Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes
Peter Wehner at the Atlantic says Trump’s presidency is over.
Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.
The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.
Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.
The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.
I think that’s probably true.
Indeed what he says is mostly useless. Trump’s shallowness and inability to articulate ideas, or stay focused long enough to show intelligent leadership points to the central problem. Our twitter window into his mind shows what he’s focused on, being belligerent and contentious to *his* perceived opponents, and crowing about *his* perceived wins. A lot of what comes out of this administration is happening behind the scenes, and while it doesn’t look like he’s actually being puppeted (a la Bush Jr.), it’s obvious that he’s incapable of grasping complex issues or articulating them. He talks down to everyone around him, and to the public, in a way that shows his acute narcissism and entitled, silver spoon arrogance. His attempts at connecting with people, or appearing to be magnanimous, combined with his cheerleading nationalism (which he cloaks in ‘patriotism’), are all false and contemptuous at best. Trump’s in it for Trump. His foolish offspring are the same way for the same reasons. The rest of us are only (largely unwillingly) along for the ride. No, he’s not fit for office. Maybe the people who elected him will start to see that.
If only…
Harry S. Truman, January 19, 1953: “The President has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.”
Donald J. Trump, March 13, 2020: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
I just saw that clip.
I saw it too, at the press conference today that he should have had a month ago.
“The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.”
This has been obvious to absolutely everyone since basically forever, and since well before the election. The very same cognitive dissonance and strategic ignorance which allowed millions of people to vote for the most famous narcissist in the history of the world, the very same Fox propaganda machine that turned Obama’s tan suit into a national fucking emergency and went on to foster Pizzagate, the very same provincial desperation and trans-generational underinvestment which gave it birth…all still exist, and in spades. The same thirty-year fascistification of the Republican Party still exists. The same timid and timorous Democratic Party still exists, as do the same entertainment firms we call news outlets.
I’ve got news for Peter Wehner: the vast majority of Americans can’t *spell* ’empirical reality’, much less know what the fuck it means, and much, much less are amenable to it. If it were possible for Trump’s conduct to shock the people who’ve voted for and enabled him into regretting those decisions, it would have happened a long time before now. There is absolutely nothing he has done in this crisis that is a difference in kind from his responses to everything that has gone wrong ever since he began running for the office in the first place. There have been many, many moments where his unfitness for his position has been demonstrated with mathematical precision, and precisely none of them have managed to move the needle.
Now people are dying, it is true, and when the dust settles and we’re all dead, the mismanagement of this crisis should stink up the annals of history for millennia to come. But the more people die, the more desperate people get, the more they will dig in and blame the targets they’ve been primed to blame, and the more his defenders will defend him.
I am reminded of British and Canadian Communists who celebrated when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, because it was obvious to them that Hitler had overplayed his hand and would be defeated by the Worker’s Paradise. They were ultimately correct, of course, but the struggle was a close-run thing that took just shy of four years and just over twenty million Soviet lives until the hammer and sickle were raised over Berlin. I understand the impulse to see the silver lining in the circumstances that have befallen us, but that impulse is not a rational one; we will not be saved by events, but by ourselves, if we can muster up the will to see through the calamities of fate and the calumnies of men.
Seth;
And those same communists applauded when the Hitler/Stalin pact was signed 22 months before Barbarossa. And had no objections when the Soviets invaded Poland in coordination with the Germans.
There is no limit to how far ‘party loyalty’ of that kind will go. And that’s just the kind of loyalty ‘the base’ has for Trump.