A lumpy pink dope bellowing
David Roth on Trump’s pre-helicopter shtick is a feast of word-deployment:
The wheedling honk of Trump’s voice and the uneasy tilt of his standing-on-a-hoverboard-for-the-first-time posture are constants, as is his customary air of triumphal huffiness…
It’s worthless, of course. Reporters shout something at Trump about a thing he said or did or his response to someone’s else response to something, and then he shouts that he did it because he felt like it or actually didn’t do it at all, or that the criticism of what he did is offensive and illegitimate, or that the question itself is. If he’s asked a question by a woman, he gets extra spicy….
This is more or less what Trump has always thought the news should be like: people with microphones clamoring for his opinion and asking him about himself. For decades the man has dreamed of reporters calling out “please, sir, what’s the latest on your personal feuds” or “sir, how did you achieve this amazing success?” while he delivers flirty winking answers. That this is not the way it goes now that he’s president clearly causes him great frustration. Watch these pissy helicopter-adjacent scrums and you may see a lumpy pink dope bellowing “we’re looking into that very strongly” in response to questions he transparently can’t answer and dispensing whatever thudding speculative idiocy he thinks will get him to the next question…
…Trump is nearly as ubiquitous in the culture as he has always believed he should be; the one deeply held belief that has been evident throughout his whole faithless disgrace of a life is people should be talking about Donald Trump more, on television, and he has just about seen that part through. All Trump wants, all he has ever wanted, is to be able to keep doing and taking and saying whatever he wants whenever he wants. He ran for president for this reason and this reason only.
One small but key additon: to be able to keep doing and taking and saying whatever he wants whenever he wants while millions watch. He’s not content to do all this talking just to himself, or to a captive audience of his wife or porn star or lawyer.
His politics, to the extent that they’ve ever been legible, have always been off-the-rack big city tabloid bullshit—crudely racist exterminate the brutes/back the blue authoritarianism in the background and ruthless petty rich person squabbling in the front. His actions since becoming president have been those of a dim, cruel child playacting at being a powerful man…
It’s all that good; you should read every word.
My only quibble with the piece:
Shouldn’t that be effluent?
Holms, more like influent – what comes into the sewage plant, not what goes out, since our sewage plants are pretty good at getting the water pretty clean.
What a brilliant piece. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. It makes me happy that so many people get what is going on, but sad that it doesn’t seem to be making any difference. People usually get a six-month probationary period to show that they can do the job, and get chucked out if they’re a fraction as incompetent as the mouldy mandarin. Yet after almost two years in the position, with the man actively destroying everything the job stands for, not only has no-one sacked him, it seems like everyone in the media is colluding with his determination to turn the US presidency into a personal TV show by standing around gawping at him and gleefully anticipating what the next outrageous pronouncement will be.
I’m tempted to say “The USA has the presidency it deserves”, except I know that a lot of you want to see him removed even more than the rest of the world does. When the wheels of justice grind so exceedingly slow that there is no detectable movement, it’s hard to see the famous ‘checks and balances’ as anything but wishful thinking and the US Constitution as anything more than a set of suggestions which can be ignored without consequences so long as you are brazen enough.