Trump Derangement Syndrome

by Carl Nelson

My wife and I were having a great conversation with a woman at the local retirement center tasked with helping people to find their way through the bureaucratic maze of medicare drug supplement insurance plans. She is quite bright, funny, and superbly effective. We were sharing our disdain for the bureaucracy’s arrogance, when I happened to mention something that came to mind from a book about Peter Navarro’s experiences in the Trump White House. “It seems even the President of the United States can’t make these government apparatchiks perform!” I said, noting the many cases when he was trying to initiate some executive directives. Apparently, these directives had to pass through several levels of bureaucratic authorization (e.g. past ‘legal’, ‘fiscal’, etc.)… any one of which could either derail or tie-up the process. This seemed a situation in which we were all on the same page. Instead, a cold hatred fell across her aspect like a garage door closing down… which was dispelled as soon as we moved on.