This image released by Simon & Schuster shows “Fear: Trump in the White House,” by Bob Woodward, available on Sept. 11. (Simon & Schuster via AP)

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The hot ground is crumbling under President Donald Trump’s feet, opening up a crevice in the political landscape like an earthquake after the eruption of a super volcano.

The Washington swamp is about to come out of a heat wave, but the political heat is about to grow even hotter between now and Nov. 6, when voters will go to the polls to elect new members of Congress.

The news is flying and changing at an unprecedented pace. Don’t expect a slowdown or a break between now and November. It’s as if the future of the country and the press are on the line like never before — because it is.

Trump’s mood is being described as volcanic, so don’t expect Trump to slow down or give in. He could do the right thing and resign. But he won’t. He will fight the lost cause to the end. It will make great reality TV, but the stress is likely to bring the country to the breaking point.

It all started with the release of iconic press hero Bob Woodward’s new book Fear, which uses interviews with White House insiders to describe the Trump White House as “Crazytown.”

Of course we have been writing the same thing since day one, but the mainstream media is now onboard with any and every narrative that could get Trump out of the White House and his hands off the nuclear football.

Then the New York Times published an anonymous editorial column allegedly written by a “senior administration official” who claims to be part of the “resistance” in the room trying to thwart the worst parts of Trump’s agenda and the president’s “worst inclinations.”

That was followed by a piece in the Atlantic calling the publication of the anonymous op-ed itself “a Constitutional Crisis” from a “cowardly coup from within the administration” that “threatens to enflame the president’s paranoia and further endanger American security.”

Every news outfit and blogger in the country was sent reeling for the right metaphor to describe the situation, although I didn’t see anyone call it “mutiny.”

If the writer turns out to be Vice President Mike Pence, that could be an apt description. He would be the one guy who would benefit from Trump being removed from office, either by resignation, invocation of the 25th Amendment’s power to remove an unfit president, by impeachment or even the remote possibility of arrest by the FBI and the Justice Department on the recommendation of special counsel Robert Mueller.

The parlor game has already begun to guess and out the source of the NYTimes piece, but I have not seen anyone mention the possibility that it might have been penned by Attorney General Jeff Sessions himself.

In Woodard’s book, Trump is quoted attacking Sessions: “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner. … How in the world was I ever persuaded to pick him for my attorney general? … He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama. What business does he have being attorney general?”

Hey, I actually may agree with Trump that Sessions should not be attorney general. I’ve never been a fan and think of Sessions as a racist who is using his position to fight a war against Latino immigrants he has wanted to fight for years to try a rear guard action on our southern border to keep America majority white.

Of course I am as offended as everyone in my home state of Alabama should be by Trump’s attitude about the South. The people who voted for Trump in Alabama and other southern states did so because they perceived Trump as someone who would take on the “liberal establishment” in New York and Washington. Of course it was all one big political hoax and “fake news,” since Trump just wanted desperately to be one of them.

If Sessions turns out to be the “deep throat” who helps take down Trump, he could turn out to be a hero in the end. It would make sense for him to communicate with the New York Times behind the scenes, since it was the Times that came out so strongly last August to fight against Trump’s desire to fire Sessions then when he first did the right legal and ethical thing and recused himself from the Russia investigation. Sessions was neck deep in Trump’s campaign and had meetings with Russians too. He had no choice but to recuse himself.

Clearly Mr. Trump doesn’t understand such things, another reason on top of the giant mountain of evidence that he should never have been elected and sworn in as president in the first place.

More explosive quotes from Bob Woodward’s book about Trump.

Could the piece have been written by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly? He is quoted in Woodward’s book on working for Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown.”

Kelly denies it, of course.

The Washington Post launched an all out war this week to reveal the identity of the anonymous writer, to bring down Trump, and defended it’s long-time reporter and editor Bob Woodward.

Trump’s reputation precedes him. So does Woodward’s.

Rolling Stone‘s National Affairs desk describes Woodward’s book as both Damning and Frightening, with “evidence that the Trump White House is as dysfunctional and broken as everyone fears.”

Of course we have been saying Trump is ill-suited to be president from day one. Let the mainstream media steam roller roll all over him now. He’s as gone as gone can get. While he probably deserves to be rolled out of the White House in a nut house van and a straight jacket for suffering from “Narcissistic personality disorder,” that’s not how our system works.

When the Democrats take over the House and Senate in November and impeachment becomes inevitable, someone may be able to talk Trump into resigning for the good of the country and the Republican Party. He will break ratings records in this reality TV show.

Let that comfort him when he is run out of the country and placed in the hands of his Russian debtors. Maybe Vladimir Putin will build him a new prison in Siberia and name it Trump Tower. That would be a fitting end to this horrific period of mob rule in America, and I use the term “mob” in more ways than one.

If Elton John and Bernie Taipan still have it in them, maybe they could write the hit song on the end of Trump’s presidency: “Goodbye Orange Baby, and Good Riddance to Donald Trump.”