It’s Thursday!
That means that there are only three more full days left in the week for Donald Trump to do or say something stupid. This is of no condolence to anyone, because he typically doesn’t rest between fuckups. Even on his golf vacations he never misses an opportunity to not make the papers with his latest embarrassing utterance. You can bet he’ll be there at 6:45am Sunday, still stoned on Halcion, fuming about his latest feud with black football players, dreamers, transgendered people, the entire island of Puerto Rico, the media, Democrats, Republicans, Congress, Gold Star families, his cabinet, the intelligence community, “activist” judges, John McCain and this list is nearly interminable so I will stop here.
Some of you out there like to think he’s a disruptor on purpose, judging from the volume of internet punditry that keeps writing the “here’s what Trump did today while you were talking about (see feud list above for examples)” story even though I am aware of no rule that says we internet sleuths can only focus on one outrage at a time. But anyway, I still don’t know. Maybe there’s something to it, maybe he thinks he’s an effective one, but you cannot ignore the fact that he even does that really badly. In most of the fights he picks, he punches himself in the face first real hard. The rest of his obsessions, well, he kind of just leaves them in the air, arbitrarily picking the nearest hornet’s nest to hit and then he moves on suddenly, which is somehow less scary than him actually focusing on something. His lack of curiosity and distaste for detail and nuance are probably the only things stopping us from a hot war with the rest of the Axis Of Evil.
Whatever you’d like to say Trump is up to-is he any good at it?
An old friend said something approximating the truth-Trump is good at getting himself noticed. He can’t seem to stand not being the center of attention, which bespeaks of an unfortunate upbringing. Positive or negative, all press is the same, echoing that old dictum about publicity. He takes all comers no matter whether or not he has a leg to stand on- and he usually doesn’t. Truth to Trump is totally relative to whether or not it serves his interests at any particular moment-one only need observe the hilarious phenomenon of being able to zing Trump using tweets he lobbed at Barack Obama during his presidency. I don’t even know if the word hypocrite really begins to describe it-perhaps some of these synonyms are fresher and more accurate. Trump may be dimly aware of Adolf Hitler’s counsel about lying big or going home, which is a charge I am reticent to make but the man lies about everything. Today, I fully expect him to keep lashing out about what he did or didn’t say to a grieving mother who lost her son serving, even though someone’s already leaked that he’s sort of contrite about the whole thing.
Now, if we were living in normal times, this guy would have been pinched for abusing and shitting up the office long ago. But we don’t live in a normal political climate. For example, during my lifetime, I have watched or listened to the right wing make an enemy out of the free press. You see, Donald hasn’t been the only one to use big lies. The right wing movement in America been slowly but surely undermining the trust in professional storytellers for at least 30 years, first by taking over the AM dial and then by forming its own TV station. I often hear that Democrats like to divide people, but if you step out of the bubble you find out who the real dividers are. So I’m not going to give Trump too much undue credit for the mind-humping poll that says that 46% of Americans don’t believe what the media reports about Trump. This number is unnervingly aligned with the outcome of the popular vote in 2016. Clearly, our people isn’t learning.
President Poopypants has successfully sold himself as a victim, not realizing that he is dying by his own hand. But the putzes and outliers that voted for him don’t seem to notice. Trump and his henchmen will carpet bomb the truth with nonsense and disinformation at every turn, whether intentionally or not. They may still be the gang who can’t shoot straight, but I’m afraid hitting the soft-headed fish they’re aiming at doesn’t really take all that much talent anymore.