Tomorrow evening Comrade Donald Trump will stand up on his hind legs and bark at the American people. Afterwards, he’ll probably call it ‘maybe the greatest State of the Union speech ever given in history.’ I’m pretty confident it’ll mostly be bullshit.

I don’t say that because I dislike Trump (though I do — I really do — Jesus suffering fuck do I dislike Trump). I say that because the speech will be meaningless. Why? Two very fundamental reasons. Reason One: the state of the Union is Ag-gh Help! Reason Two: nobody really trusts or believes anything Comrade Trump says anymore. Last I heard, WaPo had Trump at just over 8000 lies since he assumed office (and really, that’s the best use of ‘assumed’ ever).

The state of the union is Ag-gh Help! largely because Trump is really bad at being president. Why? Because he’s ignorant of the functions of government, he has no interest (and probably lacks the capacity) to learn the functions of government, he seems incapable of putting the nation’s interests before his own, he’s incapable of establishing a coherent policy and abiding by it, and none of the other nations of the world trust him or believe him when he makes a promise (on account of all that lying). All of that is in addition to the fact that Comrade Trump is effectively a Russian intelligence asset. In other words, ag-gh help!

Yes, he IS giving a State of the Union speech.

This is how bad Trump is at being president. Right now the Trump administration doesn’t have a chief of staff, it doesn’t have an Attorney General, it doesn’t have a Secretary of Defense, it doesn’t have a Secretary of the Interior, it doesn’t have a Director for the Environmental Protection Agency, it doesn’t have Director for the Office of Management and Budget. The people who held those positions have all either resigned or been fired. All of those positions are in the hands of ‘acting’ directors. We don’t even have nominees for many of those positions. Ag-gh help!

Again, why? Because competent people don’t want to work for Comrade Trump. Nobody trusts him (there’s that lying business again, plus the fact that Trump has no concept of loyalty to his staff). The fact is, Trump treats being POTUS like it was a part-time job. Seriously. A member of the White House staff recently leaked three months of Trump’s private daily schedules. The very fact that his own staff is actively undermining him is evidence of how badly he sucks at his job. Worse, the schedules show that for the past three months, Trump has spent about 60% of his day engaged in ‘executive time’. Which is basically watching FoxNews and tweeting. (If you’re interested, you can look at those schedules yourself.) Ag-gh help!

So it’s really no wonder the state of the union is Ag-gh Help! When Trump bothers to actually attempt to do his job, he’s bad at it. He can’t say that in his speech, of course. Which means he’s pretty much limited to having to lie a lot. Which is what everybody expects. Which is why the speech is meaningless.

That said, Comrade Trump can count on his fellow Republicans to give him several standing ovations. Why? Why why why? Because they’re as responsible for the state of the union as he is.

Ag-gh help!

I’ll bet you’re sitting there right now and asking yourself, “Hey, I wonder how the patriots at FreeRepublic reacted to Comrade Donald Trump being totally nutted yesterday in the Rose Garden by Nancy the Knife Pelosi?” Well, you can stop wondering, on account of I’m going to tell you how they reacted.

Not well, is how they reacted. Depending on how you define ‘not well’. Many of them were…well, let’s say they were somewhat disappointed.

He just caved on TV….what a PUSSY!! — sailor76

Stock up. The Republic is dead. — dware

First, he said Mexico would pay for the wall, then demanded $5 billion from US tax payers. Second, he said no to opening the government no matter what until the wall was funded. It is now opening today. NO wall. CAVED! — CodeToad

Some sought to understand–to explain how this Jedi Master of the Deal could have been out-maneuvered. Surely Trump must be playing multi-dimensional chess.

What is this 3 week delay accomplishing for the wall funding? Getting us by the Superbowl. Only thing that makes sense to me. — mewzilla

He will get a SOTU and the dems fear this. — Boardwalk

But most seemed to understand that Comrade Trump was overmatched. Not even Superman could have withstood the implacable and evil forces arrayed against him.

I don’t have energy to follow this shit on a day to day basis anymore. Democrats want to destroy this country, period and the Republican’s don’t seem to be doing a damn’ thing about it. They should’ve funded the wall within weeks of Trump taking office. That they didn’t tells me they don’t really want to do a damn’ thing about illegal immigration. Not even sure why I bother to vote anymore. — usconservative

DJT is facing never before seen attacks and pressure and is fighting back every way he can. Yet still, weenies on this site take every opportunity to so discord along with Ann coulter. She is a whore who would change her allegiance in a new york minute for an extra million dollars. — okkev68

He is a duly elected President who hasn’t been in charge since the election….he has been battling a coup since day one. The Feds (IRS, CIA, FBI, DOJ) have committed illegal crimes against him with impunity…and their protorian guards in the MSM have covered it up. Your ire is facing the wrong direction. — roses of sharon

A surprisingly large proportion, though, felt their ire was facing in the right direction (I’ll bet you didn’t know ire had a face). They suggested Comrade Trump just wasn’t up to the task. Not only was he taken down, he was taken down BY A GIRL.

It’s game over. Nancy and Chuck run the show. — Scott from the Left Coast

Dude, it ain’t happening. We’ve had two years. Nothing’s going to happen in 3 weeks. It’s over. — DownThe405

Trump folded, ceded to Pelosi. Now he’s just rambling in shame, all talk, no action. Pathetically, he’s just repeating worn speech talking points he’s given over and over. Doesn’t cover that there is no money, just an expectation to talk with people that said No Money and WON. Pelosi owns Trump. — Reno89519

But there were those who started to wonder if Comrade Trump really wanted the wall to begin with. Maybe…just maybe…he wasn’t all that serious.

Trump never fought very hard when the GOP was in control. If Paul Ryan was not going to fund the wall, what made him think Nancy Pelosi would? — David1292

If the problem is so serious, why wait? It’s going to lead many to believe now that the problem isn’t all that serious. — dfwgator

Of course, there were Freepers who focused on the future rather than dwell on the ignominy of the present or the expectations of the past. Where do they go now? What are they to do? How should they respond to the government re-opening without any money for a wall? Some will vote differently; some advocate more direct action.

I’ll write in Mickey mouse before I vote for someone who is rhetoric. 21 months remaining and counting and court up ahead. pelosi in the driver’s seat. The long the waits to declare the emergency, the less likely m amor work will be done. — morphing libertarian

All I can think of is the line: “Cut the cake!” – and there rolls out the Death Mobile. One way or the other the left will be defeated. If not through political action – then by violence … Because that is the lesson of history. — JME_FAN

The lesson of history. Maybe it would be wise to consider recent history — the two caravans that Trump claimed were ‘invasions’. Consider how those people swarmed over the southern border in Death Mobiles (the back seats of which were jammed with women bound and gagged with duct tape), turning right and/or left, pillaging whole communities, marauding the countryside, laying waste to crops and homes, plundering shops and warehouses, massacring innocent Americans in their beds, and…wait. What?

Oh yeah. That didn’t happen. Still, we should keep the words of ‘morphing libertarian’ in mind when the next three weeks pass and there’s still no money to build a beautiful wall: “The long the waits to declare the emergency, the less likely m amor work will be done.” Amen to that, sister.

First, let me point out that by calling Comrade Trump ‘ignorant’ I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. To call him ignorant is simply to say he’s lacking in knowledge. Everybody is ignorant about some things. Trump, who has lived by the credo that bigger is better and ostentation is impressive, is ostentatiously ignorant about a lot of things. One of which is counterintelligence.

A LOT of people are ignorant about counterintelligence; they don’t understand what it is or how it’s practiced. There’s no reason they should be familiar with it, But, sadly, Trump is POTUS; he should understand it — especially since a counterintelligence operation was put into place to protect him from Russian influence.

Let me repeat that bit, because it’s important. A counterintelligence operation was put into place to protect candidate Donald J. Trump from Russian influence. That’s the heart of this whole mess.

Back to basics: counterintelligence is the gathering of information to protect something or someone from acts of espionage. The goal of counterintelligence isn’t to find evidence of a crime; it’s to identify and monitor foreign intelligence activity, then render it ineffective.

That leads us to kompromat. What the hell is kompromat? It’s a Russian term, a portmanteau, the squishing together of two words — in this case ‘compromising’ and ‘material’. Compromising material, of course, is what’s used to blackmail somebody. But kompromat combines blackmail with what’s called ‘black public relations’. With ordinary blackmail, the blackmailer says “Do this or I’ll make the compromising material public.” Kompromat is more subtle; the compromising material is publicly teased out. Rumors are started, questions are asked, hints and suggestions are made — all of which are damaging to the person being blackmailed, but none of the damage is necessarily fatal. Kompromat is the Death of a Thousand Cuts coupled with the implication that those cuts can be stopped and the wounds healed…but only if the compromised person cooperates.

The Russian secret services didn’t invent kompromat, but they are well-known to be masters at it. They routinely try to acquire kompromat information on foreign politicians and businessmen — and Trump has been doing business with some really shady Russians since the late 1990s. He’d had a string of bankruptcies, most of which he’d been able to lawyer his way out of while his investors lost their shirts. This led to every major U.S. bank refusing to lending him money. But those shady Russians had deep pockets and were willing to open them.

Here’s the weird and dangerous thing about post-Soviet Russia: there’s no way to differentiate between oligarchs and former intelligence officers and political figures and organized crime gangsters and legitimate business people. It’s not just that these different groups cooperate with each other, it’s that they’re often not really different groups — they’re often all interconnected. These are the people who provided Trump with financing when nobody else would. He literally owes these people. That makes him vulnerable.

By the summer of 2016, the FBI were aware from at least two different sources that at least four significant members of the Trump campaign were in contact with known Russian intelligence/criminal elements. So the FBI launched a counterintelligence operation to find out what the Russians were up to. If they hadn’t done that, they’d have been derelict in their duties.

Again, the first goal of counterintelligence is to identify and monitor foreign intelligence activity. This has to be done covertly in case the activity is actually innocent. It was, after all, entirely possible that nothing suspicious was taking place between those Trump campaign members and the Russians.

What Trump, out of ignorance, doesn’t understand is that this counterintelligence work was done to protect him, protect his campaign, and protect the democratic process from Russian interference. Out of ignorance, Trump is apparently under the impression the FBI ‘infiltrated’ his campaign in an effort to ‘spy’ on it and entrap his campaign staff into breaking the law. Again, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt by saying he’s just ignorant rather than suggesting he’s actually complicit.

“There was NO COLLUSION with Russia! It’s a WITCH HUNT! Deep State Fake News total disaster ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?”

BUT if you look closely at how Comrade Trump has behaved toward Russia and Putin, it looks a LOT like complicity. If you look at Trump’s refusal to implement the sanctions voted by Congress, if you look at Trump’s policies toward the Ukraine, if you look at Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that Russia interfered with the election, if you look at just about everything Trump has said or done about Russia — well it looks a lot like a successful Russian kompromat campaign.

Ignorance is the best case scenario.