The Rough Beast is a Piss-Ant

Above all else, Donald Trump  will be remembered for his smallness.  Not the hands nonsense, but the petty, petulant, puerility of his time on the world stage. Send not to know for whom the baby monitor tolls.  We have elected a puling nonentity and sent him out to represent us at the big-boy table.  Shame on us.  Shame on the Republican Party for having so little to offer.  But mostly, shame on us as a nation.

Vladimir Putin is popular in Russia.  People say it's because he suppresses information about his flaws, but I don't believe that's so.  I think he is popular because a classy leader is a luxury that the Russians have not been able to afford, ever.  Gorbachev might have been such a leader, but the fact that he has been supplanted by a fascist thug says something about the kleptocratic soil in which Russia grows its leaders.

Trump is living proof that the US can no longer afford the luxury of a quality President.  The GOP gerrymandered the Congress into a feckless mess with an approval rating of 19%, every missing 81 points of which are the other guys' fault.  They aren't to be pitied - they thought they were putting party over country - but there is a delicious irony to their having hoist themselves on their own petard.  When swing voters don't matter, cooler heads have no reason to prevail.  Instead, morons get elected, Congress becomes a swamp, sixteen Tweedle-dees run for the Presidency, and an abomination slouches toward Washington to be born.

Read some Gibbon.  Read Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."  And then read Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The party cannot hear the ward leader;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The Tea Party is loosed upon the world,
The heartless tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of compromise is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Or something like that.  I'm quoting from memory.

Watching President Trump lecture the NATO chiefs on their obligations to the US was really, really painful.  The US has every right to pressure its allies into paying their "fair share" toward the defense of their own soil, but the idea of hectoring them in public should make any American's skin crawl.  With so much going on in the world, so many points to make in a public speech, our guy wants to know who ordered the lobster.  And yet, an astounding and sobering number of self-styled "Americans" actually think this bozo is a better leader than Hillary Clinton.  Or John Kasich or JEB Bush.

Like Willie Loman, when this many voters talk, attention must be paid.  We must take another look at Germany in the late 1920's and see why Hitler's, er, quirks, were overlooked.  If stupid people are empowered to vote, they don't suddenly become smart.  Rather, they just vote for stupid things - solutions that sound good fast, because no one else is offering any solutions at all.  So, no, Mr. Eliot, the way the world ends is not with a bang or a whimper.  It's with a snivel.