Charles Pierce: Somebody Put the President to Bed

[babylonsister]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55559/pelosi-trump-get-some-sleep/


Somebody Put the President to Bed
Nancy Pelosi is right to say Trump needs to sleep.

By Charles P. Pierce
Jun 9, 2017


Nancy Pelosi, leader of the Democratic minority in the House of Representatives, popped in for a visit with the MSNBC Morning Zoo Crew on Friday, and it turned out to be quite a show. The shiny-object headline that her appearance produced was her speculating that the president* might not be all there, physically and otherwise, and that his staff should make sure he gets some sleep between now and 2020.


"Get some sleep. Bring yourself to a place where the synapses are working."


Then she related a story about the night that the president ordered the missile strikes in Syria that was truly alarming.


"It was late at night, like midnight. It was well after it was all finished. He was going on and on. It was like midnight and I said, 'Why don't you get some sleep?'"


There are a lot of places where having someone yammering on the phone in the middle of the night isn't strange at all. Bookie joints, call centers, and saloons, to name a few. The White House in the aftermath of a military strike overseas is not one of them. And Pelosi wasn't ready to let that go, either.


"I think his family should be concerned about his health…I'm concerned about his fitness for office. I think those around him if, in fact, they have the confidence to do so, do they have the courage and confidence to say to the president that these things are not in furtherance of bringing the country together, which is what we all have to do."


When you think about it, if you're looking to find a solution to the problem before 2020, handing the president* a medical discharge is probably the most painless one there is. He's 70 years old and in questionable physical shape. He eats like a college sophomore and was defeated physically by the rigors of a G7 conference, which never has been confused with American Ninja Warrior. And, for god's sake, he really should get some more sleep.

But Pelosi had some other things to say, too, and they may have gotten lost in the noise around her comments about the president*'s fitness. She answered a question about the apparent apathy of the Republican majorities in Congress toward the crisis at the other end of the Pennsylvania Avenue, and she tied it to the ur-madness of the modern Republican party, and of the conservative movement that is its only life force: the original monkeybrains that Ronald Reagan fed the party with his first budget in 1981.


Why do Republicans want to hide the truth from the American people because of Donald Trump? Because they truly are the high priests of trickle-down economics and that means everything to them.


And that is what puts Donald Trump into the mainstream of Republican history in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is its logical product, and they are perfectly willing to go along with whatever antics come out of his White House because they're too far gone in their decades-long madness to ever come back. Right now, they're trying to roll back the Dodd-Frank regulations, to eviscerate the first real attempt to reform healthcare, and they're warming up to shred the social safety net. It's all to pay homage to what David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, once called "a Trojan horse to lower the top {tax} rate," and what George H. W. Bush correctly called "voodoo economics." Until the power of that voodoo is broken, the madness will go on and on.