Has the Trump Administration gone raccoon penis crazy?
I don’t mean are raccoon penises this year’s fad among Trump Cabinet officials, now that shooting your puppy is so last year.
Rather, the question I am asking is, “Is the administration’s general level of insanity well illustrated by the recent revelation that once, on a family drive, our health and human services secretary saw fit to pull over with a car full of his kids, go over to a dead raccoon he saw lying there and sever the tiny schlong from its decaying corpse in order to bring it home for ‘study?’”
Remember when you would have thought such a story was bats--t? But now, your first reaction when you heard it was probably, “Oh, it’s just Wednesday.” Because you’ve heard stories about RFK Jr. and roadkill before. Not just once. You know the story about him and the severed whale head. (Everybody does. It’s a classic.) And you know the story about him picking up the deceased baby bear and placing its corpse along Park Drive in Central Park. That’s just zany old RFK Jr.
We know that he likes nothing better than to go out into nature, find dead animals, and play with them. We also know that it’s not the craziest thing about the guy.
After all, this is the health and human services secretary who sought to persuade the public he’s no germaphobe by pointing out, on the record, that he’s a guy who used to snort cocaine off toilet seats when he was a drug addict. And, face it, crazier still is the reality that the real reason he is not a germaphobe is that he doesn’t believe in germs… or science… or most of the conclusions of the past 200 years of modern medicine.
Despite all that, the president of the United States decided to put him in charge of all of American healthcare. Now, that’s nuts.
Having said that, even that level of cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs-iosity isn’t the craziest thing we’ve heard or seen in just the past few days from our friendly neighborhood dementocracy.
Remember all the way back to last week when the president threatened to destroy an entire civilization?
Remember when he said that Pope Leo XIV was “weak on crime?”
Remember when he circulated a picture of himself as Jesus?
Remember when he tried to persuade the world that the picture of a guy in flowing robes, with a heavenly glow and light emanating from the palm of his hand, was really just a doctor?
Remember when people in his own party defended that redolent pile of nonsense?
Remember when the entire administration, one elected largely with the help of independent Catholic voters, decided to get into a war with the pope—one of the world’s most respected, beloved figures?
Remember when that included the vice president (who met the previous pope the day before he died), the one who’s a recent Catholic convert, lecturing the pope? Telling him to study theology more carefully?
All that from a man with no values who has changed everything about his identity not once but several times, a con artist who believes in nothing and apparently understands less? A man who, then, based on nothing but toxic arrogance, felt he could lecture the pope on religion?
Then that man’s idiot sidekick, Secretary Beer Goggles McLethality, decided to join the fray by quoting scripture? Except, it wasn’t really scripture, it was a line from Pulp Fiction?
And all that was this week? The past few days? And many of us just shrug and accept it. Those kooky guys. Even as the rest of the world backs slowly toward the door, smiling and grabbing their coats.
But even that is not the worst of it. What is worse is that the real problem is not the zany anecdotes. It is the day-in, day-out behavior that shows that the administration is not funny, cray-cray, but is evil, psychotic.
Illegal wars are being fought for no reason, and thousands of people are dying. Millions will die from the cutoff of vital U.S. aid flows to the world, and now, Marco Rubio, a sane-appearing man whose actions are deeply disturbed and disturbing, is saying that there will be no more aid, rather countries should rely on trade and markets to lift themselves up and out of poverty.
They would if they could, of course. Without our help, millions more will die.
And how many deaths will result not from Kennedy’s necro-zoosadism but from cutting funding for cancer treatments, suppressing vaccines, denying science? From denying our climate crisis? From aiding our enemies? From rampant corruption? From freeing insurrectionists and white-collar criminals by the thousands? From attacking and undermining democracy and the rule of law in America?
Each of these policies runs counter to fact and reason. Each is irrational. Each is a manifestation of the “inability to think and behave in ways considered to be normal and rational.”
In other words each is, literally, by definition, insane.
Further, as if all that was not terrifying enough, we don’t just have the behavior to date of the president, our lunatic-in-chief, and those he has hand-picked to carry out his destructive, cruel, and sometimes criminal policies, to concern us. We also have the fact that each week, his actions, his thoughts, his statements, his demeanor, grow more erratic.
He can’t concentrate. He can’t maintain a thought in his head. He has uncontrolled episodes of anger. He lashes out at strangers. His public language is growing more vulgar. He is declining before our eyes into a state of malevolent, destructive dementia… and those around him, rather than seeking to contain or counteract it, have been hand-chosen to accept and defend it, and they are doing so.
We have a madman surrounded by often equally deranged lackeys and enabled by an entire political party, a Congress and often a Supreme Court full of those willing to turn a blind eye to the Caligula in our midst because they can still enrich or empower themselves by remaining close to him.
That is when one man’s insanity plus that of a handful of crazed men and women becomes empowered by the greedy and the immoral and the blindly ambitious (a circle extending out to billionaire oligarchs and wannabe millionaire access journalists) turns into a form of national psychosis. And that’s where we are.
It’s not the plot of a dystopian novel or movie. It’s a nightmare.
It’s our world right now—a world in which a former heroin addict with a brain worm who cuts the d---s off of dead critters in front of his kids is not the exception, but the rule, not a wild, you’ll-never-believe-it story, but a symptom of a time when the world’s most powerful nation lost its collective mind.
