GOP is finally running out of people to blame

Now that Donald Trump no longer has a White House press secretary with a ready cherubic smile and a ton of snark, we can all see that the paint is peeling off his delusional presidency. 

I’m not just talking about the Reflecting Pool.

Republicans like Rep. Byron Donalds, now the GOP nominee to succeed Ron DeSantis as governor of Florida, has habitually and enthusiastically repeated and amplified Trump’s whims and still claims with a straight face — as he did on Fox News this week — that Democratic policy and the actions of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are responsible for the horror under which we currently live. Never mind the fact the Democrats currently hold no power in Washington and can’t implement any policies of any kind.

At least Republicans are finally, if obliquely, admitting that things aren’t so good in the country. Trump, however, isn’t ready to concede that. According to him, America would have burst into flames and melted into the bedrock mantle if he hadn’t come to town. Now? We hear many in and out of government saying that his presence ensures the outcome he predicted the Democrats would visit upon us all. 

Like I say, the paint is peeling. 

Time for this commercial break. On Wednesday, Trump was seen on the South Lawn praising a brand of fertilizer made by a company that, as he noted, had given him a sizable campaign contribution. Trump says it’s great stuff. Hey, they paid. He played. Very often, he is exactly as transparent as he claims to be. At the end of this live commercial he said that this fertilizer made for “happy grass.” He sounded like he’d been smoking some of that stuff. 

On the one hand, this is incredible corruption, but if you’re a CEO, having the president push your product directly in front of the White House isn’t a bad thing. You can’t blame business for doing what business does. You can blame the rest of us for not stopping it before it got this bad.

Yep, the paint is peeling.

To overcome the absence of departed pep secretary Karoline Leavitt, Byron Donalds and the rest of Trump’s puppets have been dancing long and hard lately. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told reporters the economy had taken off and was on its way into the stratosphere until we experienced this little detour “called Iran.” You could say he unwittingly justified every American’s anger over a pointless, useless war that is making all our lives more difficult and more expensive. He was trying to back up his leader, but accidentally threw him to the wolves. But was it really accidental? 

The key point here is that the GOP has been in charge in D.C. for more than a year and a half. Republicans control the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court and the presidency. They vowed they’d fix the economy and have only moved the needle backward. Everyone who pays rent, utilities and grocery bills and worries about what they’ll do if they have to face a sudden health crisis knows it.

Republicans are screaming about socialism ruining the country while those so-called socialists are pushing free healthcare. Who do you think the American public will listen to? The GOP’s pitch was, roughly speaking, that they could use extreme methods to take care of the cleanup on aisle seven. They have obviously failed. Now other folks are making the same claim from the opposite side of the court. I remain skeptical that any political party in this country can affect real and lasting positive change. They’re too busy demonizing each other, with Trump as lead demon who, along with other minor imps, feed on the filthy lucre of oligarchs and billionaires.

Even if Trump and his lesser demons, in their bacchanalian zeal, were right in pinning blame for how the country got the way it is on Biden and the Democrats — and I’m not saying they are — their self-incriminating statements amount to admitting that they can’t handle the problem either. If you got elected to fix the system and nearly two years later everything is much worse, then it’s time to hire a new plumber — and not the Richard Nixon type.

Making a sale to the electorate as a Republican this year is a difficult task indeed. Even the disorganized Democrats might be able to crawl over that low bar. We can’t say a GOP victory is impossible, but it seems conditional on a variety of narrowing possibilities, especially considering the accused criminals, domestic abusers and otherwise morally bankrupt candidates they are offering us. Then there are the Democrats. All the Republicans can do is accuse the party that’s out of power of somehow wielding the power, and doing so as part of a sinister communist conspiracy. These midterms promise to be fun: the old and befuddled far right versus the young and arrogant far left, vying for attention and a chance to feed at the public trough.

Even corrupt public servants deserve a second chance. Sure, some of them should have to work in soup kitchens for a decade to earn that second chance — you know, in addition to whatever prison time they serve. After all, we want good people. 

But no one who’s been convicted of 34 felonies should get another chance. If he never goes to prison, he should be forced to work the rest of his natural life handing out free meals in a soup kitchen in an impoverished  county in the Deep South, with weekends spent answering phones on the substance abuse hotline. 

Paint peeling. Hear it?

Remember Michael Cohen? He was the former Trump “fixer” who testified against his ex-boss in the New York criminal case. He also testified in a highly publicized congressional hearing on Feb. 27, 2019, telling the House Oversight Committee that Trump was a “racist,” a “con man” and a “cheat.”

On his podcast, Cohen he has often referred to Trump with a scatological insult (“VonS***zInPantz”), which even entered the official court transcript during the 2024 hush-money trial when Trump’s defense attorney brought it up.

But the paint is peeling, and Cohen recently got a chance to interview Trump for his podcast. Some liberals who have welcomed Cohen’s criticisms of Trump are now calling him a weasel, a sell-out and worse, turning the scatological nickname back at him. Hey, the American public can be crude and cruel. Those two guys definitely know about that.

For the documentary “The First 100 Days,” I asked Cohen in January 2025 what he might ask Trump if he got the chance to talk to him. Cohen said he believed he was owed an explanation.

Many journalists would love to get the opportunity to interview Trump one-on-one, and might pursue more ambitious lines of questioning. The fact that Trump gave an interview to someone who has publicly called him a racist, a con man and a cheat, and who has suggested that the president is incontinent, says a lot about both men. Hey, it should give us hope. It sounds like Trump is desperate to tell his story to literally anyone.

Few, perhaps, would have employed the same tactics Cohen used. But the folks at Breitbart, News Nation and similar outlets who preface their briefing-room questions by referencing “mainstream media” can only wish they were as successful as Cohen in getting Trump on their show.

Those who do interview Trump should treat him no differently than we used to treat the accused criminals we interviewed on “America’s Most Wanted.” That’s why I’ll never interview him while he’s president. 

So how did Cohen’s interview with Trump turn out? On Thursday we got a preview. It sounded a lot like Trump’s standard stump speech. He began by saying the country is doing well and Cohen responding, “Thanks to you, Mr. President.” Both said they were victims of a “weaponized” Department of Justice. Later on, Cohen volunteered to stage a presidential press conference and played “Reunited” by Peaches & Herb. People are too busy searching for things “to be enraged about,” he said. Cohen ended the 20-minute preview by saying that he’s putting the past behind him and that the $40 trillion national debt is a huge problem. Then he played “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” by War. 

Would it surprise me to see Cohen named as the next press secretary? Not as much as it should. And Trump would throw him under the bus, first chance he got. Why not? He’s done it before.

Again, the paint is peeling.

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Jokes aside, if I got the opportunity to sit down with Trump, I would treat him with the respect due his office, even though he has done nothing personally to deserve that.I would make clear the interview is for the American public at large, not for my entertainment. I would ask the questions. In a sane world he would provide answers that could facilitate greater understanding of his actions and motivations, and how he believes those actions will benefit the American people. 

Trump’s gift in the past was the ability to sell an alternate reality. He now does that very poorly, and by asking the proper questions we might be able to clarify this country’s predicament — as if many of us haven’t already come to the conclusion that we’re terminally screwed.  

When people get a chance to interview the president — any president, not just this one — the issues and questions should be well researched and precise, in hopes of eliciting responses that are concise and specific. Too much of today’s political discourse consists of “gotcha” moments. Those of us in the press do it. Politicians marinate themselves in it. Trump perfected it. No other president has ever called a reporter “Piggy,” much less gotten away with it.

And if reporters are not playing the gotcha moment, then we are too often serving  as propagandists for those in power. Then again, many of us just don’t know how to ask real questions. 

Yeah, the paint is peeling.

What could be more symbolic of the depths of depravity we’ve hit than a president literally giving a paid testimonial on the White House lawn for fertilizer? While the punchlines write themselves, I never had that on my bingo card. I never even imagined such a possibility. It’s a criminal act and an empty and meaningless prostitution of the office. It demeans the entire nation, and adds to the instability in the world.

And what can your average White House reporter do? Not much, beyond watching the turgid, disconcerting vomitorium we call politics with a jaundiced eye, careful of the manipulations and machinations of those who are out to feed their own greed while screwing the rest of us into the ground. It helps if we can laugh about it. 

As we can clearly see this week, the paint is peeling and we have no way to fix it.  

Can I interest you in some fertilizer? Everybody needs “happy grass.”

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