Donald Trump is a dumbass.  We all know that.  He’s also narcissistic, cruel, self obsessed, and utterly devoid of human emotion.  We’ve come to expect the worst in him through pure personal experience.  Now let’s look at Greg Abbott; he graduated from UT and Vanderbilt Law.  He served on the Texas Supreme Court and as Attorney General of Texas.  Greg Abbott is smart.  His problem is that he’s also a partisan hack.  He sued a tree trimming company after a tree fell on him after a storm, paralyzing him from the waist down resulting in an insurance settlement that pays him for life, though he can freely practice law.  After he got his, of course, he spent years trying to undo the very system that supported him when injured.  That makes him a hack, and a hypocrite.  But he’s worse than that.  As governor since 2015, he’s continued Rick Perry’s dismantling of Texas reputation for good education and a fair government.  He’s participated in the culture wars and even sicced the Texas State Guard on the US Army after goofy conspiracy theorists raised hell about how the military exercises are going to “take away their guns”.  It was stupid, and he knew better, but still pandered to screwballs.  He’s now continued that pandering all the way through Trump’s disastrous presidency, and now Texans are actually dying because of that pandering.

Against all common sense and medical experts, Abbott ordered the reopening of businesses and government agencies even though no criteria for reopening had been met.  Trump called for immediate reopening to save his reelection bid, and Abbott happily complied.  He even overruled safety precautions put in place in cities all over the state.  The result?  COVID-19 cases have overwhelmed the hospital systems; medical staff is either exhausted or sick themselves.  People are dying waiting for a hospital bed, or at home, terrified to come to a hospital. Yesterday, Texas hit a new record of over 11,000 new cases and 131 deaths, overwhelming the previous death record by over 100%.  Total deaths since the beginning of this disaster now total over 3,000.

This catastrophe is all on Abbott, period the end.  When he overruled adults like Sylvester Turner and Lina Hidalgo, he took the entire responsibility on himself.  The real tragedy?  Unlike Trump, Abbott is not a dumbass; he knows better.  He’s just a corrupt and cynical politician, and this year should spell the end of his political career and a place in polite society (if that even exists anymore).

As we’ve already reported, the Texas Medical Center halted reporting all COVID-19 data after some kind of agreement with Greg Abbott to continue allowing elective surgeries even after his statewide order that shut down those elective surgeries to free hospital capacity for infected patients.  TMC halted that reporting just as it reached 100% base capacity and forecast overrunning surge capacity in days.

Well, TMC started reporting the data again last night, but OMITTED ICU and hospital capacity data.  A before and after example is below.  Doctors in

Before and After

TMC have been ringing the alarm bells for weeks, and management was accurately reporting data and also sounding the alarm until everything stopped Thursday.  The Houston Chronicle has now picked up the story as well as other local media.  Frankly, this entire episode is shameful; corruption has moved from Austin and the governor’s mansion to the largest medical center in the world.

Our legacy will be determined by how we respond to this crisis.  I’m not hopeful as the cancer of Trump has metastasized from Queens to Houston.

Trump got his money’s worth this morning, using one of his judges on the DC Court to overrule district court judge Emmet Sullivan, ordering him to immediately drop the charges against Michael Flynn to which he had twice pleaded guilty.  The order was written by Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee and protege of none other than Clarence Thomas.  Rao was joined by Karen Henderson, an HW appointee.  Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, disagreed.

The judicial branch of our government is now completely corrupted, caught in the iron grip of Trump criminality.

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.

If there was any one photo that spoke a thousand words of Trump’s infestation, it is this one:

During the demonstrations at the WH gate, all the lights were turned off as Trump hid in his bunker, not knowing what to do or say.

Millions of Americans have known for decades that our government was broken, but I don’t think any of us realized just how badly is was broken.  The Trump infestation of the WH has exposed the manifest weaknesses in our system of government which cynical career politicians have exploited for personal and ideological gain.  When the Framers established our Constitution and supporting laws, the assumption was that that those who governed would uphold the public trust; if an elected official betrayed that trust, they provided a provision for impeachment and removal from office.  They didn’t envision a time that the majority of representatives would be abjectly corrupt.  We’re there.

The most shocking feature of the Trump regime is the amount of damage one president can inflict with virtually zero accountability.  In three short years, Trump took over the Republican party, the Congress, the courts, and even the Justice Department.  He has pardoned criminals, unilaterally withdrawn from longstanding treaties, started trade wars, attacked countries, disbanded entire agencies that blinded us to massive threats like the Coronavirus pandemic, has undone decades of environmental, education, employment, and safety regulations, wrecked dozens of alliances, sidled up to murderous dictators, and ceased funding global efforts that support healthcare, security, and human rights.  He illegally extorted a foreign leader for to damage a political opponent.  He is actively trying to whip up a scandal in the Obama administration which is invented from whole cloth with zero basis in fact.  He personally profits from his presidency on a daily basis, and makes public policy to advantage himself and his family.

Worse, anyone who gets in his way is either fired, slandered, or both.  He’s now fired an FBI director, two Attorneys General, and five Inspectors General.  He continues attempts to illegally out the whistleblower in the Ukrainian extortion effort.  His current AG is violating the public trust and the law by covering up major crimes and participating in smearing Trump’s political opponents by initiating “investigations” of non-existent crime. As he does this, he willfully ignores the tsunami of actual crimes being committed by Trump and his cronies.

How did we get here?  In a word, corruption.  The US is no longer a functioning democracy and the majority of our elected representatives no longer actually represent Americans.  Over the last 4 decades the money has gotten so big for congressmen and senators that making money has taken over from representation.  To avoid responsibility, congress has steadily ceded authority to the president.  For example, Article 1 of the Constitution specifically authorizes the CONGRESS to determine international trade policy, but for years that authority has been delegated to the president under “expedited” rules.   Trump has run wild with that authority, starting and inflaming global trade wars while the Congress (especially the Senate) just sits there doing nothing.  The Constitution also assigns authority to declare wars on other nations, but through legislation has also delegated that to the president, leading to never ending war and deadly attacks on other countries without so much as a “Go to hell” to the Congress.  It goes on and on, from selling off federal land to private interests to unwinding decades of environmental protections to shutting down agencies and engaging in abject corruption which lines the president’s and his children’s pockets with zero oversight.  Add all that to a now hands-off anything political judiciary and we don’t even remotely resemble the federal structure envisioned by the Framers.

The Framers designed a system of checks and balances to prevent rule by one branch and corruption.  Over the years all three branches have altered that design and what we now have is a zombie version of the federal system.  Add a profoundly corrupt president with evil enablers and you get what we see today, a president unilaterally wrecking the US government, the economy, the healthcare system, the federal safety net, anti-corruption legislation, international treaties, global alliances, and even the rule of law.

The system is broken.  Even when we rid ourselves of the Trump infestation, massive damage will have been done chances are remote that anyone left in authority will have incentive to fix it.  Yeah, it ain’t pretty.