I DON'T ASK FOR MUCH, I ONLY WANT TRUST

Well, that deteriorated quickly.  Yesterday, Republican Senator Ben Sasse tweeted, "We are in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of public trust."

The “presidential” phase of Donald Trump’s presidency lasted about three days, from his speech on Tuesday evening when he said “the time for trivial fights is behind us” to Saturday morning, when he re-opened his twitter vendetta against Arnold Schwarzenegger.   Stay classy, Donald.

Earlier in the week, mainstream purveyors of conventional wisdom showered Trump with hosannas for managing to read from a teleprompter and refrain from talking about pussy for an hour.  They want a normal president so badly that they’re trying to will one into existence.  Good luck with that, fellows.  The really sad thing is that they’ll do it again the next time Trump makes it through a public appearance without sounding like Captain Queeg ranting about missing strawberries.  

Trump’s other Saturday morning tweets were distinctly Queeg-like, claiming that President Obama tapped his phone during the election campaign.  But the fact is that no president – not Obama, not Trump, not even Abe Lincoln or Millard Fillmore – can order a wiretap.  Wiretaps can only be authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court after receiving a request from the Justice Department.  The only way the FISA court would authorize a wiretap on an American citizen would be if the suspect was a foreign agent, or was under criminal investigation. 

Kinda makes you wonder which of those categories Donald Trump falls into.  Maybe both?  Nah, he’s probably an innocent bystander who just happens to have a bunch of Russian agents on speed dial. 

Meanwhile, a spokesman for former President Obama stated unequivocally that “neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.”  He didn’t say that Trump wasn’t under surveillance, just that the order never came from Obama or the White House.

I take it that Donald Trump has begun to understand the trouble he’s in, including the fact that the FBI knows about the phone conversations between Russian agents and Trump’s people, perhaps including Trump himself.  He’s panicking, which of course is what every innocent person does when they realize that the law is in possession of the facts.

We know that Trump engages in a lot of projection, accusing his enemies of what he’s doing himself.  And sure enough, he illuminated his predicament yesterday: “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

Remember Trump's history.  Everything he touches turns to shit.  Now it's about to hit the fan.