The qualities we most need
It’s not just god who isn’t built for this, it’s also Trump.
The pain and hardship that the United States is only beginning to experience stem from a crisis that the president is utterly unsuited to deal with, either intellectually or temperamentally… The coronavirus pandemic has created the conditions that can catalyze a destructive set of responses from an individual with Trump’s characterological defects and disordered personality.
Yes but he pisses off the liberals, so it’s all worth it.
The qualities we most need in a president during this crisis are calmness, wisdom, and reassurance; a command of the facts and the ability to communicate them well; and the capacity to think about the medium and long term while carefully weighing competing options and conflicting needs. We need a leader who can persuade the public to act in ways that are difficult but necessary, who can focus like a laser beam on a problem for a sustained period of time, and who will listen to—and, when necessary, defer to—experts who know far more than he does. We need a president who can draw the nation together rather than drive it apart, who excels at the intricate work of governing, and who works well with elected officials at every level. We need a chief executive whose judgment is not just sound, but exceptional.
But that kind of chief executive wouldn’t piss off the liberals, so forget it. A pandemic is a small price to pay for the joy of pissing off the liberals.
The thing to understand about Donald Trump is that putting others before self is not something he can do, even temporarily. His attempts to convey facts that don’t serve his perceived self-interest or to express empathy are forced, scripted, and always short-lived, since such reactions are alien to him.
And that’s perpetually hard to grasp fully because it’s so alien to most people. Selfishness isn’t rare, but the complete inability to see past the self is.
This president does not have the capacity to listen to, synthesize, and internalize information that does not immediately serve his greatest needs: praise, fealty, adoration. “He finds it intolerable when those things are missing,” a clinical psychologist told me. “Praise, applause, and accolades seem to calm him and boost his confidence. There’s no room for that now, and so he’s growing irritable and needing to create some way to get some positive attention.”
I have a suggestion for that. He could resign.
Nixon: an example of a president who’s selfish, vindictive, duplicitous, and with little conscience. Yet I can imagine him rising up and handling a crisis like this at least competently, if not brilliantly.
It’s not just that I can’t imagine a president who’d be worse than Trump, it’s that I’m hard put to imagine anyone at all who’d be worse than Trump.
That’s the thing about Trump – it’s hard to think of anyone like him. We have massive supplies of bad people to contemplate, but still, they fall short of Trump.
I caught a snippet of Nixon on some programme about economics and thought, that guy sounds smart, fluent and well-informed. Amazing!
@sastra – Yes, you don’t expect Lincoln, but any President would be better than this, even George W. Bush.
His approval rating is soaring nonetheless… Perhaps the general public hasn’t cottoned on to how bad he’s fucking this up.
I voted for Bernie in the primary for my state, simply because Warren had already conceded, and I find his positions better by far and away that Biden’s. But I’ve also been forced to reconsider in recent weeks. Yes, Biden is plodding, compromised and sluggardly when it comes to any long-term policy issue; at best, he’d be a placeholder. But as much as I like Sanders’ positions, I’m forced to acknowledge that his temperament, while nowhere near as bad as Trump’s, is not one I’d like to see facing a crisis like this. His monomaniacal focus and his egoism would be issues in trying to deal with a situation not of his choosing–he has trouble shifting gears to address anything that is not one of his pet causes. (I do believe his policies, if they had already been enacted, would’ve left the nation in a better position to face the crisis no matter who was in charge–it’s this sort of forced compromise that really has me lamenting Warren’s departure from the race, as she fell into the best of both worlds category–temperament AND policy position. But apparently vagina is enough to make folks ignore that.)
I was born in the mid-south, moved away about 10 years ago but I still have connections there. I see people from that region on facebook talking about how great Trump is handling this thing. Today one said she actually cried over how people won’t recognize what a great president Trump has been and how many lives he’s saved. I’m not sure these people will change their minds even if/when the death toll becomes local and personal. It’s a cult.
They literally think the media/democrats (the same thing in their minds) are now complaining that Trump didn’t shut down the borders soon enough. It’s seen as a sign of hypocrisy that we complained about closing the borders and now we supposedly complain that he should have closed the borders sooner. They don’t have a clue what people outside their bubble think or say, their knowledge of the opposition is entirely made of strawmen like that.
Nobody could handle this crisis better than Trump, and I mean that literally, as in an empty seat would be more effective.