Faced with economic, military, and social failure, Trump's narcissism has him hunting for scapegoats

On Thursday, Donald Trump fired lickspittle Attorney General Pam Bondi. She will unquestionably go down as the worst and most corrupt attorney general the nation has ever seen, and just as unquestionably will lose that title the moment the seditionist omnifelon Trump succeeds in replacing her with someone even crookeder.

Bondi's brief tenure will forever be notorious, because she acted as a crook. She was the willing saboteur who forever erased the would-be independence of Department of Justice, turning it explicitly into a weapon to be used against her fascist party's enemies. She succeeded in purging the department of prosecutors who gained convictions against those who stormed the U.S. Capitol and sought to hunt down lawmakers on Trump's behalf. She oversaw a sweeping and yet still incompetent cover up of her president's involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. She oversaw the launch of countless new investigations and indictments of people who committed the sin of exposing Trump's corruption, or voting against him, or merely pissing him off.

But we will forget her, soon enough. She was never important. She never rose to competence, much less legitimacy. She was a hack who did hack things no differently than any other hack in Trump's orbit would do, an interchangeable toady plucked from a bucket of indistinguishable others, and will now retire to one of the posh make-work jobs that washed-up conservatives fade away to when their failures grow so large that even a movement based on pompous incompetence can't redeem them.

Ah, there we go. That felt good. And we're done with it now.

There is no tricky nuance to Pam Bondi's firing. No conspiracies are at play, here. The truth of it is that Trump is both a malignant narcissist and a stone-cold idiot, and now that daughter Ivanka has given up her daddy-whisperer duties and Trump has similarly isolated himself from anyone in his orbit who might once have been able to talk sense into him, there is nobody left to stop him from "governing" strictly by his own idiot delusions.

And none of it has worked. Even slightly. His tariffs have been an economic clusterfuck; his Stephen Miller-pushed vendetta against immigrants and any Americans on the street who might look like immigrants became repulsive even to some of the same voters who had no problem brushing off his attempt to murder Congress, and his little tee-hee assassination-and-bombing campaign against Iran turned into an actual fucking war, which is an outcome that never occurred to him and none of his supplicating goons bothered to tell him.

Trump is, however, the poster child of malignant narcissism. He has it in all its forms and to the maximum possible degree; he has never, not in a lifetime peppered with monumental screw ups, ever once given voice to the thought that maybe everything turning to shit around him might be his fault.

It's never his fault. Not ever. If he doesn't win an Emmy, if he can't keep a casino solvent, if he doesn't sell a large enough number of mail-order stakes, if he gets caught stealing national security documents and showing them off to his private-sector peers as a boast, none of it is ever his fault. It's the fault of everyone around him. It's the fault of his enemies, who rig the Emmys against him. It's the fault of his underlings, who are forever foiling his un-foilable ideas through their own stupidity.

It doesn't help that the man is quite clearly descending into dementia, inventing conversations that never took place, losing the plot during meetings, and becoming even more prone to the fits of rage that so often accompany dementia symptoms and which Donald was already notorious for many decades ago.

Pam Bondi got fired because Donald Trump wanted to see all his enemies in jail, but lives in a country where those people get to have trials and discovery and their own lawyers—which, in Trump's mind, is all Pam Bondi's fault because she couldn't find a way to destroy enough of the country to make his dementia-addled vengeance happen anyway.

Kristi Noem got fired because Donald Trump launched the sort of massive, nationwide campaign of government-sponsored white nationalist violence that he and his most goonish minions had long promised to unleash, only to have his own obsessed-over poll numbers collapse spectacularly because, for reasons unfathomable to his psychopathic self, most Americans do not want to watch acts of genocide unfold outside their favorite deli or grocery store.

But now Trump has landed himself in a self-imposed disaster that threatens to dwarf all of his other failures. Donald Trump, narcissistic lying gasbag, "commander in chief" of the most powerful military to ever exist, is on the losing end of a shooting war with a middle power that wasn't even supposed to fight back. Iran was supposed to be another Venezuela; it is obvious, now, that both Trump and the even dimmer Pete Hegseth thought that assassination Iran's top leadership and destroying the most visible assets in its military would be met with no Iranian reaction at all, in the same way that Venezuela calmly accepted the possibly-coordinated capture of its own leader and politely carried on without much protest.

It didn't happen, Trump now both looks like the idiot he is and has been cut off from his one and only move after he's screwed something up catastrophically, which is to declare victory and run away, and now that's going to be everybody's problem.

After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George. Several people familiar with the White House’s plans told us that there are active discussions about others leaving the administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

Ah, there we go. Trump is failing on every front; Pete Hegseth finds himself architect of a war that threatens to make America's loss in Vietnam look trivial in comparison. Since that can't possibly be their fault, we're headed for a good old fashioned authoritarian purge. Titanic-style, to be specific.

This is textbook narcissism. It's almost comical in its pathos. Dear Leader, who cannot fail and who surrounds himself only with supplicants who will never ever stop him from doing something stupid, is now flailing around in a puddle of his own sewage but remains quite certain that not a damn bit of it is his fault. His most favored aides (Hegseth; Miller) are the ones who remain most responsible for the failures, but because their sociopathies most closely mirror Leader's own, they will receive none of the blame.

No, it must be the fault of the women and the nonwhites, as it always is

On Thursday Hegseth fired the Army chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, whose term was expected to be four years ending in September 2027. George, the Army’s top officer, was senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during the Biden administration.

George recently asked to meet with Hegseth to discuss Hegseth's blocking of promotions for some Army officers, which seemed to focus on women and Black men, but Hegseth refused to meet or discuss his decisions, according to two additional U.S. officials.

Hegseth, who declared an end to “woke” culture at the Defense Department last year, has criticized DEI initiatives adopted by the Biden administration, as has President Donald Trump. Hegseth also has publicly accused the military of awarding promotions based on diversity rather than merit.

We were all wondering why Hegseth was targeting the U.S. Army chief for retribution, despite the Army having the least role in Hegseth's current screwup. Is it prelude to a ground invasion, one that the general strongly resisted due to its risk and stupidity? Did Gen. George end up on Hegseth's enemies list after attempting to explain to him the reason that the U.S. Army does not like its helicopter pilots going rogue and flying their craft to Kid Rock's house?

No, it now looks like it is just an extension of Hegseth's day-drinking gutter racism. Pete Hegseth, former Fox News host and longtime war crime advocate, the man with the Christian nationalist tattoos and who could be thoroughly trounced in a battle of military wits by that basketball-playing dog from the movies, still believes the United States military should not have women or Black people in it.

And since Hegseth is under an enormous amount of stress right now, thanks to being the biggest military fuck-up since the guy who ordered a big wooden horse to be wheeled through the gates, he's going to retreat to the familiar ground of firing The Woke so that his gin-soaked brain doesn't have to contemplate the rest of it.

Here is what to take away from Bondi's ouster, and from whatever administration purge comes to fruition in the coming weeks: Donald Trump is a screw up. He knows he's screwed up. He knows there's no possible way he's going to come out of this war and these court cases without looking like a dimwit loser.

But since he can't admit it, he's going to turn it into a Stalinesque purge of the underlings who carried out his orders, blaming it all on them. And then he's going to hold up more renderings of his goddamn stupid "ballroom"-slash-bribe-o-plex, which is the only thing that still brings his decaying brain joy.

What a loser. And shame on every Republican everywhere for being willing to destroy the whole damn country for one spray-tanned frothing, whining, racist crook.