From the Mind of Steve Bannon? No, Mel Brooks

By JOHN YOUNG

“My, how presidential.” nnFor all those, including the reputedly lucid, who said Donald Trump “turned a new page” with a “presidential” State of the Union, the next page he turned was a bucket of brine right in the kisser.

You know now that as he left the House chamber his face turned south from what he’d just said, like a months-old infant getting that first taste of grapefruit.

Yecchh. Statesmanship tastes like death.

To cleanse his pallet: Almost as soon as the new, presidential-like Trump reached his porcelain throne for a Twitter break, he accused his predecessor of the crime of wiretapping him.

Later, he would accuse President Obama of springing dozens of terrorists on the planet from Gitmo releases, though almost all of the releases in question came under George W. Bush’s watch.

The “new, more presidential” Trump did these thing based on the kind of information children used to glean from the back of a box of Wheat Chex — which is pretty much how he’s been briefing himself throughout.

All of this brings into question the role of Steve Bannon. He’s supposedly a smart guy. But nothing Trump has done as president emits anything that could be called smart.

Bannon’s out as Trump’s brain. Mel Brooks is in.

Trump clearly is doing what the movie-maker envisioned in The Producers, in which two corrupt individuals try to make a quick buck by staging a play certain to fail.

Increasingly, we can be confident that this is exactly what Trump intends. The idea: be president just long enough to ramp up the price of his properties, ensure the economic future of his bumbling sons, sell Ivanka products, and bail out of Air Force One somewhere over the Arizona desert with a briefcase full of cash.

Yes, Trump is in a hurry to make things fail. Every appointee he’s chosen is sworn to destroy the department from within. It’s like the army enlisted in Brooks’ Blazing Saddles to rough up the town of Rock Ridge.

Trump’s taste and haste for wreckage is evident in what the House has proposed, and he’s blessed, in dynamiting the Affordable Care Act, leaving millions of Americans strapped again to Big Insurance’s railroad tracks.

Paul Ryan is in a bigly hurry offering something, anything, to set this plot in motion.

Hence, we see such commissary leftovers as health-care savings accounts, which are basically great for anyone with lots of money to save. This entree calls to the GOP buffet line like a filmy slab of lime-green Jell-0.

This is bad policy that only exists because Republicans, who don’t believe they should do anything whatsoever to help the poor, want to say they, in fact, are doing something. And this way they won’t.

So, too, with Trump. He couldn’t care less about the result. He couldn’t care less about the losers at the raw end of a very raw deal.

Like the politically ambitious Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles, Trump is on the great ego trip. He wants to be famous, to be all-powerful, and the only way to do that is through destruction.

Blow it all up, man. Then you can retire on your riches and bask in acclaim from your kin.

We can see Trump inspiring his heinous appointees, and Congressman Ryan, and Sen. McConnell, with these immortal words from Mr. Lamarr:

“Men, you are about to embark on a great crusade to stamp out runaway decency in the West. Now, you men will only be risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.”

John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2017

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