“What A Country!”

The slanging match between the the zany Donald Trump and the morally and mentally deranged Marjorie Taylor Greene has dragged American national politics to the level of Chicago. Both of them, when decades ago they were twelve, have been punished by normal parents for their immature behavior.

In my lifetime, I have witnessed from afar every president since the death of FDR, who, although a complete scoundrel, ar lezst knew how to behave with dignity on public occasions. Truman was the first buffoon in the White House since Lincoln, whose fondness for dirty jokes embarrassed his cronies and their wives. Harry's silly defense of his daughter's musical abilities was ridiculed, though his imitation of HV Kaltenborn got laughs at the time. In retrospect he looks like a fool. Reagan upped the ante with his joke-telling--Aides claim he carried the jokes on cards, though his best joke was spontaneous: Shot in an assassination attempt, he quipped, "I hope the doctors are Republicans."

Jimmy Carter, with his folksy sentimentalism and his rendition of "Salt Peanuts", lowered the bar still further, while Clinton's saxophone performance on television should have been the limit, but he was easily eclipsed by the follies of Bush II, Obama, and Biden. Each President, it seems, has learned to imitate the arrogance and follies of his predecessors, until we now have a President who has turned the White House into Las Vegas. We might as well have Sam Kinison or Elon Musk as President.

It is not at all that Trump is stupid or was not brought up with good manners, but what started as a successful television act has now become part of his character. His Hollywood alter ego, like Stevenson's Mr. Hyde, cannot be exorcised. Like Mussolini, Trump started out as a forceful and shrewd operator, but also like Mussolini, he cannot help playing to his audience. Count Ciano, the Duce's son-in-law, after listening to a Churchill speech, expressed his dismay over the Italian leader's buffoonery. Many a Trump supporter must be thinking along similar lines.

I still support most, though not all, of the President's agenda, and I wish him success in getting rid of violent Third World immigrants and making peace in the Ukraine and the Middle East, but he and his goose-stepping Maga supporters are working irremediable harm to whatever is left of the American republic.

Where is Yakov Smirnoff, the Russian comedian who wrote jokes for Reagan? We need to hear him again, concluding, after describing bit of American insanity, "And I thought, what a country!"