Stop giving Donald bad ideas

Via Politico:

A federal appeals court panel expressed skepticism Friday about the Trump administration’s view that courts are powerless to stop the construction of the White House ballroom now that the East Wing had been demolished.

Two members of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit repeatedly pressed administration lawyers about its argument that President Donald Trump’s pet project — now well underway — could not be stopped by the courts even if it was found to be illegal, because it was too far along and involved significant national security interests. [...]

Millett, an Obama appointee, peppered Roth with questions about the extent of the Trump administration’s view of its power to “move fast and break things” without being subject to legal challenge.

“If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty — the people whose ancestors that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast — nothing can be done?” the judge asked.

“I think that’s right, yes,” Roth responded.

Please stop doing this. Please stop giving the lunatic Donald Trump new bad ideas.

Now, I am not an idiot. I do realize that this is an exchange of a very specific and useful type, both inside courtrooms and in rhetoric in general.

LAWYER: On behalf of my client, I am going to propose an utterly ridiculous theory of law that, if the court is willing to accept it, would bar courts from weighing in on anything my client does forever.

JUDGE: To show how idiotic your premise is, here is a hypothetical situation that highlights how your argument would lead to batshit insane outcomes that we think everyone in this courtroom agrees would be bad and batshit insane.

LAWYER: Oh ho! And now I am going to double down on my ridiculous theory, because even though everybody here understands that the outcomes this theory would allow are definitely batshit insane, I have already staked my professional identity to this idiotic premise and we will all pretend I believe in it so that my client and all potential future clients can see how thoroughly I am willing to debase myself to defend their every petty insane whim.

So yes, this is just the usual bit of rhetorical gamesmanship. The court wants to know how far the Justice Department attorney is willing to go to defend the Trumpified DoJ's premise that Donald Trump can break whatever laws he wants, so long as he does it quickly, and Judge Patricia Millet asked whether Trump could knock down the Statue of Liberty on a whim because that's a good, solid example of something that nearly everyone in America would be horrified by but which, according to the designated Justice Department lickspittle of the day, nobody in America would actually have the power to stop.

What the judge is looking for, here, is whether the advocate can come up with a limiting caveat that would allow the court to agree with their theory while still preventing the obviously batshit insane scenarios from taking place. And if the lawyer has any smarts, they immediately understand what they're being asked and can quickly come up with some half-assed rationale for why the court doesn't need to worry about the batshit insane things, because the batshit insane things can be dealt with by applying other legal frameworks that would apply in those other cases but not this one.

A good lawyer can do that. A lawyer who has been commandeered into making a ridiculous argument because everyone higher up on the pay scale decided they didn't want to humiliate themselves in a public courtroom might not have had time to come up with the needed corollaries. Or had time, but couldn't bring themselves to. Or are keenly aware that if a court asks you whether Donald Trump can do an obviously batshit insane thing, you had better damn well say yes if you don't want Pam Bondi or Todd Blanche or Donald himself firing your ass before you've even made it back to the office.

I get all that. The problem, though, is that Trump is a very, very stupid person. He doesn't understand rhetorical device. He doesn't understand the purpose of the question or the face-saving opportunity the judge threw to the day's designated lickspittle.

All Trump will understand is that there's now a Department of Justice lawyer declaring, on the record, that Donald can do whatever he wants to the Statue of Liberty—and he will internalize that on a cellular level. It will be stuffed into one of the hollowed-out spaces in his brain that once housed his sense of dignity or the ability to understand percentages, and it will now live there forever.

Huh, he is now already thinking to himself. Why haven't I screwed with the Statue of Liberty yet?

We've seen this over and over. It's a staple of Trump's White House press scrums. Some (usually rightwing) White House correspondent will shout a question at Trump along the lines of "Mr. President sir, do you think you might do [batshit insane thing]?", and Donald will invariably respond by saying "I might do [batshit insane thing]. I might do it. I could do it if I wanted to. I might do it in two weeks, we'll see."

It doesn't matter if the batshit insane thing is possible or impossible, whether it's legal or illegal. It doesn't matter if Trump had never once heard of the batshit insane thing before this question was posed; that will have no impact on his answer, none at all. It is the method by which far-right cranks introduce him to new batshit insane things that he hadn't previously thought of, things like "what if we turned invading screwworms into the newest weight loss fad," and lodge those things into his brain-holes where they can ferment and turn into something new.

Now that Trump has been reminded that he can wreck the Statue of Liberty, he will almost certainly do so. What happens next is not just predictable, but inevitable.

At minimum, Donald will announce that he's going to cover the entire Statue of Liberty with gold leaf. It doesn't matter if it takes half the contents of Fort Knox to do it; when Donald Trump wants to turn something classy, slapping gold leaf on things is the only thing he knows how to do.

And then he will decide that the poem engraved on a bronze plaque in the statue's pedestal should be removed, because Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breath free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore is among the wokest and most DEI things anyone has ever written down, and goes so strongly against the Trump administration's entire ideology that it's a wonder they haven't dug up Emma Lazarus' corpse and deported her bones.

Her grave is in Queens, by the way. So you know Trump has fumed about it at least once in his wretched life.

Nothing Trump does ever ends with slapping gold leaf on something or censoring something, though, and so Trump and his collection of pocket rats will assuredly upscope the project. Why does Lady Liberty look so dour? She would be prettier if we put a smile on her. In fact, her whole face is a wreck; it ought to be removed and redone so that she has a perfect Mar-a-Lago face, the one with the wide frog-like mouth and reinforced sneer muscles.

And why is Liberty wearing a robe, of all things? Nobody in Mar-a-Lago would be caught dead wearing that nonsense. A true Lady Liberty would show more skin; she should be modeled after the fan dancers hired for Mar-a-Lago parties, or the swimsuit models, or the scantily clad girls lounging in oversized martini glasses, hired solely so that rich decrepit men can ogle them from below. A Lady Liberty lounging in a 200 foot tall martini glass, now that would represent the new Trump States of America.

But such extensive modifications would get the White House sued again, so it would all be called a national security program so that the courts would have to pound sand.

There will be a drone port on the top of her head, you see. The spikes of her crown will be replaced with a row of ICBMs. Her eyes will host anti-drone lasers, and her torch will host the most advanced electronic eavesdropping equipment ever devised; not one damn person in New York or Jersey will be able to badmouth Donald without Lady Liberty hearing of it.

And then, at the end, Trump will decide that having "Liberty" represented by a dame, a chick, a broad is still an insult to what he thinks America ought to be, and instead of Lady Liberty showing off her gams in a 200 foot lucite martini glass it will all be replace with a golden Donald Trump statue twice as high and with more muscle definition than anyone in the Trump extended family has ever sported in their whole limousined lives.

We know how this man thinks. Or how he "thinks," anyway, now that his family has given up on trying to restrain him and he settles into the confused, often incoherent rage that marks early dementia. Right now he is fixated on destroying the law and the White House, but it would take only the tiniest of nudges to convince him that the Lincoln Memorial should be the Trump and Lincoln Memorial, or that the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame should become the Donald Trump Eternal Chocolate Fountain, or that the U.S. dollar should become Trump Bucks.

So I beg you, federal judges. I beg you, supposed American journalists. I insist, random people who meet Trump on one of his golf courses. Stop giving the lunatic new bad ideas. If we can keep him occupied on just a handful of his most absurdist obsessions, like putting up golden lettering to remind him that the Oval Office is called the Oval Office, or putting up a brightly lit cage match arena on the White House lawn where it can fester as an eyesore for as long as he maintains an interest, that might be the best we can hope for.

No new shit, though. Stop giving him new shit to possibly obsess over. The man has one foot in the grave already, we can get through this if everyone would just shut their pie holes already.