Every once in a while, the Gameshow President inadvertently blurts out the truth during his streams of unconsciousness. It happened again this last week, when he admitted this:

“If we did very little testing, [America] wouldn’t have the most cases.  So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”

There it is.  Trump has been promising millions of “beautiful tests” since February. It’s mid-May, and we’re still testing at extremely anemic rates.  In Texas, for example, our current testing rate is 2%, and that rate ignores possible multiple tests who have already tested positive.  Every single medical expert I’ve heard speak repeats the mantra that massive testing is mandatory for opening economies.  Without it, we’re all flying blind.

The problem? Trump is playing a gameshow and in this game, the smallest number wins.  The prize is another 4 years to tear the US apart and avoid felony indictments from the State of New York.  We’ve been calling this for months, and, once again Trump admits that he doesn’t want testing.  He’s literally risking millions of lives for a win.

Yesterday a friend of mine got caught in a huge traffic jam on a local street.  The cause of the jam? The line of cars trying to get into a Popeye’s Fried Chicken drive thru to buy their chicken sandwich.  Also yesterday, there was a fatal stabbing outside of a Popeye’s fried chicken in Maryland during an argument over…wait for it…a goddam chicken sandwich.

If you’re around a Chick-fil-A around lunchtime in Texas, you will be caught in a traffic jam with hundreds of people sitting in dozens of cars willing to wait for almost an hour to buy THEIR goddam chicken sandwich.  This willingness, though, is in large part owed to conservatives  making some kind of statement in support of Chick-fil-A for their anti-diversity politics and support of Trump.

In the meantime, we’re only a few weeks away from the madness of Black Friday (which now starts on Thanksgiving morning) as millions of Americans stupidly storm into big box stores to do battle with one another to buy a cheap made in China flat panel television which they can neither afford or fit on a wall in their home.

Insanity has now become normalized.  More Americans are engaged in Dancing with the Stars and The Voice than they are in participation in their own government.  They go nuts over shit they read on Facebook and Twitter, while ignoring the real world of what’s going on around them.  AND, our system of consumer protections has been decimated.  Lying about products, politics, people, and policy is now OK and our courts have been packed with ideologies who believe that is just fine.  The President of the United States has amplified this cancer by lying himself over 14,000 times in 3 years.  He’s tweeted over 11,000 times, most of those tweets either lies, attacks against his enemies, wild conspiracy theories, or promotion of his own businesses.  His education department is making it worse by destroying decades of progress in public education and assuring that millions of Americans swim in debt created by a system designed to entrap them for profit.

We are living in the age of lies.  The masses, whose wages have been stagnated for 0ver 30 years and whose education system is broken, now live in a distopian television fantasy world, reduced to fighting over goddam chicken sandwiches, flat panel televisions, and casting meaningless votes for people who have no business dancing on national television.

We are lost, and with few viable government protections left, Trump has accelerated the downward spiral to an outright freefall.  I don’t have a solution for it, and don’t even know where to start.

Since his first day infesting the WH, Trump has been trying to produce a militaristic super duper patriotic ceremony to celebrate…himself.  The Pentagon succeeded in shutting down his Soviet style military parade last year, but now he’s decided to co-opt the most American of American holidays and make it about himself.  The National Park Service has announced that, at Trump’s order, they are turning a traditional non-partisan event of American music and fireworks into an event centered on His Orangeness, including giving a speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and rearranging the entire holiday celebration to put himself in the middle of it.

My response to Trump trying to take over OUR HOLIDAY to make it about himself?  Fuck you.  I refuse to participate in any way, not even turning on my television for it.  Enough of this nonsense is enough.  He’s turned the entire US government into a reality television show starring him, his criminal cronies, and his entire fucking family.  I’m sick of it. Congress needs to stop this narcissistic asshole in his tracks, get him out of office, and then return our government to some level of normalcy.

For God’s sake, I want my country back from insanity and cheesy reality television.

Last Thursday, during the photo op on the border with His Orangeness, Dan Patrick offered Texas taxpayers’ money to build his idiotic wall.  That’s right, folks – the most powerful man in Texas offered the most powerful man on the planet OUR money to build HIS wall – and pay us back later.  We can’t afford to fund schools and teachers, but we have enough money for this kind of folly.  Swell.

This is what happens when Americans are so goddam stupid that they elected a hate radio screamer and a cheesy reality television star to high office.

Disaster.

Normal people have gone from laughter to shock to anger to abject fear of the Trump presidency as his reality television drama has torn at the very fabric of our society for almost 2 years since he was inflicted upon us by voters who are idiots.  I worked in New York during the eighties when Trump was a punch line, the target of derision and anger over his trashy gold plated branding and real estate failures.  Many New Yorkers called him Donald Chump.

How did he go from laughingstock to the most powerful job in the world?  In one word, television.  Were it not for The Apprentice, Trump would still be relegated to the pages of tabloids like the Enquirer and the Daily Post.  The Apprentice used trumped up drama (no pun intended), manufactured qualifications, fake controversies, and personal destruction of contestants as a formula to transform Trump from widely known failure to a successful businessman.

Who accomplished this seemingly impossible feat?  His name is Mark Burnett, who invented the first major reality television series, Survivor, in 2000 and then The Apprentice a couple of years later.  After meeting Trump Burnett identified him as the perfect character around which to build a fake “successful” businessman who ruled over contestants each week.  Burnett called it the “Urban Survivor”.  The formula worked, and the rest is our nightmare today.  The New Yorker has just profiled Burnett, and the article reads like a…wait for it…reality television show.

So, if you want to blame someone for the train wreck that is now our daily reality, here’s the guy.