When last we checked in with Team Garbage Fire, we were under the impression that White House Golden Boy Jared Kushner, who is a brilliant man who can solve all of America's problems by virtue of his relationship to Donald Trump's favorite child, was spearheading the administration response to the American opioid epidemic. But we may have imagined that, because looking back that sounds like a ridiculous notion to begin with.
Not to worry, we have a new spearheader of the administration's opioid epidemic response. It's that White House jackass whose only job appears to be telling fantastically ludicrous lies in front of television cameras. No, not that one, the other one. No, we mean the other other one.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday announced that pollster Kellyanne Conway, 50, counselor to President Donald Trump, would oversee White House efforts to combat the opioid overdose epidemic.
At this point, you may be reasonably asking yourself questions like "what the f--k?" or "no, seriously, what the f--k?" An astute point on your part. In the entire history of Team Garbage Fire, there has been no evidence that Kellyanne Conway could manage any task more complicated than shouting at a television camera and looking smug for 15 seconds afterward. Her behavior suggests, if anything, someone who has already had a few too many of The Drugs, rather than someone you might trust to reduce the supply.
But Conway will now become the Opioid Czar. (Because the current president is not black, appointing unconfirmed "czars" to spearhead individual administration policy initiatives is now acceptable again, and no longer a sign of a march towards communism. And now you're remembering that appointing "czars" was actually a real f--king Republican freak-out, when Obama was elected, a real f--king thing that a bunch of red-faced Republican leaders and Fox News camera-shriekers actually attempted to turn into evidence of tyranny, and feeling a bit sick to your stomach at just what lengths their party has gone through, for a decade, to delegitimize the very existence of those that they see as their enemies. That feeling, in the pit of your stomach, is normal.)
So then. What will Conway do?
It is almost certain that she will do nothing. Appointing pollster Conway to head the "opioid" response is a rough repeat of when George W. Bush appointed political strategist Karl Rove to "head" the response to Hurricane Katrina. The job is not to solve a damn thing; the job is to best strategize what purely political rhetoric will best insulate the White House from having to take real, effective action once it has been been decided that real, effective action is no longer on the table.
We know this because the administration still hasn't appointed someone to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and has done nothing to shake loose the considerable sums of money necessary for a meaningful national push to reduce opioid deaths, because despite a few of the usual self-aggrandizing blusters from Trump himself the White House has been slow-walking their response to what Trump himself says is an emergency for close to a full year, at this point.
The most probable outcome here is that three months from now everyone will have forgotten Kellyanne Conway was given the role at all. As with Jared Kushner's various, spurious appointments, we'll have a vague remembrance that maybe there was an announcement this new Trump-adjacent lout was taking charge of this new something, but none of us will quite be able to recall if that was a real thing that happened or just something the Garbage Fire burped out in a puff of smoke, on some long-forgotten Thursday. And then someone new will be appointed to the role.