You know, I’ve only actually ever been to Washington D.C. the once, back when I was married, and we didn’t even stay over, as we couldn’t find a hotel in our price range that wasn’t located at the edge of some crime-ridden suburban hell-hole. We instead stopped on our way back from a few days in Norfolk, Virginia, saw the sights, and stood across the way watching an Air Force One helicopter land on the White House lawn. This would have been mid-90’s, Bush senior was in office, we’d watched the opening scenes of the first Iraqi war after Saddam had invaded Kuwait on TV, and wow does that seem like a long time ago, and far, far away from where we are today.

That Washington D.C. is gone, maybe for now, or maybe forever, but it is gone.

I had to pinch myself watching Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on Fox News. These men, railing furiously against plots and traitors, were eerily reminiscent of the propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov on Channel One Russia.
[ The Atlantic, by Ben Judah, published August 22, 2018 ]

So, now let THAT sink in. This guy once hobnobbed in Moscow and dragged off to the FSB once too often, and…

Power had long ago slipped out of formal institutions in Moscow. What mattered most was an unspoken fact: The president’s friends’ financial interests shaped almost everything. I became sick of government officials repeating the lines they parroted from the hate-filled nightly opinion shows on state TV. What I really wanted was to move to America, where it was all so different.
[ ibid ]

Was all so different, but all that once made America what it is has become more rare, more difficult, more hushed. They didn’t drain the swamp, they killed the frogs, the snakes, the insects, and anything that existed of any benefit and purpose has less power, and slowly the mantra is about what “he” wants, what “he” says, and institutions are being dismantled – it has begun.

moved a few months later and started noticing things changing almost immediately. People I knew began having dreams (actual dreams) about Trump, something that started with Putin in Moscow a long time ago. Everything that felt so distinctively D.C. about how people talked began to fade. All the earnest discussion about policy that I had so enjoyed was replaced by opaque rumors and guesswork about the influence of oligarchs, the ructions of the intelligence services, and the intentions of “the family.” I shuddered as, when discussing politics, people started to speak about “him” and “what he wants” without ever needing to name him. Just like Moscow.
[ ibid ]

It is for me a mind-boggling factoid that this isn’t just some morality play penned by Shakespeare or the biography of a mob boss, or the back story of the leader of some 3rd world shit hole, it’s the day-to-day crazy circus that buzzes around this White House like flies around the rotting carcasses of the friends and associates of this corrupt POTUS, and we have no clue when it is going to end, or how, or who will fall, and who will rise, and who knows what, when, and this is no fiction, it is the reality show that has become this White House.

And, can you picture it, 1:10AM, and he’s tweeting like some love-drunk teen, wandering the hallowed halls late at night, pondering his own fate, perhaps also talking to the paintings like Nixon was said to of, as the flippers and money-grubbers he’s surrounded himself with for 30 years one by one turn against him. Every day he becomes more isolated and his world slowly caves in, and I wonder if he regrets his desire to live within the storied solemn columned monument of a once proud nation, to have obtained that highest office he has forever tainted, and now he is imprisoned within it, smelling the stench of his own corruption, and yeah dude, you’re doing A+, what a guy.

Oh, the poor baby, being burned by those around him with the same self-interested philosophy, and one has to wonder why he thought loyalty could be bought and sold on the market like gold bullion, fool.

Where it will end is anyone’s guess at this point, cause anyone who says they know is delusional.

As David Frum, one of the senior editors at The Atlantic, pointed out on CBC’s The National, a 40% approval rating is too high a number to successfully impeach a president, and so that nugget is still another day, week, perhaps months away, still, the last few days have sweetened the brew, added facts to the frittata.

It was now perfectly clear. What upsets the current regime in Moscow is not what used to infuriate the old Soviet authorities—research into its military strength—but anything exploring its illicit finances. Something similar might now be said of the current White House.
[ ibid ]

So, implicated in criminal conspiracies by his own lawyer, and the immoral characters he once considered friends are given immunity, and why on earth this surprises him, well, he is delusional after all, but still. Plus, any honest person that ever stood beside or behind him is hopefully long gone, and if not, maybe they ain’t so moral after all.

Yet, the potentiality of this house of cards collapsing and rising up a more fascist, more corrupt version of itself is still looming large, and I am reminded of something David Frum said in one of the vids I watched, this detail he mentioned about how moderate states emerge, or moderate philosophies, from tragic experience comes moderate views, he was referring to Germany and some joke told just before the U.S. Elections in 2016 by their most popular comedian;

lunatics with crazy hair, we have already been there, ya, ya, ya.

Scary funny, funny but scary? Prophetic? Hope not.

At what point the American people, the Senate, the House, anyone, is going to wake up, MAYBE recognize that they are heading for a crash, and that the great democratic dream has been infiltrated by those who do not have any interest in pesky things like rules, fair justice, or morality, and any regulation that digs in to their profit shares is suspect, regardless of who or what it protects, and what “he” wants is of far more significance than what, em, let’s say, the people want, and slowly the “WE” erodes and becomes “HE”.

And, numb, blind, indifferent, oblivous, as HE slowly kills the American identity, the dream, the belief in liberty, and the patriotic BS his supporters STILL claim to uphold is exposed as the hogwash it really is, as the stench of backdoor deals and greed becomes the only way to succeed, and the people rally around their values like some maypole dance, never once realizing that they have been had.