There is no President of the United States
This sick joke has gone on far too long. For the better part of two years now, there has been no President of the United States. Instead a career criminal, who conspired with a foreign government to rig the election in his favor, has been occupying the office of President and refusing to surrender himself to federal law enforcement so he can be indicted and put on trial. Now we have emergencies going on at home and abroad, and we’re being reminded that America is simply not equipped to function without a President.
You could make the strong argument that the United States would be better off if there were literally no President of the United States, if the office were simply sitting empty. There hasn’t been a single identifiable instance in which the nation has been better off with Donald Trump illegally occupying the office than if it were literally vacant. Then there are weeks like this one.
Even as Donald Trump continues to squat in the Oval Office while Special Counsel Robert Mueller chips away at him, Trump and his complicit Republican Party have been using increasingly dangerous and dishonest rhetoric aimed at specific Democratic political figures. Yesterday, someone decided to try to assassinate several of those Democratic political figures. Trump responded by holding a deranged political rally and blaming the media and the Democrats for the fact that someone tried to blow up the media and the Democrats.
We don’t have a President of the United States. We have a mentally deranged criminal squatter occupying the Oval Office who answers to Putin and who aspires to be Hitler. America can’t begin to return to being a functioning democracy until Donald Trump is in prison. For now, we’re learning the increasingly horrifying answer to the longstanding question of just how important the President truly is to the fate of the nation.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report