A LEARNING CURVE GOES FLAT – By Jim Kent

It’s pretty frustrating, really. Just about every day there is a story in the formerly plausible news publications and websites about how politically risky Mr. Tangerine Man’s actions are.The children of the people who voted for him are dying; his moronic tariffs are mostly hurting the states that voted for him, the reputation of the United States is in shreds everywhere in the world except Beijing and Moscow; the federal government is being gutted and its workers’ morale is shattered; and the US military and federal law enforcement agencies and intelligence organizations are led by strutting buffoons. The Leader Of The Free World, in the meantime, is busying himself with becoming richer.

In short, all the voters who bought the Make America Great Again snake oil are being betrayed at a frenetic pace, while those who are supposed to be helping us understand things continue not to mention the most obvious explanation for his actions:

He doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care about the children who are dying, or about their parents. He doesn’t care about factory workers, or people in the military, or police officers, or farmers, or health care workers. He doesn’t care about consumers who will be facing steeper inflation. He doesn’t care about taxpayers, unless they are rich enough to avoid paying taxes. He doesn’t care about voters he’ll never face again, or about the Republican party, which unless all the above groups remain oblivious, should be doomed in November of ’26. Not to put too fine a point on it, he doesn’t care about the United States of America.

What he cares about is getting richer and feeling competent, clever, and beloved.

The richness is being taken care of by his relentless merchandising. The other bits are delegated to his brigade of fawning sycophants, which inexplicably still include most of my fellow Republicans, aided by his lifelong egomania and increasingly severe cognitive impairment. The latter may explain a sliver of why he doesn’t care: He doesn’t understand or believe the consequences of what he’s doing. But even if he did, he wouldn’t care.

And still the so-called news people bang on about the political risks of his lunatic actions and those of his band of merrymakers. Have they not figured out that he is facing no political risk?Have they not figured out that he is unwilling and probably unable to behave like a responsible public official or even a decent human being? Or, to give them some benefit of the doubt, are they mired in their long tradition of deference to high-level officials? Or are they afraid of what he might do or say that would hurt their business interests?

For whatever reason, they continue to pretend they believe he has a broader strategy or a comprehensive plan or something to explain what’s going on. He doesn’t, which they ought to have figured out by now. A significant faction of his supporters do have a plan, Project 2025,which he continues to maintain he’s not familiar with. That’s probably true, by the way, but that group have charmed and wheedled and bribed and flattered their way into positions where that plan can be implemented. “Supporters" means, after all, those who hold him upright as his decline accelerates, while the mainstream and formerly respected newsfolk continue to quack and flap about the political risks of his strategy, completely abdicating the irresponsibility to inform the public without fear or favour.

The President of the United States has always been unwilling and is increasingly unable to understand and carry out the duties of his office. It is not clear whether the largest news organizations haven’t learned what’s true or just haven’t figured out how to talk about it. Their timidity was a great help to him in getting elected twice. Certainly the elements of the news industry who support him have no interest in telling the truth, so who’s going to?