Laughing with Tears in My Eyes

For a while there, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and the rest of Team Trump rode a wave of hagiography that cast them as paradigm-destroying, swamp-draining geniuses. The left added 'evil' to that description, but in general, a credulous media gave the new administration a great deal of credit for a systematic approach to dismantling the foundations of the modern American state.

That edifice crumbled pretty quickly, no? From a disastrous ban on foreign travel from Muslim-heavy countries, to a nearly-as-disastrous attempt to resuscitate it, to support of a widely panned healthcare bill, to a budget proposal that would be crippling in its breadth  if it weren't literally illegal to pass, the Trump brain trust seems to resemble nothing so much as the Really Rottens of Laff-a-Lympics fame. Their cruelty and bad intent is routinely scuttled by their incompetence.

It would be laughable, if it weren't so consequential.

It's still laughable, actually. Case in point, last week, the White House either completely failed to understand obvious satire and mockery, or never read past the headline of an article by Washington Post writer Alexandria Petri. That headline, "Trump’s budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why", was followed by an obvious and over the top (so, really, quite Trumpy) sendup of the folks that are running our country at the moment, including such gems as:

The piece continued on to describe in ridiculous detail some of the specific cuts President* Trump's budget proposal (which, as I may have mentioned, is cruel and incompetent) suggests:

 Petri closes with a flourish, and a literal LOL line to boot:

The article was amusing, an obvious (to most) cathartic salve to the liberal soul. To at least one person who works in the White House (it's Trump, isn't it?), it was something different entirely.

Here's a screenshot of the White House Daily Newsletter from March 16, which includes the President's daily schedule, as well as links to a couple of articles the White House thinks are important for the public to read. One's a Politico piece about Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny's visit to Washington. The other, Petri's budget-praising snarkfest.

As Petri herself put it in a follow-up article/facepalm explaining how it feels to become part of the story, "This is 2017 in a nutshell: You start with what you think is obviously a joke, and then a few days later it is being sent out from the White House."

The stock market's just started to figure out that maybe Trump is full of shit and genuinely incapable of understanding or keeping his campaign promises. FBI Director Jim Comey (Go Tribe! If we're claiming him. Given the fact that there's a strong argument all of this is his fault, maybe we shouldn't.) confirmed D.C.'s worst-kept secret, telling Congress that the Bureau is investigating the Trump campaign's ties to the Russian government. We're basically all fucked.

At least we'll die laughing.