President Narcissus

"If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read, 'President Can’t Swim.'"- Lyndon Johnson

So, yes, lots of Presidents have had to deal with bad press, but none that I know of have described the press as the "enemy of the people." But now they have.

Jon Sopel was the White House correspondent for the BBC during the last of the Obama presidency and the first term of Donald Trump. And he summarized what can make us all so tired of fact-checking and keeping track of the outrages we all see...

" It is impossible to cover every single thing happening at the moment without going mad. Or, as someone put it to me, reporting on this President is like trying to put your mouth over a fire hydrant and catching every drop of water."

So, sooner or later you get tired of outrage. It is wearing on a fella to keep up with the silly and serious malarkey dribbling out of this White House like apple sauce from a UFC fighter at the weigh-ins for the Trump birthday bash fight on the White House lawn.

The weigh-ins for the grotesquely cheesy event, by the way, were held at the Lincoln Memorial. Really, right in front of Honest Abe.

And, just a quick observation. Watching beefy, tattooed mounds of walking steroids sashay through the Green Room at the White House, where James Madison signed the first US Declaration of War in 1812, was an affront to the eyes as well as to history.

Or warming up in front of another bust of Lincoln. Abe had to endure a lot during this vulgar bit of redneckery. And of course, no event involving Trump would be complete without an insult to former Presidents, or their wives, as when the same apple sauce spitting guy echoed an apparently popular right-wing internet meme that Michelle Obama is transgender.

That is a two-fer for this crowd, going after someone who is black, and throwing in the whole trans deal.

Then we get the G7 meeting with insults for our allies about the Iran deal, getting into a petty fight with Prime Minister Meloni of Italy and more, all in a couple of days. And always, always mention Biden or Obama in anything from the border to the budget to foreign affairs.

And there is a formula for this endless cascade of outrage. Of course, there is the whole Epstein diversion always underway, but this strategy has been used before. Now look, I'm not one to go into the whole Hitler deal as Hitler was uniquely evil.

And, again, I would be very careful making a direct comparison to that guy, with a couple of exceptions like Kim Jong-un or an Ayatollah or two. But an American analyst for the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, named Walter Langer analyzed the Fuhrer's political tactics and summarized them this way...

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Sound familiar? Nowadays, this strategy has been supercharged by the internet which gives new life to the old saying that, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

So, the problem with the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is due to vandals. Yes, vandals, not mistakes made by the contractor friend of the President who got the no-bid contract for $14-milllion.

"They're eating the paint! They're eating the algae!"

And without any sense of irony, the contract to clean up the algae, which is in full bloom in a Washington summer, went to a guy name John Cafaro, a convicted criminal and Trump donor, who got a Presidential pardon. He runs a company called, no really, Greenwater Services.

Add to that he looks like John Candy in a bad rug, and the story is now perfect.

But with the continual self-aggrandizement, the monuments to himself like the ballroom, Arc D'Trump, farcical lies about reflecting pool vandals, the Italian Prime Minister, and imagined accomplishments, I don't think we are dealing with any sort of Hitlerian monster, but a Greek God. No, it's not the one he imagines himself to be.

It's Narcissus, who, according to mythology, was so enamored of his own reflection, he could think of nothing else.

Well, until he fell asleep in a morning meeting.