I can’t help thinking about the last worst president in American history who was surrounded by creepy, arrogant people with their own nefarious agenda that blinds them to the horrendous consequences of their apocalyptically stupid actions.

Trump, Miller, Sessions, Kelly, Neilsen and the rest of the alt-right blood and soil gang push forward an agenda to slow the browning of America by making immigration nearly impossible and sending  a message around the world that America does not want you if you’re black or brown.  They’re proud of a cruel, inhumane policy that they describe as “tough” because toughness is so needed to deal with a difficult situation.  Thoughtfulness and care are not needed, according to them, in much the same way that a plumber will use a c-wrench awkwardly to hammer a nail because a hammer is just not in their tool box.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby, Perle, Wolfowitz, Bolton and a previous generation of arrogant war hawks had such a hard-on for war in the Middle East they looked at Iraq and saw easy pickins.  Not one of them gave the slightest thought to the people of Iraq and the consequences of removing a long standing strong man leader.  They were completely taken by surprise by the enmity between Sunnis and Shiites, but how could they have known that when they thought all Muslims were the same?

In both cases people were given power that should never, ever be trusted with any more responsibility than holding the remote control when something unimportant is on the TV.  But the American people in both cases, with warning, chose to put them in powerful positions.  The establishment political parties to some extent or another looked the other way and allowed provably irresponsible people to run cabinet level agencies.  The beltway media acted as if the individuals in question, and their actions, were unexceptional choices imbuing them with levels of  credibility that they had not come anywhere close to earning.

Until things broke bad.  And then all of a sudden a massive fuck up that was completely avoidable came to light followed by denials of reality and then self-serving deflection.

Republicans do not change.  The media does not change.  So lives will be destroyed callously on schedule every few years or so as we keep letting morally repugnant people have the remote.