At times bizarre
The Guardian live is startled by Trump’s performance on Fox “News” this morning.
Donald Trump has had quite a morning of it already. The president called into Fox & Friends for an extraordinary, at times bizarre, 55-minute interview during which Trump:
•Reiterated the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election
•Said his own EU ambassador’s sworn testimony was “total nonsense”
•Called Nancy Pelosi “crazy as a bedbug”
•Suggested he wanted to be impeached, saying: “I want a trial”
•Complained that former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch took too long to hang his picture in the Ukraine embassy
•Said people praised Yovanovitch – a highly regarded official – because “she’s a woman, you have to be nice”
•Described Rudy Giuliani as “one of the great crime fighters of all time”
The Fox & Friends hosts were largely bystanders during what effectively became a Trump monologue.
Trump sounded slightly hoarse as he ran through some of his greatest hits: his 2016 election victory, how much he has invested in the military and the highly dubious claim that “no one” has done as much during their first term.
He sounded very hoarse. He usually does. The reason is obvious: he never shuts up. He’s That Guy Who Never Shuts Up. What does that tell us? How profoundly narcissistic he is. Normal people understand that others have things to say too; narcissists think They Alone are interesting.
What he said about Yovanovitch:
This ambassador, who everybody says was so wonderful, she wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy, ok? She’s in charge of the embassy, she wouldn’t hang it, it took like a year and a half or two years for her to get the picture up. She said bad things about me, she wouldn’t defend me, and I have the right to change an ambassador – and Rudy didn’t say good things but he wasn’t crazy about her, it wasn’t like you know a major topic – but I have the right to change. This was an Obama person – didn’t want to hang my picture in the embassy, it’s standard is you put the president of the United States’ picture in an embassy, this was not an angel, this woman, OK? And there were a lot of things she did that I didn’t like, and we will talk about that at some time.
Bad things, I have the right, good things, the right, Obama person, my picture the picture my picture the president of the United States’ picture, a lot of things.
In that one passage you get the hatred of women, the narcissism, the tiny shrunken vocabulary and thought process, the bullying, the emptiness and spite and rage. It’s a disgusting collection.
In addition to all that lunacy, he also said this: “We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi.”
I like The NY Daily News’s take: Trump falsely whines ‘that woman’ Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch refused to put up his portrait in Ukraine embassy.
“Crybaby-in-chief”. Ha!
Indeed they do, Stephanie.
And I love (not really) how he constantly goes on about his election victory, which he won while getting 3 million fewer votes than his opponent. More like a technicality victory, not an actual one. That is enough votes to fill my state twice. That is almost 1 out of every 100 people above the amount of votes he got. Not 1 out of every 100 voters; no, 1 out of every 100 people in the United States.
He is not loved. He is not even liked. He is not wanted, except by a subset of the population who hate the same people he hates and want to see him break things. People who do not love America, or the Earth itself, and want to see it go up in flames because they just love a good action movie. And because they think that somehow, they will survive and all the people they hate (read: pansies who can’t take care of themselves because reasons) will die.
He is the choice of the deplorables.
Since I once played rugby, I occasionally look at rugby on YouTube, whose ‘algorithms’ seem to assume (I don’t know how rightly) that anybody who tales an interest in rugby must be a roaring fascist, Brexiteer & Trump cultist, and probably all three at once, so that various bits of right-wing political YouTubing come up in the waiting list. (In Wales, in my day at least, most rugby players were working-class and voted for Labour or Plaid Cymru.) I looked at the one on Lieutenant-Colonel Vindman and his testimony (whose title I can’t remember – probably something about traitor & Ukrainian spy, I suspect, or Nunes taking him down, as if Nunes could take down anything) and was appalled by the comments from that subset of the population, of both sexes, that Iknklast talks of; to describe them as venomous is an understatement. There was also another bit of YouTubing regarding Fiona Hill’s testimony, where the personal attacks didn’t seem to be quite so much in evidence as in Vindman’s case, but the same fervent refusal to listen, hatred, and trumpettings about Drumpff winning the next election by a landslide were. A real case of the DTs in both cases. There is no possibility of reasoning with such people.