Keeping track of the chaos: This is not normal.

One of the dangers of the Trump administration is not merely that the constant drumbeat of ludicrous bullshit will serve to obscure the less dramatic, and more pernicious, damage being done to the fabric of American society, and to the global community. No, the real danger is that the constant chaos of Trump has been going on so long without letup that it's starting to feel normal.

This is not normal. The world must never lose sight of how utterly abnormal the Trump administration actually is.

Thankfully, there's a resource of people far more industrious than me, who are working to keep track of every bit of Trump madness, no matter how large or small. The less-dramatic stories that would be huge scandals for any normal White House, but that can't get traction during Trump's exercise in escalating effrontery? Amy Siskind is keeping track. Are you starting to think that George W. Bush wasn't all that bad, after all, because look what Trump's done today? Amy Siskind has your antidote.

Because the unmitigated disaster of the Bush administration wasn't normal, either. It's just that Trump's is worse... and getting even worse still, with every passing day. America, and the world, will be repairing the damage from these years for the next twenty years at least; you should be arming yourself with the knowledge of what damage is being done, so that you can hit the ground running when the damage finally stops happening on a daily basis.

Ladies, gentlemen, and others, it is my great pleasure to point you in the direction of The Weekly List: This is how democracy ends. No, no, don't thank me. I'm just spreading the word.

(BTW, this week's list of madness is 154 items long. That's just this week's list; last week's list was even longer. Yikes.)

And this would be why term limits are a thing

OMG, he's such a fucking moron. From Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping Saturday after the ruling Communist party announced it was eliminating the two-term limit for the presidency, paving the way for Xi to serve indefinitely, according to audio aired by CNN.

“He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great,” Trump said, according to audio of excerpts of Trump’s remarks at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida aired by CNN. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday,” Trump said to cheers and applause from supporters.

[...]

U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat, said on Twitter that “whether this was a joke or not, talking about being President for life like Xi Jinping is the most unAmerican sentiment expressed by an American President. George Washington would roll over in his grave.”

The Chinese government is currently cracking down on anything resembling criticism of Xi Jinping's plans to be dictator for life - among other things, they've banned the letter "n," something that sounds like an Onion article except that it's actually happening - and to say that the international community isn't exactly thrilled with the leader of the world's 2nd largest economic (and 3rd largest nuclear) power turning into North Korea would be something of an understatement. The only reason that it isn't getting more attention is that Vladimir Putin also decided that he wanted to model himself after Kim Jong-un, and did so even more explicitly with literal nuclear saber-rattling.

This would seem to be an excellent time for the leader of the world's leading democratic nation to step up to defend democratic principles, by maybe pointing out that "presidents for life" have always proved to be a terrible thing (no matter how charming that president may have seemed beforehand), and even showing some small iota of awareness of why he himself is term-limited. Unfortunately, the current U.S. President is Donald J. Fucking Trump, who thinks that the sun shines out of his own ass, and thinks that being president for life sounds just swell, in spite of the fact that his own administration is already a disaster.

This effectively undermines any sort of response that any of the planet's other democratic nations might have been planning. After all, if the United States isn't going to do anything, and they very clearly aren't planning to, and Vladimir Putin is obviously down with the whole "strong man dictator" thing, then there's not much that nobody else can effectively do that Xi Jinping will be compelled to take any notice of whatsoever. China had spent the entire Obama administration slowly moving in a more open and democratic direction, but that's all over now, and the orange idiot in the White House is too much of an idiot to even realize that this is a bad thing.

I'd written before about the Trump damage being a generational thing that the United States will be dealing with for decades to come. It's becoming increasingly clear, though, that the U.S. won't be the only ones dealing with Trump damage for the next twenty years, as his ham-fisted, ignorant approach to foreign policy continues to push both Russia and China further away from liberal democracy, cementing them into oppressive, nuclear-armed dictatorships that the rest of us will now have to deal with the foreseeable future. GG.

Can this idiot please just get his ass impeached, already?