliterated in the crazy madman ranting hysteria...I personally think he is both mentally unstable and gets off on lying to create the yuuge distraction he was elected for as the GOP strips this country bare.

[pnwmom]

3. Exactly. And that means they won't be impeaching him as long as he's useful.

But if he starts pulling them into the swamp with him, they might cut him loose.

This is why I think we're better off with Pence. He'll have the same awful policies, but he's not Svengali.

[mfcorey1]

4. This needs to go viral! Americans need to know how the repp party is using

a mentally challenged person to advance their negative agenda.

[vlyons]

5. Yes, yes, yes. Trump is a distraction, while GOP picks our pocket

The GOP is a vast criminal enterprise. They are in the process of stealing our tax dollars, dismantling and privatizing gov functions, and stealing our natural resources, while leaving the cleanup of their rape and pillage to we taxpayers. Grover Norquest said long ago that all the GOP wants is someone with enough digits to hold a pen to sign their bills.

[Kablooie]

6. Yep. This occurred to me this morning too.

I'm sure they are gearing up to tear everything out of the government while no one notices because all the news will be continuously swamped with analyzing Trumps insanity.

Did you know that in 2015 a Senate majority voted to sell off all government land except military and national parks? Obama vetoed it of course.
It won't be vetoed next time so better accept this as reality soon.

[SleeplessinSoCal]

7. Then why are the Dems mostly voting for the rancid cabinet picks?

It is very distressing and many of my friends are getting really pissed at them.

[arthritisR_US]

8. Duh..and what about those 'democrats' voting in his

nominees and high fiving his BS executive orders..I've never seen such an easier coup. I hate the repigs with every ounce of me but at least they stuck to their immoral guns

[Fritz Walter]

9. Douglas Adams called this some 35+ years ago

Recently, csziggy posted a reference to the BBC TV series "Dr. Who," quoting a line or two from that show's script that was prophetic about "Alternative Facts": http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028528315

At about the same time, Douglas Adams -- a former script-writer for Dr. Who -- was creating his own BBC Radio 4 series, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Here's what he wrote in the late 1970s:

The Major problem -- one of the major problems, for there are several -- one of the many major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: It is a well-known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: - people are a problem.

And so this is the situation we find: a succession of Galactic Presidents who so much enjoy the fun and palaver of being in power that the never notice that they're not. And somewhere in the shadows behind them - who? Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to can be allowed to?

In retrospect, I believe Barack Obama was an exception to the Douglas Adams rule, however we now have the full embodiment of what he foresaw!

[democrank]

10. Been wondering about this.

Just compare the off-script and on-script Trump. When he's babbling about things coming directly from his brain, he sounds like an immature 11 year old with no context, no focus, no purpose. When he reads from his teleprompter, he can regurgitate figures, sometimes a bit of history, even correctly state the name of a person heading an agency.

When he has one of his executive order-signing events, he just signs whatever is handed to him, then proudly holds up his his signature while stating few words like, "We're building a wall." During interviews, he answers questions in a disjointed way, latching onto one word in his response and allowing that word to point him into a totally different direction, unrelated to the subject at hand.

I don't believe (for the most part) that he's the originator of his stated ideas and policies. He's a shallow-thinking conspiracy theorist, easily influenced and led by those around him. When someone is filming Trump in a room with Steve Brannon, don't watch Trump, watch Brannon. It's quite telling. Brannon acts something like a guy who has spent his life savings collecting expensive, rare model train parts and is delighted to finally get to show off the carefully-constructed train and the village it runs through.

One of the most frightening things about Trump is that he lives in a fantasy world which is also inhabited by some dangerous people.And, he lives in that world as a man void of guiding principles and grounded beliefs.

[Judi Lynn]

11. So good to read this. Thank you.

[Lee-Lee]

12. That is it exactly

He is the puppy show- the puppet masters pulling his strings are doing so much else at the same time.

[Hekate]

13. Self kick for the day shift

[Tommy_Carcetti]

14. Except that shiny object still possesses the nuclear codes.

And has a hair trigger temper to boot.

It's different than say the folksy simpleton figurehead that was George W. Bush.

[Hekate]

16. I'm sure you noticed where I said he's dangerous in and of himself. What a clusterbomb.

[MineralMan]

15. Yup. We're so busy watching the catastrophe that is Trump

that we're not paying attention to what's happening in the background. We need to be paying attention to Congress and the exact content of those executive orders. All of the EOs and Memoranda are published on the whitehouse.gov website.

[Hekate]

17. Good morning, sez I at the DU coffee station. How about them career diplomats walking out?

Gods help us, every one.

[MineralMan]

18. I would love it if the same thing happened at all Executive Branch

departments and agencies. Trump's staff is completely clueless about who to appoint to anything, so it would send them into a complete tizzy of incompetence. They've been dragging their feet with regard to all of the appointments they need to make, because they have no idea what to do or who to choose.

It's all part of the ignorance about federal government operations everyone on Trump's staff has. They simply don't know what these organizations do, how they do it, and what their responsibilities are. Trump knows nobody, and neither does his senior staff. None have any experience in government at this scale.

If the half-dozen or so senior people at all those agencies all handed in their resignations at once, everything would come to a slow, grinding halt after about a week. Federal career bureaucrats absolutely require direction from top staff. It's the nature of those jobs. They can follow broad directives, but with no directives, they can do nothing, frankly.

It would create a bureaucratic paralysis, the like of which has never been seen before. Trump's people would be in instant crisis, with no clue about how to extract themselves from it.

[struggle4progress]

19. +

[KittyWampus]

20. It's mainly Bannon.