He's not sundowning

I spend what is likely an unhealthy amount of time listening to political podcasts and reading political newsletters and such (some better than others). In so doing I have heard/read a lot of comments about Felon47 becoming more and more demented, about how he's clearly less sane now than he was in his first term, how so much of what he's done of late can be correlated with what happens with dementia patients of various kinds.

I don't dispute the insanity of what the guy does—he is unquestionably, to use Jeff Tiedrich's term, "bugfuck nuts." He is a deranged, narcissistic loon that has no interest in facts or reality and has cultivated a fantasyland to impose on the public that is only now, with his insipid war figuratively blowing up in his face (if only it was literal), breaking down among his MAGA cultists.

But I do emphatically dispute the idea that any of his behavior is new and different than it was the first time around. It's not.

He was just as deranged, just as imbecilic, just as unconcerned with reality, just as cruel, just as corrupt and evil in his first term. There are differences, but they are not in his behavior or demeanor. The differences are in his staffing and in his quite justifiable takeaways from the events of the four years between his terms: That he can get away with almost anything.

He had people in his administration the first time around that would tell him no. That would run interference around him. That had some modicum of competence at their jobs (even the horrible William Barr compares very favorably with Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche as Attorney General). This time, everyone in the cabinet, everyone in the executive, everyone in his advisory circle is an obsequious toady and if someone crosses him in any way they get fired—even if the president has no legal authority to fire them, because Congress is almost completely feckless under the Republicans.

He was just this bad before, he was just being mitigated to a degree.

In the four years he was out of office, the Senate refused to convict him in his impeachment for trying to overthrow the government, the Supreme Court unconscionably gave him immunity from prosecution, his handpicked judge in Florida made his crimes under the Espionage Act go away, he suffered no real damage from his felony convictions in the election-interference/obstruction of justice Stormy Daniels matter, no indictments were brought by the Jack Smith investigation thanks to a timid Merrick Garland Justice Department and a successful run-out-the-clock strategy, and he convinced even more willfully ignorant dupes and marks to vote for him on the basis of outright lies and appeals to racism and misogyny.  Why would he not, especially as a narcissist, then believe he could get away with anything?

He feared consequences in his first term, at least early on. He was reported to say that the Mueller investigation would mean the end of his presidency; even he didn't think he could squash it as well as it was ultimately squashed with the help of the rest of the corrupt Republican party. Now he doesn't even consider the possibility of consequences unless they're consequences to his image.

He's outraged that his war backfired on him. He's desperate to get himself out of that self-dug hole, but only because he can't seem to make people believe he didn't fuck up. He is unfathomably insecure, he needs affirmation that people like him even as he steps on their necks. He doesn't think about legal ramifications of what he does because he thinks he's stacked the deck sufficiently in his favor with the courts and what used to be the Department of Justice; he does think about "his" people turning on him and the potential revelation to the MAGA cult that he (correctly) thinks they're suckers and fools.

But because he's such an idiot himself, one who cannot think ahead, one who cannot conceive of other people not being self-obsessed grievance factories, one who has no grounding in the lifestyles of non-filthy-rich Americans, he will keep saying and doing things to undermine himself. He will continue on unfiltered by rational actors, keep committing atrocities, keep destroying the reputation of the United States, keep spouting nonsense, keep lying about anything he thinks is important and revealing what he thinks is unimportant by not lying about it (i.e. telling a reporter that gasoline isn't really expensive and its cost will probably keep going up for the foreseeable future).

It's not new. It's not recent-onset dementia. His cheese is not sliding further off his cracker, for it was never on his cracker to begin with.

And it angers me that the press, the podcasters, the commentators, the media figures, et. al, essentially validate what came before by ascribing the second-term outrages to diminished capacity. HE'S THE SAME. Thanks in large part to that same press, he learned that he can surround himself with toadies without significant pushback and that he need not fear legal consequences for anything he does this time. THAT'S why it's worse. (There's some chance that his physical health might be worse, but since COVID didn't kill him it's hard to imagine that he'll finally eat one Big Mac too many before his term is up. I mean, we can hope, but....) 

Press coverage, reportage, public opinion: that's what has to change to reflect reality. That's what will get us a Congress that will act. It's moving in the right direction, but it's not enough, and I fear it won't ever be enough if the regime's actions and behavior are excused—even if the excuse is "dementia."