Gold Hickory

We've all had a good laugh at the latest display of Trumpian ignorance -- Andrew Jackson the "swashbuckler" whose poor wife was maligned to death, who could have staved off the Civil War with "a deal" had he only lived another twenty years, and those wonderful people in Tennessee who love him so much, etc.  Did Bannon give him a children's book about Jackson, or just show him a movie?  It's impossible to imagine Trump visiting The Hermitage for more than a ten-minute photo-op; it's a beautiful place but Studio 54 it's not.  But this isn't historical derpitude like his amazed discoveries about Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.  Trump's infatuation with Jackson stems from his hatred of Native Americans, whom he blames for the failure of his casinos (nothing is ever the result of Donald's stupidity and incompetence).  Between chats with dictators and signing his name, he can lift his eyes to the portrait of Jackson and long for the days when a man could kill Indians and own black people and nobody called him a racist.

At around the same time we learned that even the "grownups" are historically illiterate.  Prince Rebus Reince Priebus revealed that even the First Amendment is not safe from these troglodytes -- they're "looking at" ways to keep those nasty journalists (and bloggers, and speakers, and graffiti writers) from "libeling" them with lies.  I hardly know where to start.  A regime of top-to-bottom fabulists is complaining about lies?  Trump has made a hobby of suing, or threatening to sue, anyone who fails to flatter him, so perhaps he doesn't know that office holders are fair game and always have been.  People wrote terrible things about George Washington.  His successor, John Adams, pushed through the 1798 Sedition Act, which made it a crime to criticize John Adams.  (Three years later, Jefferson got it repealed.)  Ever since, politicians have had to grit their teeth, smile a little harder, and grow nice thick skins while people called them "Ape Lincoln," "Franklin D. Rosenfeld," or more recently, "the devil."  And as one of them observed, "If you can't take the heat..."

Priebus knows, as Trump certainly doesn't, that amending the Constitution is a long and complex process; it's not the contract scene from A Night at the Opera where you can tear off the clauses you no like.  Donzo can try to emulate his heroes like Putin and Erdogan and Duterte by writing his name extra bigly on one of those executive things that Steve shoves in front of him, but some so-called judge is bound to slap it down.  He's free to skip events like the Correspondents' Dinner in favor of thinly-attended Angry White Folks rallies in the hinterlands.  He can squat on the golden throne and tweet his tiny thumbs off, and he will, but he will never get the adoration he covets from the smart kids, or punish them for despising him.  Sad!