I’ve remarked a few times over the years on our prez’s tremendous cowardice. Anyone who has ever been blackmailed or extorted dreams of how to get Out From Under. But our guy can’t even manage it when he is running one of the most powerful nations on earth, with the most powerful weapons.
Of course, it was a massive failure to let anyone compromised by OUR GREATEST ENEMY to be anywhere near the presidency. What a fucking joke our spies and intelligence agencies are…our electoral system…and the Republicans are. But here we are, and now our commander is under a death-threat fog whenever it comes to how we maneuver our entire global strategy.
With predictable results, as now even with his SECOND chance to get Out From Under he can’t seem to manage it. My guess is he is finally screwing himself up to The Final Showdown because, as usual, being blackmailed and extorted is unbearable. So we not only have a compromised leader, it is one who has a personal and executable offense in the mix - which cannot be divulged at all costs yet he must do something (or even face that reckoning of it becoming known) and has chosen to take all his dealings with USSR into his personal domain. Because he can’t trust anyone else to do it, and it is the vessel of his greatest fears and greatest weakness.
And predictably, he is going to try all manner of skeevy and dirtball moves because he can’t be a man and face-up to pootikins or his crimes…and he doesn’t know how to use power except with his usual dirtbag/blackmail tactics. He’ll likely chicken out, but things have come to a head and his dirtball, low-rent attempts so far have been shitshows. We have a world war brewing and our guy is trying to appease and weasel and knobslob the enemies leader.
Has any fiction writer ever come close to such a tragic farce, with such huge consequences?