Sadly, I ended up ‘watching’ about 15-20 minutes of the Trump debacle last night because I didn’t want to miss Stacy Abrams.

Mostly I was on Twitter (rather than actually watching), and I thoroughly enjoyed some of the snarky comments. What I observed, and this isn’t new information but it’s still shocking, is how meaningless the words are that come out of the orange miasma’s mouth.

He is a grotesque caricature of a politician, lying with abandon and shunning any/all values beyond the quest for power. He reflects and amplifies what @GOP has become, representing the worst of America writ large. Only his hands and their corresponding body parts are smaller than normal.

And then the press and pundits have to try to interpret what he said. Their commentary, unfortunately, ascribes more meaning to his words than they actually hold. He’s just throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.

And the white men on one side of the aisle (along with a few odd women) cynically stand and applaud on cue. They don’t actually like him or believe him, but they calculate that it serves them to do this. So they do it, while the nation and the world wait to see whether they will ever, ever, ever be guided by anything more than their own empty desire to hang onto privilege and power. So far, they have shown themselves to be much worse than I’d imagined (and I thought they were pretty awful before).

A gaping maw of need.

There is something horrifyingly mindless about the words that come out of his mouth. His need for attention seems to be the thing that drives him as he lurches from one lie to the next.

He will, literally, say anything. His base, perhaps, provides some parameters for what he spews. But even their festering, fevered perversity won’t keep him tethered if they don’t feed him what he needs.

And, of course, there’s also the fact that he’s exploiting them. Lucky for Donnie, they just haven’t put the pieces together yet. Perhaps they never will.

Meanwhile, I note, this morning, that the sun has risen once again and Bob Mueller continues to quietly do his work. This gives me hope that even as Mr. Trump has empowered the worst instincts of American and made a travesty of everything he has touched, our institutions will withstand this craven assault and eventually prevail.