The Idiot’s Guide to How Not to Run a Country

WEEKEND BRIEFING: From sending troops to cities and fiddling intel to messing with museums, money, companies and elections, Trump's authoritarian circus is something Republicans once would have hated

I often hear conservatives dismiss criticism of their spiritual leader as “Trump derangement syndrome.” The implication is that all of this outrage is just hysteria, and what we are living through is otherwise normal. It is sad to see so many people — some of them intelligent — so badly fooled. To set things straight, and in case anyone has been taking a break from the news in August, I propose a briefing on the latest outrageous absurdities.

Think I’m exaggerating? Then take a moment to peruse AQL’s Idiot’s Guide to How Not to Run the Country. It is a public service offered to future leaders, and the action point is simple. Look at the things the Trump administration is doing, and do exactly the opposite — or better yet, steer clear of the issue altogether. Your choice. No other president including Nixon would have behaved this way.

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It all comes back to the Supreme Court, whose destruction can be destribed as the original sin: Republicans blocked Merrick Garland in 2016, Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to step down, and Trump got lucky enough to fill the court with hacks. They have since ruled that the president enjoys immunity, one of the worst rulings in what was until recently a functioning democracy. So he assumes that anything he does, however idiotic or illegal, will be laundered by lemmings.

And remember: This is a guy who bragged about being able to get away with a gun murder on Fifth Avenue.

We could have chosen a huge number of examples, but time is short and everyone is busy. To pare down the list, we applied three filters: No mention of tricking the American people into a tax rise by lying about the nature of tariffs; no foreign policy matters (so we can forgive, for example, the absurd spectacle with Putin, or the freak show with European leaders); and only events of the past month. So without further ado, strap in for a half-dozen of the most egregious exhibits of idiotic behavior by a chief executive in US history.