It's worse than an embarrassment - it is an indictment of democracy itself. It is difficult to imagine a people - on paper the richest, most educated and healthiest in the history of the world - intentionally choosing a real villain as their duly-elected leader. They elected a man whose outrages, corruptions, selfishness, malice and outright crimes are so egregious and obvious that the problem becomes organizing so long a list into a workable taxonomy. But he's not done this alone - SCOTUS is in his pocket and truly made him above the law. The Republicans have enabled him by staying silent and riding on his coattails - the most "principled" of them have retired. Media is consolidated and owned by the oligarchs he calls friends. He has a personal paramilitary force (ICE) roaming the streets, killing people, and who will be "observing" the mid-term elections.

The root of the problem is in the collective mind of Americans. We are the problem - we've been hacked to be both stupid and proud of that stupidity, to cease recognizing "character" or "virtue" as a signal, to cease caring about reality that doesn't support opinions that were installed on us, like malware, or anything really except entertainment. Because that's the ONE thing we do get out of all this - we get to be entertained. How funny when he says outlandish things like immigrants are eating the cats, eating the dogs! How hilarious (and macho!) when he brags about grabbing women. How wonderful it is to see the discomfiture of the libs when he parrots Nazi propaganda or when he encouraged the Proud Boys to storm the capital to overturn his loss, and then his lackeys claimed it either didn't happen or was a false flag. "Hang Mike Pence!" is what an obese, fentanyl- and TikTok-addicted mind thinks is doing something! And hey, you can say "retard" again without getting canceled.

I've got kids and I'm terrified for them.