The Twit on Twitter

Addressing the Israeli president and other elected notables, Donald Trump said he had “just got back from the Middle East.”

Protocol called for straight faces and no laughter, but that was asking too much for Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador in Washington. He snickered in dismay and tried to hide his disbelief by running a hand over his hair.

President Trump had once again proved that the emperor has no clothes. Whether he manages to complete his full term in office he will go down as “The Twit of Twitter.”

We saw it coming from the moment the electoral college votes declared him the winner. The unconventional campaign candidate had stormed into the White House as the king of insults. Anyone standing in his way was trashed with a moniker, whether it be “lyin’, low-energy, cheatin’, crooked,” or any other put-down.

Exalted office made no difference to the septuagenarian with the limited vocabulary of a pre-teen child, exaggerating in hyperbole. Within days of becoming president we grew accustomed to his repetitious use of the words “amazing, horrible, and tremendous,” most times coupled with the words, “in history.” Without a teleprompter President Trump came across as an oaf, a buffoon, the village idiot, and a dunce.

He quickly solidified himself as a national embarrassment. No amount of scorn can turn the tide, for he remains dumbly unaware of his own defects.

The Office of the Presidency survives inviolate. It is the incumbent most voters despise. Even if his policies did not weaken the poor and disadvantaged, while molly coddling the rich and elite, Trump’s persona has many wanting to run for the vomitorium.

He will surely be the last successful businessperson, without electoral experience, to occupy the White House. Chief executives of corporations are used to swinging the ax to rid others of jobs in the sole interests of profits. Only when stocks tumble will shareholders rise up in anger and vote them out.

Trump’s authoritarian background positioned him to dictate the deal, bully, threaten, and intimidate those within his business realm. They did not groom him for elected office, where constitutional checks and balances ensure Americans live in a country of laws, enshrined through generations.

Trump’s accession of presidential power has brought with it a tempest of turmoil. Respected figures in the co-equal branches of the judiciary and legislature have suffered from his intemperate and dizzying despotism. A judge with a Mexican heritage was scolded by Trump for his inability to adjudicate without bias. Another was derided as a “so-called judge” for ruling against Trump’s ban on potential immigrants from Muslim countries.

The president swept away investigative and judicial heads in the FBI and the Justice Department to rid himself of looming opposition. He dismissed the minority leader of the Democrats in the U.S. senate as a “head clown.”

The president’s unlearned rule has even protected those with the most basic ignorance of their duties in the White House. Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, still works in the White House even though she brazenly, and perhaps unethically, urged Americans to buy goods peddled by the president’s daughter.

The headwinds are an omen of impending disaster. If the chiefs of major intelligence services survive their expected grillings by Congress, there is every expectation that Democratic control of the House of Representatives, after the mid-term elections next year, will result in Trump’s impeachment for obstructing justice.

Fortunately for President Donald Trump, he should be acquitted in the ensuing Senate trial, where a two-thirds majority is needed to convict.

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Anthony S. Pitch is a former journalist in America, England, Israel, and Africa.