Et tu, Pat?


It looks like Jesus has let Pat Robertson down. After promising his viewers that Jesus would ride in to save the day before the Electoral College meets, saying “this fraud will not stand and it will be exposed and that the lord himself will intervene before this country turns into something socialist”, he now says that it is all over and that Trump should concede the election. Worse, he says that Trump “lives in an alternate reality”, is “very erratic”, and that he has had his day and that it is time to “move on”. Being told by Pat Robertson of all people that you are living in an alternate reality has got to hurt.

While Robertson is finally acknowledging reality and calling for Trump to do the same, Trump is actually dialing up the insanity way beyond 11, surrounding himself with an increasingly delusional cast of characters who do not accept what even Robertson has accepted.

President Donald Trump has turned to a fringe group of advisers peddling increasingly dubious tactics to overturn the results of the election, creating a dire situation that multiple senior officials and people close to the President say has led to new levels of uncertainty at how Trump will resist the coming end to his tenure.

“No one is sure where this is heading,” one official said on Monday. “He’s still the President for another month.”

Conspiracist lawyer Sidney Powell, disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon, hawkish trade adviser Peter Navarro and the eccentric founder of the retail website Overstock have all recently found themselves in the Oval Office or on the telephone advising Trump on new last-ditch efforts to reverse his loss.

That’s in addition to Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has been feeding the President’s conspiracy theories for weeks and who, along with Powell, was seen again at the White House on Monday.

In the process, Trump has mostly shunned those working inside the government, leading to growing fears of how he may lash out in the four weeks he has remaining in the White House — or at how he may resist leaving the building come Inauguration Day.

Through it all, Trump has mostly abandoned the day-to-day running of government. At a Cabinet meeting last week, he spent much of the time complaining about his suspicions of voter fraud, according to a person familiar with the matter, leaving some attendees puzzled at the point of the gathering.

Indeed, Trump has spent his days singularly focused on the election results.

“We won this election in a landslide,” Trump claimed falsely during a Monday call to the activist Charlie Kirk, who broadcast the conversation using a microphone so attendees at a gathering of young conservatives in West Palm Beach, Florida, could all hear.

This new Downfall parody video of Hitler’s last days in his bunker looks like it pretty accurately captures the situation in the White House now. One character even says at the end that Trump “is like Hitler refusing to concede that the war is lost.”

We have to put with another another four weeks of this.

Comments

  1. billseymour says

    I haven’t read or heard any news since early this morning, so I’m considering the possibility that Trump is throwing a temper tantrum and refusing to do any presidential work of any kind.  Has he signed the COVID relief bill yet?  If not, I hope that there’s somebody in some branch of government who has the guts to sit him down and make him sign it.

  2. flex says

    Maybe they are planning a variation on Goodbye, Lenin.

    They could set up a location which looks just like the interior of the White House, at least the rooms he frequented. Hire actors to play the parts of agency heads and congresscritters. Pay Fox to create alternative news shows, showing his accomplishments for the next four years (wait, they may be doing that already).

    It would probably cost no more than a couple tens of millions a year until he died. If his estimate of his net worth is accurate, his family could afford it. And we would never have to see a presidential tantrum again (at least not until the next republican president is elected).

  3. DonDueed says

    flex: No need to finance it from the Trump treasury. Just televise it 24/7. The Trumpman Show would attract massive audiences.

  4. billseymour says

    I just heard on BBC World News America that Trump will not sign the COVID relief bill.  He claims that he thinks that the direct payments to real people are too small.

    I doubt that it’s a case of the old “stopped clock” saw. I suspect that he’s lying as usual and wants to pretend to be kind to create more Republican votes in the upcoming Georgia elections.

  5. says

    In the video, spoken German and the English subtitles are extremely different. The result is that I get weird dissonance while watching. My brain tries to simultaneously listen to German words and read the English subtitles, and the result is just some weird sense of confusion.

  6. bmiller says

    On an off-topic note, I saw that the mayor of Rio de Janeiro has just been arrested for corruption. In his pre-political days, of course, he was an EVANGELICAL MINISTER.

    It seems that a “Christian Fish” on a tradesman’s truck or a business card should be a WARNING that bad dealings are ahead. Unless one is a member of said businessman or politician’s particular sub-cult.

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