Forget, if you can, his incessant self-serving ego-pandering tweets. Forget his strange fetish for violent dictators. His continuous denial of scientific fact. His rampant bigotry and his classic xenophobia. And stop wasting your time trying to decode his nefarious master plan, starting with his Black Floyd Wall. A plan of any sort does not exist. It never did.

I know. You can’t forget. Something about the fate of the world and you’re still young and / or you have kids or at least you’re thinking about it. To quote once again Lenny Bruce: “Yadda yadda yadda.” The fact is, so many of Donald Trump’s plans and propositions are nakedly stupid. We all suffer from the pains of the Law of Unintended Consequences; that’s human nature, or fate, or karma — whatever; your mileage may vary. What I mean here is stupid. So stupid that even Ike Broflovski knows it, and he’s in kindergarten.

Which is why, this week, my respect for German Chancellor Angela Merkel hit a new high.

First, a technical consideration. Chancellor Merkel discussed the sheer stupidity of Trump’s tariffs policy before the Munich Security Conference. She was a complete professional, combining many contradicting emotions — befuddlement, bewilderment, anger, fear, and complete disbelief – into one, long television-friendly wince. That is not easy to do. I’ve done a lot of public speaking, and I know how tough that is. Give it a try. Don’t hurt yourself.

Merkel pointed out to the group, and by electronic extension to the entire world, exactly how stupid Trump’s tariff policy is. According to Time Magazine, “the German leader called for global trade and cooperation. The biggest BMW plant is in South Carolina, she said, not in the carmaker’s homeland of Bavaria in southern Germany.

“Look, we’re proud of our cars … We’re allowed to be. And these cars are built in the United States of America. If these cars, which are no less a threat than those built in Bavaria, are suddenly a national security threat to the U.S., then that’s a shock to us,” Merkel said, to loud applause.

That “loud applause” did not extend itself to Vice President Mike Pence’s speech before the same body. According to Slate.com, Pence said he was there as President Donald Trump’s spokesperson “on behalf of a champion of freedom and of a strong national defense … I bring greetings from the 45th President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump.” The response was the type quite familiar to Daffy Duck: the sound of crickets, for five very long seconds.

Indeed, his salutation attracted applause in but one venue: the official U.S. government transcript of that speech. The transcript reports applause that did not occur, and, as of this reporting, said transcript has not been corrected.

Where I come from – the United States of America – that is what is known as a blatant lie. As we have seen several times each week (on average) for the past two years, such lies are so routine the boy who cried wolf wants his reputation back.

Of course, building the Eiffel Tower of Stupidity is too much to ask from one person. Lucky for Trump, he gets a lot of help from his friends. Steven Miller. Linsey Graham. Sarah Sanders. And the equivalent of a short-run 1970s sitcom, Washington ‘s own Three Stooges, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort. If you were walking down a dark alley and any one of them whipped out a gun and demanded your money, you would wind up taking his money – once you stopped laughing.

Aside from all the lies, manipulation, megalomania, acts of treason and pocket-stuffing, after two years of Donald Trump we are left with two stunning, depressing thoughts: all the president’s men are idiots, and stupidity bleeds out from the head.

Stone, Cohen and Manafort will see what their loyalty gets them.

Three of Trump’s stupidest stooges, trying to find their barrel as they head down Niagara Falls.

You know, Roger’s tattoo of Richard Nixon should go over well in prison.