Last September, I observed that the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was a choice between SNAFU — situation normal, all effed up — and FUBAR — effed up beyond all recognition. My argument was that enough voters were sufficiently fed up with the status quo, as personified by Clinton, to gamble on the political outsider Trump, in the full knowledge that the ultimate result might be not to make America great again but to eff it up beyond all recognition.
Last week President Trump took several steps down the road to being FUBAR himself. The question about his presidency is, increasingly, what form the final debacle will take. I still don’t think it’s going to be Watergate II. And I certainly don’t buy the argument made by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder (and many other Ivy League liberals) that Trump is a tyrant bent on overthrowing American democracy.
Trump isn’t Nixon. He most certainly isn’t Hitler, the comparison implied by Snyder’s best-selling booklet “On Tyranny.’’ He’s Trump. And what we have to contend with is not tyranny but trumpery.
Look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which offers two definitions:
“1. Deceit, fraud, imposture, trickery.
2. ‘Something of less value than it seems’; hence, ‘something of no value; trifles’ (Johnson);worthless stuff, trash, rubbish.”

Read more >> Boston Globe