In his set up for this piece at Esquire Magazine Charley Pierce points us to this article in the Atlantic about the discovery of a huge underground parasitic fungus, the Armillaria mellea, that is slowly consuming an ancient conifer stand in Malheur Forest in eastern Oregon. The article is a fascinating read, should you choose to pursue it, but one paragraph from it will suffice to illustrate it’s striking similarity to the drumpf maladministration:
László Nagy of the University of Sopron and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences explains:
The rise of Armillaria has come at the expense of trees. The fungus actually grows into trees and spread under the bark. At first they digest living wood and when they’ve done enough damage, they continue to feast on the dead wood. “You can basically see entire hills wiped out, entire forests wiped out,” says Nagy. You can’t see much of the humongous fungus in the Malheur Forest in Oregon since the Armillaria is mostly underground, but you can see all the trees it has killed.
In two beautifully crafted paragraphs Charles Pierce drives home the parallel of Armillaria to drumpf:
“The revelations on Tuesday that Michael Cohen, the president*’s personal lawyer, was one of the most ambitious bagmen in American political history all emerged from an improbable source: a lawsuit lodged against the president* by an adult-film actress with whom he allegedly had an affair. We discovered that Cohen reportedly got a half-million dollars from a Russian oligarch with “links” to Vladimir Putin, as though you could even be a Russian oligarch and stay alive without some kind of “links” to the newly re-elected goon-in-chief. (snip)
Robert Mueller’s team already has interviewed Victor Vekselberg, Cohen’s buddy from Moscow, so we can probably assume there’s more there than we already know. (More women who were paid off? Checks with “kompromat” written in Cyrillic on the memo line? Who knows at this point?) The criminal rhizomorphs of this parasitic blight on government extend god knows where. That members of the administration—hi there, Scott Pruitt—see public service as an All-U-Can-Eat buffet on our dime is no secret any more. We’ve had Pruitt’s $43,000 phone booth, Ben Carson’s dinette set, and a great love for taxpayer-funded air travel by almost everyone.”
The aforementioned Dr. László Nagy laments that so much of the work of the parasite Armillaria mellea is carried out underground where it’s method of destruction goes unobserved:
“I wish all of the substrate would be transparent for five minutes, so I could see where it is and what it’s doing. We would learn so much from a five-minute glimpse.”
We can only hope that the efforts of Robert Mueller, Charles Pierce and ourselves can bring the parasite that is Donald Trump & Co. into view before our old growth democracy is swallowed up.