Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Perseus Series: The Death of Medusa I
(1882 )

“All the King’sHorses and all the King’s men seem unlikely to save our incumbent from himself again. Thank Heavens!”

The administrators and cabinet heads in our incumbent’s first administration were fringe characters, but several seemed to retain enough of their native senses that they eventually acted to prevent a few of his more disgusting abuses of power. These interventions ultimately frustrated and angered our malignant narcissist, and he leveraged these experiences to ensure that no sane person would get a chance to serve in his second administration, the one he clearly intended to remain steadfastly indifferent to administering very much of anything, especially our federal government. And so it came to pass that he nominated not merely the bottom of the barrel, public servant-wise, but generally, creatures who had never quite managed to matriculate to inhabiting the inside of any barrel, but those who hailed from somewhere beneath one. Carefully coached and in collusion with some of the worst legislators in the history of legislating, most of those horrible nominees managed to gain approval. These became what are generally referred to as The King’sMen, even though a significant number of them purported to be women, though none of them in any way traditional or as DEI hires, except, of course, in the caricature, cartoonish way.

Anyway, we ended up with an epic crew. Secretaries more interested in exotic travel than in unraveling the very fabric of representative government. They talked big but delivered little beyond fresh litigation, which they would invariably lose. These were administrators perfectly chosen for their studied indifference. A seemingly inhuman Secretary of Health and Human Services who didn’t believe in science. A remarkably insecure and performative Secretary of Homeland Security who believed her primary responsibility involved cosplaying cowgirls. A Secretary of Labor whose father was cited for hitting on his daughter’s employees in their workplace, and who also hosted her direct reports to a visit to an honest-to-God strip club, in an attempt, I guess, to help them get right with God.

Most of these clowns pretended to righteousness, helping their boss sell his corrupted Bibles on the side. His Secretary of the Treasury’s son started a business intended to leverage the eventual finding that the incumbent’s tariffs had been illegal and needed to be refunded. He offered beforehand to buy back tariff claims at a discount for those who were being ruined by those tariffs. Similar curiosities prevailed in every department. The King’s Men ran rampant, appearing anything but penitent when called before congressional hearings to recount their precedent-setting sins. They came defiant of their constitutionally-mandated overseers, and declared their Fifth Amendment with near absolute impunity, as if they didn’t need to care. They didn’t seem to share a molecule of guilt or understanding among them, as if they existed solely to fulfill their boss’s often contradictory and indecipherable whims. They generally seemed to do whatever they pleased.

Early on, we partisans, we who thought of ourselves as the True Americans, if only because we retained a firm belief in such practices as due process, believed that the brakes that emerged in that first administration might eventually appear in the second, though the early evidence of such an emergence was never all that promising. We saw defiance impudently doubling down whenever another miscarriage of justice was found. We saw Cabinet Secretaries dissemble, doubling down on whatever transparently illegalities they’d been caught trying to get away with. That doubling down went double for the legislators charged with holding those clowns accountable. Collusion seemed to be the primary purpose of this second administration, the one that sure seemed maliciously indifferent to actually administering anything.

The incumbent they intend to protect with these dances, though, might just have outsmarted himself, or, more likely, out-dumbed himself this time around. However his loyal bootlickers might try to defend his actions, he doubles down on their double downs on their original double downs. These clowns who seem to firmly believe that they’re actually getting away with something, ain’t actually getting away with anything in the long run. All the King’sHorses might be arrayed to defend him, in hopes of somehow putting him together again, but no men or horses that have ever existed seem terribly likely to make much headway against such a dedicated doofus. All the King’sHorses and all the King’s men seem unlikely to save our incumbent from himself again. Thank Heavens!

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Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz