Washingtonian today is not okay, Now it’s really Crazy-town. Donald Trump’s administration produced a horrifying, blood-spattered video showcasing extreme video-game violence and the YouTube clip has quickly become an internet hit.
by Anwar A. Khan
It is not ‘The Crazy House’, the boot king of Kansas, USA. Looking for the perfect gift for that cowboy, cowgirl, co-worker, or employee on your list? A Crazy House gift certificate is great for birthdays, Christmas, or any other occasion. Make them for any amount. We pride ourselves on great, friendly customer service! These are the shibboleths of Kansas’s Crazy House.
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| The White House crazy-town |
But this is not the Crazy House like Kansas’s Crazy House. It is the White House crazy-town. The White House you find yourself driving down a dirt road through thick Washington D.C. rainforest until you come to an old manor. The building sags with the weight of age, drooping into ruin like some weary ghost house. It's a bright sunny day, but the moment you click your flashlight on and go inside to search for your missing soul, the darkness surrounds you. It's a palpable, heavy, cloying darkness, and already this writer finds his thoughts racing.
It is a captivating, atmospheric horror game that White House uses all the genre's tropes with gleeful Abaddon. Apparently it seems as if it looks and sounds great! Combat is purposefully a little janky in the game. The man who is running this Crazy-house is not a super-soldier, and he doesn't shoot like one. This is made tedious by some clever tricks that are planted in his various fight locales. This Crazy House takes place in a world under the control of an all-powerful government called The United States. You will immediately put on death row, even though you have committed no crime.
The writer of this piece thinks as if he has pushed open the White House’s screen door so hard that one of the hinges busted, making it tilt crazily. Watch it, idiot. Anything I broke, I had to fix. It wasn’t like there was anyone else to do it. The New York Times has published an Op-Ed piece by an anonymous senior official in the Trump administration who claims to be part of the resistance within the White House against President Trump. The article came a day after excerpts were revealed from “Fear: Trump in the White House”, the latest book by Bob Woodward, a veteran journalist who uncovered the Watergate scandal. Bob’s book is the true reflections on Crazy-town of Trump’s White House.
Scott Lucas has said, “Every administration has people who leak. It’s part of bureaucracy, it’s part of in-fighting, it’s part of the attempt by journalists to find out what’s happening on the inside. But this administration in the last many months has been the leakiest that I can ever recall, I mean almost on a day-to-day basis you’ve got information coming out about factions within the administration, or in this case, Trump’s unpredictability, his lack of knowledge, his almost irrational behaviour.”
The sense of a dysfunctional administration led by someone who cannot lead has been crystallised by two events. First the revelations in the forthcoming book from Bob Woodward, the veteran journalist, based on more than a hundred interviews, in which officials are having to steal papers from Trump’s desk to prevent him from overreacting and taking certain action they see as counterproductive; where the White House has officials who were threatening to resign because of Trump apparently siding with white supremacists; where he has officials, senior officials, including his former chief of staff, calling him a liar, an idiot, a moron; where you have, in the words of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (according to the book although he denied it later), saying “we’re in Crazy-town”.
The White House officials say we are actually working with each other because, even though we support the policies that the administration is supposedly pursuing, we think that the man at the top is not only a threat to us, he’s a threat to the American system. Donald Trump is concerned about one thing, and it’s not the good of the nations, it’s the good of Donald Trump’s ego.
But any good operative maintains deep cover and whoever wrote this is trying to make sure that their deep cover is protected even as Donald Trump is charging around shouting “treason!” and organising a witch hunt to find the author. Trump’s delusional state appears to be especially harrowing. Former Chief of Staff John Kelly called Trump an idiot and also crazy: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazy-town,” Kelly is quoted as saying at a staff meeting in his office. “I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
Trump’s lawyer John Dowd has likewise called his client an idiot. Somewhat more audaciously, he has argued that Trump should not have to testify to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, because the transcript would leak, and foreign leaders would see that Trump is an idiot: Dowd then explained to Mueller and Quarles why he was trying to keep the president from testifying: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?”
Another Trump lawyer, Jay Sekulow, tried to argue to Robert Mueller that Trump could not be asked to give an interview because he is a compulsive liar. They literally explained to Mueller how they conducted a mock interview with Trump, and he was so unable to tell the truth that they considered him mentally disqualified from testifying. Jay Sekulow went to Mueller’s office and re-enacted the mock interview. Their goal: to argue that Trump couldn’t possibly testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.
“He just made something up. That’s his nature,” Dowd said to Mueller. Woodward has repeatedly scolded the media for its unfairness to Trump, and expressed skepticism about the Russia investigation. Another reporter who did the same thing, before proceeding to publish a book stuffed with harrowing inside tidbits about Trump’s dysfunction, is Michael Wolff. Perhaps both of them were shrewdly planting favourable commentary in order to warm up potential sources. Wolff’s book, and it’s too-amazing-to-be-real anecdotes, was met with a fair amount of skepticism from the mainstream media. The additional support from Woodward seems to confirm its essential thrust, if not every detail. However, dumb and crazy you might think Trump is, the reality always turns out to be even worse.
Washingtonian today is not okay, Now it’s really Crazy-town. Donald Trump’s administration produced a horrifying, blood-spattered video showcasing extreme video-game violence and the YouTube clip has quickly become an internet hit.
There has never been any evidence that fantasy video-game violence correlates with real-world violence, as the game industry has pointed out. The video depicts numerous violent deaths including beheadings, clubbings, and stabbings, as well as people’s heads being shot off and a mass shooting with automatic weapons. The White House moved the video to unlisted status (meaning it does not appear on the channel or in searches) shortly after uploading it.
A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead. Woodward illustrates how the dread in Trump’s orbit became all-encompassing over the course of Trump’s first year in office, leaving some staff members and Cabinet members confounded by the president’s lack of understanding about how government functions and his inability and unwillingness to learn.
The White House dismissed the book as a series of made-up stories. “This book is nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the President look bad,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. But the reality of Donald Trump is that, he is not a deeply principled, deep-thinking individual. He will throw his lieutenants under the bus whenever it becomes convenient. And much of his base will go along with him. According to Golf.com, Trump has explained his frequent appearances at various golf courses across America by saying to fellow players: "That White House is a real dump." And because of the general state of things; and the combination of circumstances at a given time, we may reason out that the White House under his steerage is a real dump.
-The End –
The writer is an independent political observer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs.
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