Taking a wrecking ball to decorum
Well that’s one way to put it.
In his first two years in office, President Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the presidency and the norms of the nation’s capital, casting aside codes of conduct and traditions that have held for generations.
In Trump’s Washington, facts are less relevant. Insults and highly personal attacks are increasingly employed by members of both parties. The White House press briefing is all but gone, international summits are optional, the arts are an afterthought and everything — including inherently nonpartisan institutions and investigations — is suddenly political.
The thing is, though, Trump hasn’t actually rewritten any rules; he hasn’t done anything that thoughtful, and he couldn’t if he wanted to, because he doesn’t have the equipment. He doesn’t rewrite rules, he simply ignores them and does what he wants to do. He really is that stupid and headlong and childish. A bull in a china shop hasn’t rewritten the rules, he’s simply barged around the way a bull does. That’s Trump.
Taking a wrecking ball to decorum and institutions, Trump has changed, in ways both subtle and profound, how Washington works and how it is viewed by the rest of the nation and world.
Yes, that’s much closer.
I’m being picky but I think we need to be very careful not to attribute planning or forethought or any kind of thought to what Trump does, because we need to keep constantly in mind just how vacant his mind is. Know the enemy.
“He’s dynamited the institution of the presidency,” said Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian at Rice University. “He doesn’t see himself as being part of a long litany of presidents who will hand a baton to a successor. Instead, he uses the presidency as an extension of his own personality.”
Not “litany”; that’s the wrong word. Line. But anyway dynamited, yes. Tear up the drawing of Trump rewriting rules and substitute the drawing of a huge explosion.
Trump’s tweets often trade in public insults that modern presidents just don’t share in public: The Senate minority leader is “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer.” The media are “the enemy of the people.” His own former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, is “dumb as a rock.”
And that level of insult, at times veering into the coarse and the crass, has bled into the dialogue of official Washington. Outgoing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, weeks before he resigned in a cloud of ethics scandals, tweeted that a Democratic congressman had struggled “to think straight from the bottom of a bottle.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told fellow Democrats this month that the border wall was a “manhood” issue for the president.
Oh come on. You can’t compare Trump’s Twitter insults, including “little Adam Schitt,” to Pelosi telling colleagues the wall is a manhood issue. She didn’t tweet it, and it’s not remotely as crass and childish.
He’s trashed the place like a drunken frat boy. The rules remain unrewritten.
Perhaps ‘lineage’ had come to mind, but failed to come to figure
Both sidesism. That’s another thing, but Trump didn’t bring that in, it was already here. The media have been doing it for a long time, and that has allowed “us” (I say “us” because some of us did not) to overlook the growing juvenility in the country, the growing disdain for other people, and the growing rage in the entitled white male hegemons that led to the nasty troll we call POTUS (because POTUS sounds suitably inelegant for a troll, whereas President sounds too dignified and, well, presidential).
That’s not all, though. He uses the presidency as an extension of his own BRAND. It amazes me that his name has any worth at all to it. God knows it has no cachet. But he does have fans (which also amazes me). To paraphrase some else’s description of Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump is a stupid person’s idea of a rich person.
It’s not only in the US. Politicians here have suddenly noticed that they can get away with blatantly obvious bare-faced lies. They always lied, obviously, but they were at least slightly careful about it and were punished (or at least tutted at) when the lies were exposed.
Now? They just deny they ever said the lie, even if there is a 50 foot video of them saying it right in front of them. Their supporters will accept it and everyone else seems powerless to do anything about it. Then they go right ahead and tell the same lie again, sometimes in the same breath.
I don’t think this is a coincidence.
This is a president who has referred to “Low-Energy Jeb” Bush, “Little Marco” Rubio, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, who has dismissed Omarosa Manigault-Newman as a “dog” and Stormy Daniels as “Horseface”, and who said about Carly Fiorina that she lost because of her face.
I now have an image in my mind of Trump replacing Miley Cyrus in the video to Wrecking Ball.
Ugh!
Loren, don’t forget about “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren and “Low IQ Maxine” Waters, both of them racially charged slurs.