There is one word that isn’t used much to describe the Trump administration, but a powerful one.  I mean, we all use descriptors like criminal, corrupt, bankrupt, immoral. deplorable, cruel, and many other accurate terms.  One word we don’t use much, but is appropriate, and that’s chickenshit.  Trump, his goons, and sycophants are truly chickenshit, boasting and talking big on television and Twitter, but shrinking from facing the music when the time comes.  Trump always fires people on Twitter or gets someone else to do the deed because he’s too weak to do it in person, like when he fired James Comey on Twitter.  It happened again yesterday when Bill Barr stupidly tried to fire Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York by press release.  Barr lied in the press release saying that Berman had “resigned”.  The problem is that Berman hadn’t resigned and responded to Barr’s chickenshitiness with a Screw You response that he most certainly had NOT resigned and had no intention of resigning.  It was a rare golden moment in a vast landscape of darkness.

Since his appointment, Berman has drawn Trump’s ire by aggressively investigating his personal businesses, Giuliani, and Giuliani’s associates.  He’s the one who indicted Michael Cohen drawing his guilty plea.  Trump’s been wanting to get rid of him for months.

The hilarious part is that Barr can’t fire Berman because he was actually appointed by federal judges, not Trump, and confirmed by the Senate. To avoid oversight, Trump’s primary tactic is to make everyone in his cabinet and many leadership positions “acting”.  Like every other tradition and rule, Trump has shattered norms of past presidents by violating these traditions, rules, and even federal laws in plain sight, defying anyone with actual authority to do anything.  And, up until last night, it has worked like a charm.  Trump fired Preet Bharara in 2017, and has since not nominated a replacement for him. Joon Kim took his place, but stepped down in 2018.  Berman was appointed as acting US Attorney, but that was only good for 120 days.  Trump never forwarded his appointment to the Senate, so the US District Court for the Southern District stepped in and appointed Berman to the post.  In other words, Trump didn’t do his damn job, so the court did it for him.  Since the court appointed Berman, he is defying Barr by refusing to step down until the Senate confirms a new US Attorney.  I find this development and humiliation of Barr exceedingly entertaining.

Perhaps all this corruption is plain sight is now finally at least slowing?  Maybe, but one characteristic is stubbornly hanging on and that is Trump’s Chickenshitiness.

WH comms staffers just put the TVs on super loud after we could hear yelling coming from room w/ Bannon, Spicer, Sanders

— Adrian Carrasquillo (@Carrasquillo) May 15, 2017

Reporters in the WH are saying they don’t know which way to lean to overhear staff trying to grapple with the tsunami of crises of Trump’s own making.  Monday night, the shoutfest between Bannon, Spicer, and Huckabee Sanders was so loud that comms staff turned up televisions trying to drown it out.

However, their boss is going to assure that the Daily Crisis will continue.  Trump is a moron; he thought it was a good idea to take on the intelligence community?  The FBI?  That’s just plain stupid and simply political suicide by bureaucracy.  Comey was a prosecutor.  These people raise evidence gathering and note taking to an art form.  You know that this snippet from one memo is just the tip of a giant iceberg and that iceberg is only going to get larger.  In the meantime, Trump’s inner circle is getting thrown under the bus one at a time on virtually a daily basis.  The ONLY staffer who carried any weight was H.R. McMaster, but that’s over after his performance in front of the West Wing entrance the other day.

And it’s only going to get worse.  With top staffers at each others’ throats, it’s only a matter of time before the entire West Wing melts down.  If Trump survives this latest crisis, he will be so damaged that his legislative agenda will grind to a halt.  He responds so poorly to perceived slights that you KNOW he’ll tweet out some other stupid declaration that will turn his scandals into a perpetual motion machine.

You have to ask yourself why anyone with any integrity would be a part of this fiasco.  Why are wealthy and influential people staying in, much less groveling like Tillerson did on MTP last Sunday?  It’s mind blowing to watch these otherwise smart people hang on while the WH turns into Fukushima on the Potomac.  The longer they do, the more they will get irradiated from this meltdown.

Last week, beginning in the 24 blazing hours following Trump’s sacking of James Comey, the nature of Trump’s incumbency markedly shifted.  It started with the free flowing lies coming from every single one of his surrogates, then continued when the Big Cheeto threw that very same crew under the bus by contradicting his own talking points the next day after the firing.   Also, that same day, all of the networks, including Fox Noise, started using the word “lie”.  The words “chaos”, “turmoil”, and a dozen other descriptors of the Trump WH are now a regular part of network reporting.

Trump then threatened Comey with “tapes” of their conversations, and that was the moment mainstream GOP leadership started to part ways.  The Senate Intelligence committee has now asked the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to turn over documents related to Trump’s businesses.  Why is that significant?  FinCen enforces laws against MONEY LAUNDERING.  Over the years before Trump’s Atlantic City casino finally closed, it was caught several times money laundering.  This shift into serious investigation into his actually business dealings marks a change in emphasis from dark figures like Manafort, Stone, and Flynn to Trump.  That’s not insignificant. Referring to the request, Mark Warner, the ranking member on the committee, said, “[is] our effort to try to follow the intel no matter where it leads.”

There is now talk of Trump cleaning house and “rebooting” his administration.  Apparently, he’s furious with his staff for doing exactly what he’s told them to do, so the rumble is that he’s going to blow up the West Wing and start over.  Even if he does that, his problems are far from being over.  Money laundering? No one, including Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan can ignore that.  Mix in Russian money with that story, and Trump will finally be toast.

Fingers crossed here, but there is a clear shift of support away from Trump.  It can’t come too soon.

This morning, as I listen to all the MoJo talking heads recounting the stream of lies spewing out of the White House I am actually physically revulsed. Since the night of November 8th, my emotions have ranged from anger to despair.  My anger was directed at virtually everyone – those who supported Hillary’s nomination when her flaws were obvious to those not devoted to her (I know, I know), those who didn’t bother to vote, those who voted for third parties, and especially those who were so stupid as to vote for the worst presidential candidate in US history.  Those people were overcome with Trump’s celebrity, his crass word salad, his tacky gold-plated lifestyle, his obvious mental instability, and his absolutely undeniable immoral existence.  After he took office, despair overwhelmed me as my worst fears were realized.  Not only was Trump as bad as I feared, he surrounded himself with the worst WH staff imaginable.  It seemed his priority was to pick the absolute worst nominee you could imagine for each role, from an education secretary who opposes education, a housing secretary who knows nothing of housing, to a strategist who is a known bigot.

Trump also tightened his grip on power with the judiciary in his pocket and a cowed legislature.  I had hoped that the career professionals around him could at least hold him in check, but he’s now fired an acting attorney general, every single ambassador around the world, 46 US attorneys including Preet Bharara, the head of the Census Bureau, and now the head of the FBI who was investigating his corruption and ties to Russia.

Just this week, after firing Comey, Trump mustered his merry band of liars to go in front of the cameras and blatantly spin tales, not bothering to even try to square those tales with actual timelines or even with each other.  The only consistent lie that night was that Cheeto Jesus took “swift and decisive action”, and that was most certainly one of the worst lies after he later admitted to Lester Holt that he had decided long ago to fire Comey.  I sat and watched Holt try to get Trump to answer for his lies, and the result was the most concentrated collection of falsehood that has ever been emitted on national television.

As I watch this rolling disaster, I’m nostalgic for past days where we had a president who was precisely the opposite of  this creature now infesting OUR White House.  Barack Obama was known for his steadiness, his caution (some would say too cautious), his ability to speak to the nation’s heart at times of tragedy.  He occupied this very same house for a scandal-free 8 years, leading the country through some of its toughest times.

So I have to ask: Do you miss him yet?

As for me, I answer, you’re damned right I do, every single day.

Where to start, where to start – In the last 24 hours it’s come to light, despite the frantic efforts of the WH to spin the story differently, that Trump was outraged at Comey’s investigation of his ties to Russia. His impatience with Comey boiled over when, while testifying before the Congress Comey said that he was “mildly nauseous” to think that he had a hand in electing Trump. He then decided to fire Comey, and ordered the letter from Rosenstein to make a case against him.  When the letter was finished, Jeff Sessions, who had supposedly recused himself from the Russia investigation, was called to the Oval Office where Trump told him he was using the letter as justification to fire Comey.

That evening and yesterday morning, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway went on national television and lied on every network that Rosenstein had acted on his own when, in fact, he was ordered to write the letter.  The evening of the firing, a clearly rattled Sean Spicer was cornered by the press apparently hiding from reporters behind the bushes on the north lawn of the WH.  When discovered, he reluctantly gave an interview in the dark, insisting he didn’t want to be on camera.

THEN, the next day, Trump was played by the Russians when foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and ambassador Sergey Kislyak were invited to the Oval Office for a closed door meeting.  The only photographs of the meeting were from an agent of Tass, the Russian state news agency who tweeted them out live.  That’s correct, US press photographers were blocked from the meeting, while the Trump WH allowed a Russian propaganda agent into the Oval Office who live tweeted the meeting through the Tass website.   No breach of security there, eh?

This morning, the aftershocks of this latest disaster are actually getting worse.  The NY Times has published an open letter to Rosenstein urging him to appoint an independent counsel from outside the FBI and DOJ to run a fully independent investigation of the Trump-Russia connection, telling him that is his only choice.  The talking heads on MoJo are exploding today.

We may be closer to the end that even the most optimistic among us can imagine.  Reports of Trump sitting in the residence shouting at his television are common, and I can imagine that most WH staff are preparing resumes to get the hell out of there.  The Republicans on the Hill will reluctantly begin to acknowledge that they’re being herded over the cliff as part of this slow motion catastrophe and begin to move against him.

I see no scenario where this presidency doesn’t end disastrously, and it can’t come soon enough.