His eyes are rolling back in his head
One item from the Times story on Bannon and the Wolff book needs to stand on its own.
The book presents Mr. Trump as an ill-informed and thoroughly unserious candidate and president, engaged mainly in satisfying his own ego. It reports that early in the campaign, one aide, Sam Nunberg, was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” it quoted Mr. Nunberg as saying, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Not a child in school itching to go outside and run around. Not an undergraduate too hungover to pay attention. Not a random asshole on Twitter. A grown-ass adult running for president who couldn’t be bothered to learn about the Constitution.
The Constitution is hard, hard: even on a good day. Not one late-night passable joke in it.
The problem with the Founding Fathers was that they had no Twitter. It was downhill all the way from there until Trump turned up; came to the rescue; pussygrabbed his way to the top; stuff like that.
Now where was I?
The trouble is that the Constitution doesn’t fit on one page, and there are not graphs or pictures or bullet points. Also, it doesn’t mention Trump even once.
But. . . who would have thought that the Constitution was that hard? Everyone is saying that it’s easy, and not hard.
The thing I don’t get about this is how to square the idea that Trump didn’t want to win, he just wanted the publicity from running (and from crowing about the system being fixed when he lost), with the idea that he won to spite Obama because Obama made fun of him that one time at a White House dinner.
Now, Trump’s undone a lot of Obama-era legislation. Most of that makes sense in that Obama’s policies were in contrast to Republican policies, and without any specific policies of his own to enact (MAGA isn’t a policy) Trump was happy to do a bunch of stuff that Republican congresscritters put in front of him.
However, there have been a few bits of Obama-era legislation that, as I recall, had bipartisan support at the time, and were generally regarded across the aisle as good government policy, but Trump overturned anyway, and the only reasonable explanation of “why” was “because Obama did it”. (I can’t remember which bits of legislation they were though. There’s been so much awful, it all blurs together in my head.)
Now, undoing otherside well-regarded Obama-era legislation to spite him makes sense if Donnie ran just to spite Obama. However, if Donnie ran just for the publicity, it doesn’t make sense that once he’s in office and floundering about for ideas, he’d suddenly decide to look through Obama’s legislative history and find stuff to reverse… just because?
Am I missing something here?
Well, there’s such a thing as mixed motives, for one thing.
And for another there’s Trump, who wouldn’t recognize coherence if it bit him on the ass.
And for a third I’m not convinced he 100% wanted and intended to lose the entire time. If that were true he could have done a lot to make sure of it and refrained from doing a lot that made it more likely.
Karellen @#7:
I think you need to put it all into its proper geographical and geophysical context. I have studied this stuff, and so I know all about it.
There are many divides in America: the Rio Grande, the Rocky Mountains, the Canadian border, the San Andreas Fault, and the Obama-Trump Discontinuity, just to name a few of the major ones.
It’s a big picture, really demanding a big screen: like Cinerama.
Hope that helps you find what you are looking for.
;-)