From David Roth in The Baffler last August:

The most significant thing to know about Donald Trump’s politics or process, his beliefs or his calculations, is that he is an asshole; the only salient factor in any decision he makes is that he absolutely does not care about the interests of the parties involved except as they reflect upon him. Start with this, and you already know a lot. Start with this, and you already know that there are no real answers to any of these questions.

It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him…

His mental life is drastically impoverished, and yet he loves to talk – he talks a lot, he does all the talking, he has no interest in listening to other people talk, he’s that windbag bore who traps you somewhere and embarks on an anecdote you can tell he’s told a million times before and he will not stop. That’s why he loved campaigning so much and why he keeps holding “rallies” – he got to talk and talk and talk and talk, and people would cheer him and wave flags. He has nothing to say but he never shuts up.

Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life.

…

To understand Trump is also to understand his appeal as an aspirational brand to the worst people in the United States. What his intransigent admirers like most about him—the thing they aspire to, in their online cosplay sessions and their desperately thirsty performances for a media they loathe and to which they are so helplessly addicted—is his freedom to be unconcerned with anything but himself. This is not because he is rich or brave or astute; it’s because he is an asshole, and so authentically unconcerned. The howling and unreflective void at his core will keep him lonely and stupid until the moment a sufficient number of his vital organs finally resign in disgrace, but it liberates him to devote every bit of his being to his pursuit of himself. Actual hate and actual love, as other people feel them, are too complicated to fit into this world. In their place, for Trump and for the people who see in him a way of being that they are too busy or burdened or humane to pursue, are the versions that exist in a lower orbit, around the self. Instead of hate, there is simple resentment—abject and valueless and recursively self-pitying; instead of love, there is the blank sucking nullity of vanity and appetite.

…

The rest of the world is an abstraction to him, a market to exploit; there is no other person in it who is real to him. They’re all supplicants or subjects, fans or haters, but their humanity is transparently not part of the equation. What other people might want, or indeed the fact that they could want at all, is crowded out of the picture by the corroded and corrosive bulk of his horrible self.

There is no room for other people in the world that Trump has made for himself, and this is fundamental to the anxiety of watching him impose his claustrophobic and airless interior world on our own. Is Trump a racist? Yes, because that’s a default setting for stupid people; also, he transparently has no regard for other people at all. Does Trump care about the cheap-looking statue of Stonewall Jackson that some forgotten Dixiecrat placed in a shithole park somewhere he will never visit? Not really, but he so resents the fact that other people expect him to care that he develops a passionate contrary opinion out of spite.

That’s a gem of an insight.

Ruth Marcus at the Post points out that National security adviser H.R. McMaster wrote a book titled “Dereliction of Duty.”

Now, in the White House in which McMaster serves, the dereliction of duty starts at the top. And, as the past several days have shown, President Trump’s failure is dereliction on a grand, unprecedented scale: We find ourselves at war without a commander in chief; in national mourning without a consoler in chief; and in political gridlock without a negotiator in chief.

The first is the most appalling and most terrifying. “Incontrovertible,” McMaster said, and so it is for anyone who bothers to read the indictment of 13 Russians for running a massive operation not only to disrupt the election but to do so to Trump’s benefit. But of course Trump never has and apparently never will be able to accept this. Is it his fragile ego that cannot tolerate the implicit challenge to his legitimacy? Is it something more sinister?

Russia will, if it can, turn us into a subordinate replica of itself: an authoritarian oligarchy that tolerates no dissent.

We are at war with an enemy plotting to undermine our democracy, and our supposed leader, far from working to halt this, seems determined to ignore it.

…

Trump’s anger is directed against the democratic institutionsthat have rallied to discover what happened and seek to prevent its recurrence: “If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!”

…

But there is no depth to which Trump will not sink in defense of the only thing he holds dear: himself. And so, the nation witnessed a tweet in which the president, a leader to whom the country once looked for healing in times of national tragedy, instead used innocent victims, high school children mowed down in their own school, to make his bogus, self-interested point: “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign – there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”

Did he? Did he really use dead children to attack an investigation into his campaign and his conduct in office? Yes, he did. This is a person devoid of empathy. He can experience the world only through the prism of his own ego. He can read the requisite words from a teleprompter — “To every parent, teacher, and child who is hurting so badly, we are here for you — whatever you need, whatever we can do, to ease your pain” — but he is incapable of feeling them. No one who imagines the shattered heart of a grieving parent could have written that despicable tweet.

Or grinned like someone who just won a lottery while standing next to the hospital bed of one of the survivors.

David Frum too is underwhelmed by Trump’s attempt to show sympathy for the student of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school.

As the rest of America mourns the victims of the Parkland, Florida, massacre, President Trump took to Twitter.

Not for him the rituals of grief. He is too consumed by rage and resentment. He interrupted his holidaying schedule at Mar-a-Lago only briefly, for a visit to a hospital where some of the shooting victims were treated. He posed afterward for a grinning thumbs-up photo op. Pain at another’s heartbreak—that emotion is for losers, apparently.

I don’t think there was even that much thought involved. I think he completely forgot what he was there for, because there’s not room in his brain for both concern for himself and the details of what just happened to other people.

Having failed at one presidential duty, to speak for the nation at times of national tragedy, Trump resumed shirking an even more supreme task: defending the nation against foreign attack.

There again: not enough space. Focusing on the foreign attack on the nation would interfere with his focus on himself. It’s a kind of discipline, in a way –  he never ever loses that laser-like focus on his own wants and rages.

Trump has systematically attempted to shut down investigations of the foreign-espionage operation that operated on his behalf. He fired the director of the FBI to shut it down. His White House coordinated with the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to misdirect the investigation. He mobilized the speaker of the House to thwart bipartisan investigations under broadly respected leadership. He has inspired, supported, and joined a national propaganda campaign against the Mueller investigation.

And all the while, Trump has done nothing—literally nothing—to harden the nation’s voting systems against follow-on Russian operations. On Sunday, he publicly repudiated his own national-security adviser for acknowledging at the Munich Security Conference the most incontrovertible basics of what happened in 2016.

We’re in an interesting interim state right now – plummeting towards an authoritarian disaster, but with many of the institutions of a liberal democracy still functioning, so that newspapers and tv news and individuals on Twitter and Facebook can still point out what’s happening. That can’t go on forever; if the plummet towards an authoritarian disaster continues to its goal, all that will be shut down or so hindered and crippled it might as well be shut down. But for now, we can still talk about what’s being done to us.

Americans who cherish democracy and national sovereignty need to start discussing a bigger and darker question.

Authoritarian nationalist parties across the western world have outright cooperated with the Russians. Russian money has helped to finance the National Front in France, and the election and re-election of the president of the Czech Republic. In Germany, Russia first created a hoax refugee-rape case—then widely publicized it—in an effort to boost its preferred extremist party in that country’s 2017 election, the Alternative for Germany. Russia supported pro-AfD comment in media favored by Germany’s surprisingly substantial Russian-speaking communities.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo predicted to the BBC at the beginning of 2018 that Russia “will be back” to help its preferred candidates in November 2018. To what extent does President Trump—to what extent do congressional Republicans—look to Russian interference to help their party in the 2018 cycle?

And how the fuck do we stop them?

That was just one of many deranged tweets from “the president” today. He’s more bonkers than ever, he’s more self-obsessed than ever, he’s as recklessly indifferent to the fate of the country and the world as ever. He’s also very very cross.

President Trump, in a series of angry and defiant tweets on Sunday morning, sought to shift the blame to Democrats for Russia’s virtual war to meddle in the 2016 election, saying that President Barack Obama had not done enough to stop the interference and denying that he had ever suggested that Moscow might not have been involved.

Mr. Trump, who has said little to publicly acknowledge a threat to American democracy that even one of his top aides called “incontrovertible” on Saturday, asserted that the efforts to investigate and combat the Russian meddling had only given the Russians what they wanted, saying that “they are laughing their asses off in Moscow.”

They are, of course, but not for the reason Trump claims. They’ve been doing it ever since November 8, 2016.

The president has repeatedly seized on the fact that the efforts started before he became a candidate, but has glossed over the conclusion that they evolved toward supporting his candidacy.

By “glossed over” they mean “totally and mendaciously ignored.”

In another tweet on Sunday, Mr. Trump, who has tried since the campaign to sow doubts about who was behind the election intrusions, said that he had “never said Russia did not meddle in the election,” quoting a comment he made in a 2016 presidential debate.

“I said ‘it may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer,” Mr. Trump wrote. “The Russian ‘hoax’ was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia — it never did!”

Yet he has repeatedly denied that Russia was behind any meddling, even going so far in November as to suggest that he believed President Vladimir V. Putin’s denials of interference over the conclusions of American intelligence agencies.

“Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Mr. Trump said at the time, calling questions about Moscow’s meddling a politically motivated “hit job.”

He blew kisses to Putin at the dinner table, he went over and had a cozy intimate chat with him with only the Russian interpreter for a third.

Mr. Trump has long fought the idea that Moscow’s efforts might have influenced the election, viewing it as a threat to his legitimacy. He has made little if any public effort to rally the nation to confront the Russians for their intrusion.

Always hedging. He has made zero effort, and he has made strenuous effort to do the opposite.

On Saturday, the president’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, said, referring to the Russian meddling, “With the F.B.I. indictment, the evidence is now really incontrovertible and available in the public domain.”

In a late-night tweet on Saturday, Mr. Trump criticized General McMaster for not saying at the security conference in Germany where he was speaking that the election results had not been changed as a result of the Russian interference. The nation’s intelligence agencies believe that it is not possible to make such a conclusion.

Trump is apparently too stupid even to grasp why it is not possible to draw such a conclusion.

Josh Dawsey in the Post on the nightmare zombie visit of Trump to the Florida hospital yesterday.

President Trump, as he often does while responding to natural disasters, mass shootings or unfolding crises, spent much of his time congratulating the responders instead of memorializing the victims of Wednesday’s school shooting during a visit here Friday.

Trump, in two quick stops at a hospital and sheriff’s office near the school where 17 were killed and scores were injured, praised the doctors, police officers, fire officials and others who responded quickly to the mass shooting in Parkland, casting their response as heroic and record-setting.

“Incredible job, and everybody is talking about it,” Trump said of the response, with dozens of officers flanking a large circular conference room table on the fifth floor of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.

No, what everybody is talking about is the horror of what happened, the students and teachers who were killed, the grief and terror and loss and anguish. The fact that emergency personnel responded quickly is not the core of the story.

“They were in really great shape,” he said of the families.

Yeah I’m sure they were ecstatic that their kids were in the hospital after being shot at school, and that some of their kids’ classmates are dead. I’m sure they’re in fabulous shape, ready to run a marathon, in peak tip-top happy condition.

“The job they’ve done is incredible, and I want to congratulate you,” Trump said as he shook the hand of Dr. Igor Nichiporenko at the hospital.

Not exactly. He thrust his hand out at the doctor, and when the doctor slowly took it, he yanked it hard.

https://youtu.be/zWftDoNYHYo

He said he was impressed with the speed with which first responders reacted, calling it “record-setting” and “in one case, 20 minutes” from the school to the hospital.

“It’s an incredible thing,” Trump said. He later said the officers deserve a raise.

It’s a wonder he didn’t talk about what kind of gas mileage they got.

He did not give an emotional or rousing commemoration to the victims — like President Barack Obama’s after a mass shooting at a Charleston, S.C., church — nor did he publicly greet any families whose children were killed in the attack. Speaking at a funeral or a large vigil was not on the agenda. There were no calls for American resolve. There were no tears.

The visits were quick. For instance, Friday night, he was in the hospital for about 35 minutes, speaking to the news media for about 45 seconds.

There was no feeling, no understanding, no sorrow, no empathy, no concern, no compassion, no normal human reaction of any kind. He might as well have been playing golf. The most he could manage was that “It’s saaad that a thing like this could happen” – but that’s his “sad,” the one he puts at the end of his angry tweets, and he cut himself off instantly with “but the speed with which they got there was incredible” – as if to say let’s not get all mawkish here.

It’s chilling to watch. We know he’s empty, but seeing him demonstrate it at times like this…it’s dreadful.

Meanwhile Trump sticks to his policy of hiring foreign workers for his own enterprises.

A Vox analysis of hiring records for seasonal workers at three Trump properties in New York and Florida revealed that only one out of 144 jobs went to a US worker from 2016 to the end of 2017. Foreign guest workers with H-2B visas got the rest.

Why would that be? Because they accept lower pay and crappier working conditions.

The H-2B visa program allows seasonal, non-agricultural employers — like hotels and ski resorts — to hire foreign workers when they can’t find American ones. The Trump administration temporarily expanded this guest-worker program in 2017 while restricting other avenues of legal immigration, including the H-1B program for high-skilled workers.

The Trump Organization is exactly the kind of company that relies on the H-2B visa program for low-skilled workers.

And Trump is exactly the kind of human who is eager to pay his employees as little as possible.

Under the H-2B program, employers must first try to hire American workers — or legal immigrants already in the United States — at reasonable wages for their openings. If they can’t find qualified US workers, then employers can ask the Department of Labor for permission to hire foreign guest workers on H-2B visas. Documents show that hiring managers at the Trump establishments made the minimum efforts required by law to recruit US workers.

Remember that story last year? In which the Mar-a-Lago managers put a tiny ad in one obscure paper for about 5 minutes, and that was it. Also they interviewed one American worker but did not hire her.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions, said he was “displeased” when Trump temporarily expanded the H-2B program in 2017. He said Mar-a-Lago is just using the program how other employers use it: as a way to avoid paying higher wages or offering more benefits to attract American workers.

“It’s a bullshit law written to ensure that employers don’t have to hire Americans,” said Krikorian, who normally applauds the president’s immigration agenda.

No doubt he still does; it’s the hiring practices he’s objecting to.

In the past five years, a few of Trump’s golf clubs and resorts on the East Coast have relied heavily on hiring foreign workers to serve patrons during the summer months (in New York) and the winter months (in Florida). The H-2B database shows requests from Mar-a-Lago dating back to 2013. This practice has clearly not stopped since Trump became president.

In fact, the Trump administration temporarily expanded the H-2B program. In July 2017, the Department of Homeland Security raised the cap on H-2B visas for guest workers from 66,000 to 81,000 for fiscal year 2017. (Three days later, Trump’s properties asked for permission to hire 76 workers through the program.)

Tactful of him to wait three whole days.

Trump yesterday found time to make survivors of the Florida massacre smile in his photo op, but not to say anything about stopping Putin and gang trashing what there is of our democracy.

After more than a dozen Russians and three companies were indicted on Friday for interfering in the 2016 elections, President Trump’s first reaction was to claim personal vindication: “The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!” he wrote on Twitter.

He voiced no concern that a foreign power had been trying for nearly four years to upend American democracy, much less resolve to stop it from continuing to do so this year.

None, zip, zero. His first concern was for himself, and his second concern was for himself, and then he had a plane to catch.

Rather than condemn Russia for its actions, Mr. Trump in the past has said he accepts the denial offered by President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Trump has not imposed new sanctions called for in a law passed by Congress last year to retaliate for the attack on America’s political system, or teamed up with European leaders to counter a common threat. He has not led a concerted effort to harden election systems in the United States with midterm congressional elections on the horizon, or pressed lawmakers to pass legislation addressing the situation.

Instead he’s done

• nothing
• nothing
• nothing

We have plenty of photos of him grinning and poking his thumb up in front of his gut though.

Michael A. McFaul, an ambassador to Moscow under President Barack Obama, called Mr. Trump’s reaction to the indictments “shockingly weak” and said he should instead have criticized Mr. Putin for violating American sovereignty or even announced plans to punish Moscow.

“Instead, he just focused on his own campaign,” Mr. McFaul said. “America was attacked, and our commander in chief said nothing in response. He looks weak, not only in Moscow but throughout the world.”

And not just weak; also indifferent, also self-absorbed and self-serving, also incompetent, also clueless, also reckless and irresponsible, also profoundly stupid.

Mr. Trump’s own aides readily acknowledge the reality that he does not. Besides describing Russian interference as undeniable on Saturday, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, said Mr. Mueller’s charges made clear that Russia had been engaged in a “sophisticated form of espionage” against the United States.

“With the F.B.I. indictment, the evidence is now really incontrovertible and available in the public domain,” he said.

But the stuffed dummy at the top just keeps watching tv and paying sadistic hospital visits.

You in the bed, you too.

Smile as if you mean it.

How dare he.

Oh christ. You think he can’t go any lower and then…

Our entire Nation, w/one heavy heart, continues to pray for the victims & their families in Parkland, FL. To teachers, law enforcement, first responders & medical professionals who responded so bravely in the face of danger: We THANK YOU for your courage! https://t.co/3yJsrebZMG pic.twitter.com/ti791dENTy

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2018

My god he is standing there grinning and doing a thumbs up gesture!

He’s standing by a victim’s hospital bed in a sea of forced grins for his photo op!

He’s clapping his hands!

He collected all the nearby staff and made them grin next to him and his horrible thumb!

And, to top it off, he again treats the slaughter at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas school as if it were an earthquake or a tornado rather than a human act that better laws could have prevented.

Ugh god I have seldom seen such a disgusting quartet of photos.

Updating to add: I was wrong about the clapping. A larger version of the photo reveals that Melania is making an open hands gesture while listening to the white coat person, while Donald has his folded in front of him.