Taibbi has a perceptive analysis:
" He was a new kind of candidate and now is a new kind of leader: one who stumbles like a drunk up Capitol Hill, but manages even in defeat to continually pull the country in his direction, transforming not our laws but our consciousness, one shriveling brain cell at a time."
"Trump didn't appeal to K Street for help, didn't beg for mailing lists or the phone numbers of millionaire bundlers, and never wrung his hands waiting for favorable reviews on Meet the Press. He was the first president in modern times to arrive in Washington not owing the local burghers.
What that meant, nobody knew, but it probably wasn't good. Leaders in both parties had reason to panic. Democrats were calling him illegitimate. Leading Republicans had abandoned Trump during the "grab them by the pussy" episode. In a true autocracy, theirs would be the first heads gored on stakes as a warning to the others. Many D.C. bureaucrats had no idea what to expect. They were like shopkeepers awaiting the arrival of a notorious biker gang."
"A spy chief who believes in literal Armageddon apparently wasn't "scathing" enough to be "fevered" about, and 14 Democrats supported his nomination in a whopping 66-32 confirmation."
" ... an opposition party that perhaps unconsciously has begun to grade Trump's insanity on a curve – an early example of how the relentless Trump show bends our perception of reality."
" The Framers may have designed the government to withstand bouts of popular madness, but there are no checks and balances against the power of celebrity. A president who is both a tyrant and disinterested in governance would have blown their minds."
" ... while President Trump may be a dolt, the reality-show Trump is as clever a manipulator as American politics has ever seen. Brilliantly, he's turned the presidency into a permanent campaign, one in which an ostensibly hostile news media has once again become accomplice to whatever the Trump phenomenon is, by voraciously feeding at its financial trough."
"Everything connected with Trump becomes tabloidized. The show is unstoppable."
" Trump in the White House may just be a monkey clutching history's biggest hand grenade. Yes, he's always one step ahead of us, and more dangerous than any smart person, and we can never for a minute take our eyes off him."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-on-trump-the-destroyer-w473144Read the whole thing. He nails it. Trump has instantiated a Presidency as media production. And, boy, Trump knows how to do that.
sidd