Trump's Big CON: He is Unfit to Be President, And Republi-CONs Know It, CONt.

UPDATE IV:  Read also the Washington Post:

Bob Corker just said it again: Trump is unfit. Okay, now what?, which suggests that if Corker really thinks Trump is unfit to be President, he should use his position as Corker, who happens to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to full expose the extent of Russian interference in our election, and not a hoax as Trump claims.

‘Utterly untruthful’: Corker unbound as he attacks Trump over fitness, competence,

‘Dangerous,’ ‘utterly untruthful’: Two retiring GOP senators sound alarm on Trump, which noted that Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said that Trump’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior” was “dangerous to our democracy” “undermining of our democratic norms and ideals” with the personal attacks; the threats against principles, freedoms and institutions; the flagrant disregard for truth and decency.”

Bob Corker sounds like he’s making a case for removing Trump from office, which noted that Corker is "basically labeling Trump an irredeemable failure who cannot be prevailed upon to perform his job functions. Corker previously said Trump hadn't yet demonstrated the 'stability' or 'competence' needed to serve; now he's basically saying it's a lost cause", and

Corker shows how Republicans can dump Trump, which states:

"Whether it is a pregnant Gold Star widow such as Myeshia Johnson or a powerful U.S. senator whose help Trump needs both on Iran and the do-or-die tax plan, Trump is incapable of disengaging from a fight that he is obviously losing. He cannot cede the field to anyone, no matter how destructive the prolonged fight is to his own goals. Everything comes back to a personal battle of wills in which Trump cannot stand to be seen on the losing side. For Trump, all human and personal interactions are reduced to a test of his ego; any perceived defeat is intolerable for him. Extending these exchanges, of course, leads to bigger and more serious defeats, but those he can justify as the result of 'fake media' or hapless Republicans.

Corker is demonstrating that the GOP sycophants who feed Trump’s ego have it all wrong. The president cannot be cajoled into being a responsible, effective president. He cannot be pinned down to any specific position. No loyalty can be expected from him. Rather than lose one’s political soul and waste endless time trying to placate the impulsive, irrational president, the best course of action is to expose his craziness, minimize his influence and then ignore him. . .

Trump is not only a failure but also a menace to our democracy and national security. Egging on the North Korean dictator, compulsively lying, subverting an independent judiciary, trampling on the First Amendment and lacking the requisite skills to manage the executive branch and push through legislation should preclude a second term (if Trump makes it through this one.)

For now, Republicans should watch Corker — or better yet, join him. He’s showing them how to save their own reputations, their party and ultimately the country from the grip of an unbalanced, dysfunctional president."

UPDATE III:  "Politics, at its best, is about creating a decent society, a task that can only be accomplished when citizens find ways of cooperating. One of the best descriptions of what our aspirations should be was offered by the political philosopher Michael Sandel. 'When politics goes well,' he wrote, 'we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.'

President Trump has always prided himself on being an anti-politician. This is supposed to be one of his greatest assets. But he has thrown our government into chaos and our country into tumult precisely because his disrespect for politics and what it requires leads him to debase our public life. He offers a torrent of lies, willfully tries to tear the country apart — his tweet on Wednesday continuing his verbal war on kneeling NFL players epitomizes his eagerness to polarize — and puts everyone else down because doing so is the only way he knows how to lift himself up.

Trump takes no responsibility for — well, anything. . .

Many of Trump’s lies are hideously personal. . .

It has become a dreary Washington game to ask at what point Republican politicians (besides Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.) and John McCain (Ariz.) and a few others) will stand up for basic decency by telling Trump: Enough. Up to now, most have cravenly absorbed all manner of insults, accepted unspeakable unseemliness, and sat by with wan smiles as Trump left them hanging by shifting his positions moment to moment. . .

Sorry, but all Republican politicians who take their obligations seriously must stop rationalizing the irrational and say what has long been obvious, that Trump’s way of doing business is unproductive, erratic, mean and scary. Until this happens, Republicans deserve to be seen as enablers of a dangerous presidency.

Alas, you can count on GOP leaders to maintain their complicity until the tax cut that is their lodestar is enacted into law. On this question, Trump and his party are as one in offering misleading claims that their bill is designed primarily to help ordinary Americans when in fact its largest benefits will flow to the very wealthy.

But is a tax cut worth the price of colluding to undermine an honorable profession?"

Read the Washington Post, The enablers of Trump’s dangerous presidency.

UPDATE II:  "Donald Trump likes to say that no president in American history accomplished as much in as short a time as he has, and in a few ways, he’s actually right. What other president could say that in less than nine months, they did this much damage to the future of American diplomacy?

Congratulations, Mr. President: America’s word is now practically worthless. And the damage will persist even after you’re gone.

[Whether it is a trade or climate deal, or arms negotiation, t]here would be only one reasonable conclusion: America doesn’t keep its promises, and there is no point in negotiating with them to give up your own nuclear weapons.. .

Donald Trump has a conception of 'dealmaking' that is fundamentally unsuited to politics, both domestically and internationally. In Trump’s career as a businessman, he came to believe that all deals are zero-sum. They have a winner and a loser, and if you’re not the former than you’re the latter. The measure of a 'good deal' is whether you came out ahead and the other guy lost his shirt. In practice that meant running a series of scams, his assumption being that there were always more marks out there who only knew about his celebrity and didn’t realize how he actually did business. He could stiff contractors or set up a sham university selling real estate 'secrets,' and no matter how angry those who got conned were, there would still be suckers lining up for the next grift.

But that’s not how it works in politics. The number of potential partners for deals, whether it’s members of Congress or other nations, is finite. And they all know what you did last time. Each potential deal is affected by what happened in the deal before it, and trust is absolutely vital.

But it goes even farther. When you’re president, the deals you make will be affected by the deals your predecessors made, and this is where the long-term damage becomes evident. After Paris and (perhaps) NAFTA and Iran, it isn’t just that other countries won’t be willing to sign an agreement with Donald Trump. They may not even be willing to sign one with the next president."

Read the Washington Post, Thanks to Trump, America’s word is now worthless.

UPDATE: "Their writings and debates surrounding the creation of the Constitution make clear that the framers feared a certain kind of character coming to power and usurping the republican ideal of their new nation. Having just defeated a tyrant — 'Mad' King George III of England — they carefully crafted rules to remove such a character: impeachment. In the process, they revealed precisely the kind of corrupt, venal, inattentive and impulsive character they were worried about.

The very embodiment of what the Founding Fathers feared is now residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Again and again, they anticipated attributes and behaviors that President Trump exhibits on an all-too-regular basis. By describing 'High Crimes and Misdemeanors,' the grounds for impeachment, as any act that poses a significant threat to society — either through incompetence or other misdeeds — the framers made it clear that an official does not have to commit a crime to be subject to impeachment. Instead, they made impeachment a political process, understanding that the true threat to the republic was not criminality but unfitness, that a president who violated the country’s norms and values was as much a threat as one who broke its laws.

Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the Constitution’s preamble, and future president James Madison were worried about a leader who would 'pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation' — theft of public funds — 'or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers,' as Madison put it. Morris, who like many in the colonies believed King Charles had taken bribes from Louis XIV to support France’s war against the Dutch, declared that without impeachment we 'expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate [the President] in foreign pay without being able to guard against it by displacing him.' . .

[His ties to Russia, "decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey, the man investigating his administration’s Russian connections," failing to "to properly staff the executive branch",  "abuse of the power to issue pardons", and  "on it goes".]

But prescient as they were, what the framers may not have anticipated was someone who epitomized so many of their fears at once — someone like Donald Trump — being elected to the presidency in the first place. They hoped that the electoral college system would prevent that from happening. But in the event that didn’t happen, they added an additional fail-safe: impeachment."

Read the Washington Post, The Founding Fathers designed impeachment for someone exactly like Donald Trump.

"Some Trump aides spend a significant part of their time devising ways to rein in and control the impetuous president, angling to avoid outbursts that might work against him, according to interviews with 18 aides, confidants and outside advisers, most of whom insisted on anonymity to speak candidly. . .

Trump is hardly the first president whose aides have arranged themselves around him and his management style — part of a natural effort, one senior White House official said, to help ensure the president’s success. But Trump’s penchant for Twitter feuds, name-calling and temperamental outbursts presents a unique challenge.

One defining feature of managing Trump is frequent praise, which can leave his team in what seems to be a state of perpetual compliments. The White House pushes out news releases overflowing with top officials heaping flattery on Trump; in one particularly memorable Cabinet meeting this year, each member went around the room lavishing the president with accolades.

Senior administration officials call this speaking to an 'audience of one.' . .

Sam Nunberg, who worked for Trump but was fired in 2015, said he always found him to be 'reasonable,' but noted that delaying a decision often helped influence the outcome. . .

Corker’s quip comparing the White House to a day-care center on Oct. 8 came in the middle of a feud between him and Trump, who attacked Corker by tweeting that the retiring senator 'didn’t have the guts' to run for reelection and had begged for his endorsement. Corker fired back on Twitter and in a New York Times interview, warning that Trump was running the White House like 'a reality show' and that his reckless threats against other nations could put the country 'on the path to World War III.' . .

Still, Corker’s comments underscored the uneasy dichotomy within the West Wing, where criticism of the president’s behavior is only whispered.

'They have an on-the-record ‘Dear Leader’ culture, and an on-background ‘This-guy-is-a-joke’ culture,' said Tommy Vietor, who served as a spokesman for former president Barack Obama. 'I don’t understand how he can countenance both.'

Read the Washington Post, Inside the ‘adult day-care center’: How aides try to control and coerce Trump.