These just won’t feel timely tomorrow, by which time, deo volente, President Mike Pence will be making his moving plans.

This is no longer “how, my fellow Americans, could you have elected this guy?” It now has become “Is this the end of this particular brief national nightmare and the resumption of normal restlessness?”

1

Recommended:

1. Peggy Noonan’s masterfully devastating Trump Is Woody Allen Without the Humor (Half his tweets show utter weakness. They are plaintive, shrill little cries, usually just after dawn). I’m with Rod Dreher: if the preceding link doesn’t work, go to her Twitter feed and click from there.
2. Rod Dreher, Conservative Woman Publicly Humiliates Trump. You can skip toward the end, to the paragraph that begins “It’s funny, but before I read this, I was explaining to my kids ….”
3. Kenneth Starr: Mr. President, please cut it out.
4. Charles Krauthammer, Sessions lessons.
5. Eugene Robinson, The worst is yet to come.

Robinson is last because all the others are Republican and “conservative” in some sense.

2

We need a little comic relief in these midsummer horse latitudes of the mind as the ill-starred Trump Show appears to enter its ceremonial death dance …

The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine — in this case, inexorably toward the restorative medicine of the 25th amendment. There is, after all, that hoary old artifact called the national interest lurking somewhere offstage aside of all this colorful mummery, especially as the Russian Meddling gambit appears to be dribbling away to nothing. It’s more than self-evident that poor Trump is in so far over his head that he’s come down with something like the bends, a debilitating systemic disorder rendering him unfit to execute the powers of office. Decades from now, they’ll say he had “the tweets.”

…

The most economical script would have Trump graciously “resign” and be allowed to return to his familiar money-grubbing activities in real estate, where he can really only do harm to his own bank accounts and family posterity ….

(James Howard Kunstler, emphasis added)

It did feel to me like a “ceremonial death dance” this week — as if Trump is setting the stage for a resignation, blaming all the treachery around him for frustrating his magnificent beautiful plans to MAGA (i.e., get lots of money and limelight and set up Ivanka as future Empress).

* * * * *

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.