Don't you know that every day when he looks at his morning news feed, Lindsey Graham wishes he could just send Donald Trump to boarding school until the noisy little irritant grows up?
The South Carolina scion wouldn't have to go before the cameras on a sorry Tuesday morning, for freakin' instance, and explain why "lynching" is a proper term for what the Terrible Infant is trying to say with his words.
Graham wouldn't have to explain why the "quid pro quo" threat to Ukraine which he, Lindsey Graham, said would justify impeachment, isn't quite a quid or a pro or a quo -- though the acting ambassador to Ukraine describes it as just that.
Graham wouldn't have to explain away children in cages, or border detainment without soap, or the daily dose of unconscionability from this president.
He wouldn't have to explain away meetings with Russians bearing dirt, or Team Trump's engagement with Russian conduit Wikileaks, or the plenitude of clear obstruction authenticated by Robert Mueller.
The only problem with the boarding school idea: Such institutions are for those who graduated from diapers.
Trump isn't there yet.
Trump and his presidency are still in the Terrible Twos, where a slobbery tantrum is the highest form of expression.
Sadly, his fellow partisans have joined him. Nothing else could explain Republican congressmen storming a closed House hearing room as investigators are getting a handle on what Trump did regarding Ukraine.
Secret hearings? That would be true only if 47 Republican committee members were not part of them, which they are. In fact, 12 of the 30 congressmen who "stormed" the committee already had permission to attend meetings.
I imagine these very same congressmen would storm a grand jury and order pizza. They would if Trump asked them.
Trump has dumbed down his party's discourse to the point where any procedure that might cause a dyspeptic fit in the White House is called illegal.
But, of course, one doesn't need to go many pages into the Constitution – no further than at Article 1 -- to find the legality of what's transpiring: the first steps of impeachment.
Of course, what the House is doing is entirely legal, wholly appropriate and supported by most Americans. Check any poll you desire.
It looks bad for Lindsey's custodial case. So, let's all throw a tantrum. It will get Fox News' attention and render sympathy from a base that has lost any sense of shame but seems to thrive on high drama.
Those base-liners no doubt are convinced that Mexico must have annexed New Mexico while they slept, and so, by gum, we do need to build that wall at the Colorado border.
They, and his enablers in Congress, will put up with anything the infant says. After all, "We're building a wall in Colorado" drew applause from his hand-sorted audience.
The feedback Trump gets from his flock is like the youth sports I once heard conservatives deride. You know, when every gesture wins a ribbon.
The Trump story is assuming the look of Monty Python's "Life of Brian," in which a sad-sack walking around with but one shoe somehow comes to be perceived as the savior and his followers start limping around with one bare foot.
Life imitating art, we see Republicans saying and doing things that respectable people never did before the Terrible Infant became their savior.
Build a moat with alligators. Shoot refugees in the lower extremities. Dissolve families that brave a border crossing. Trump's supporters are all in.
Any Republican openly embarrassed by these ideas and more, says the great leader, is human "scum."
Big word for a little man.
Whatever the diaper-powder chorus says to keep Trump comfortable, this is not what history will say.
What history remembers won't be tax cuts or the (temporary) carving back of environmental protections, Trump's sculpting of a court system in his own image. It will remember the horrible rhetoric, the misspelled tweets, the infantile threats.
Come to think of it, I went too far with my toddler analogy. To compare this man to a 2-year-old is to insult every child on the threshold of 3.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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