It is not unknown, of course.
In ancient Egypt, there was the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail, and nerve-addled octopuses sometimes consume their own arms, but we have never watched a president so hungrily devour his own presidency.
Soon, there will not be anything left except the sound of people snickering.
Consumed by his paranoia about the deep state, US President Donald Trump has disappeared into the fog of his own conspiracy theories. As he rages in the storm, Lear-like, howling about poisonous fake news, he is spewing poisonous fake news.
The Hirshhorn has a sold-out exhibit of Yayoi Kusama’s stunning infinity mirror rooms, but they are nothing compared with the infinity mirror room of Trump’s mind, now on display 2.5km away at the White House.
Many voters who took a chance on the real-estate mogul and reality TV star hoped he would grow more mature and centered when confronted with the august surroundings of the White House, and the immensity of the job, but instead of improving in office, Trump is regressing. The office has not changed Trump. Trump has changed the office.
He trusts his beliefs more than facts. So many secrets, so many plots, so many shards of gossip swirl in his head, there seems to be no room for reality.
His grandiosity, insularity and scamming have persuaded Trump to believe he can mold his own world.
His distrust of the deep state, elites and eggheads — an insecurity inflamed by Steve Bannon — makes it hard for him to trust his own government, or his own government’s facts.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not get a surprise shoulder squeeze from this president. He ignored the chancellor’s request to shake hands, but Merkel still looked jittery.
Many who meet with Trump — from foreign leaders to US lawmakers — look like cats on a hot stove. One Democratic senator told me he was determined not to smile in a session with the president in case Trump suddenly said something offensive or batty while the senator was politely grinning for the cameras.
Everyone is tiptoeing around the mad king in his gilded, sparse court. His lieges make fools of themselves trying to justify or interpret his transcendentally nutty tweets and willfully ignorant comments.
For two weeks, he has refused to back off his unhinged claim that his predecessor tapped his telephones during the election.
CNN’s Jeff Zeleny said Trump got furious reading a Breitbart report that regurgitated a theory by conservative radio host Mark Levin that former US president Barack Obama and his allies had staged a “silent coup.”
It is surpassingly strange that the president would not simply pick up the telephone and call his intelligence chiefs before spitting out an inflammatory accusations with no proof, just as it was bizarre that Trump shrugged off the regular intelligence briefings after he was elected.
He preferred living in his own warped world.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer offered a shaky Jenga tower of media citations to back up the president, including the contention of Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano that Obama had used GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, to spy on Trump.
In a rare public statement, GCHQ called the claim “utterly ridiculous.”
Fox News also demurred, with Shepard Smith saying it “knows of no evidence of any kind that the now president of the United States was surveilled at any time, in any way. Full stop.”
Even House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes gave up the Sisyphean effort of defending Trump’s tripe.
He said that if you took Trump’s remarks “literally” — as we expect to do with the US commander-in-chief’s words — “clearly the president was wrong.”
Asked by a German reporter about GCHQ rubbishing the wiretapping claims, Trump was dismissive.
“All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind,” Trump said. “You should be talking to Fox.”
Trump’s aversion to veracity is exacerbated by his inner circle of sycophants and conspiracists.
As far as Trump is concerned, his budget and healthcare plan are going great, when everyone else in Washington is averting their eyes.
In a Wall Street Journal article, Bannon said his anti-elitist worldview was shaped by his father’s decision during the financial crisis in 2008 to sell his AT&T stock, at a loss of more than US$100,000.
Marty Bannon, who started at AT&T as a lineman, got spooked by Jim Cramer’s advice on the Today show to take “whatever money you may need for the next five years” out of the market.
Even though one son, Steve, was a banker at Goldman Sachs and another son had an investment background, Marty Bannon did not consult them or a financial adviser until the sale was completed.
He preferred, like Trump, to get crucial information from TV pundits and eschew the experts in his own circle, who might have told him that selling during panics is not wise and that having one stock in an undiversified portfolio is not smart.
“Everything since then has come from there, all of it,” Steve Bannon, the multimillionaire architect of Trumpworld, said of the stock sale.
So, essentially, because Bannon’s father made a bad, hurried financial decision based on watching TV, we now have to slash Meals on Wheels, Big Bird, the arts, after-school programs, health insurance, immigration from Muslim nations, climate change research, diplomats and taxes for the rich.
Maybe if these elites-pretending-not-to-be-elites deigned to talk to some knowledgeable elites in government once in a while, they might emerge from the distorted, belligerent, dystopian, Darwinian, cracked-mirror world that is alarming Americans and our allies.
They might even stop ripping off the working-class people they claim to be helping.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
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