Furious toddler is furious
So did you watch it? I watched it except for the last few minutes. I laughed at his furious scowl, his “I shoulda got that,” his “You’re the puppet.” I gaped in astonishment when he wouldn’t say he would accept the outcome of the election. I cringed when he said “bad hombres.” I missed “Such a nasty woman.”
[T]he more damaging impression that average voters will be left with from Las Vegas is Trump’s total lack of self-discipline.
Truth. It was an astonishing thing to see. We could tell he was trying, at first, to discipline that rowdy self of his. He spoke more soberly and quietly for the first few minutes, and a little bit more coherently. But it was only for the first few minutes, and after that he simply threw it all out the window and let his id take over. His id is a revolting thing to see, and out of the question for someone with the duties and responsibilities of president of the US.
Most Americans want a president who can control his (or her) impulses. They may not volunteer “self-restraint” as a hallmark of good leadership, but people do not want someone with an irrepressible temper and unhealthy ego in control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Trump once again failed that test at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, squandering his last big chance to change the trajectory of a race that has moved away from him.
Emphasis theirs.
It wouldn’t occur to us to include “self-restraint” in the list of desired talents because it seems such a baseline qualification. “Can talk” and “doesn’t defecate in public” are also taken for granted. (Mind you, Bush Junior’s striking lack of skill in the talking department should have been a disqualifier, in my view.) Nobody expects a giant toddler to try to be president of the US, and yet there he is.
Trump became more agitated as the night dragged on. The split screen was not his friend. You could see him grimacing, rolling his eyes and shaking his head as she talked.
That too, yes, but from the very beginning, even while he was comparatively disciplined while actually talking, he was making a ridiculous, childish face – eyes squinched nearly shut and mouth turned down like the sad/angry emoticon. He looked like a toddler, literally.
The culmination of all this came in the final moments when Clinton, talking about Social Security, took a dig at Trump for not paying federal income taxes. “Such a nasty woman,” he blurted out.
Yet earlier in the debate he had repeated his absurd claim that “No one respects women more than I do.” I think Milo Yiannopoulos probably respects women more than Trump does. The New York Times did a piece the other day that included a gem of a remark I hadn’t seen before:
Trump presents himself as ageless — a bit older than Clinton, but only in man years, which don’t really count. He told the TV doctor Mehmet Oz that he looks in the mirror and sees “a person who is 35 years old,” like a fairy-tale villain with a charmed looking glass. He gets his exercise, he said, by gesticulating at rallies. The bizarre doctor’s note he released concluded that he’d be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” then added, “His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary.” His wives get younger with every marriage — the third, Melania, is 24 years his junior — and their youth, Trump says, only makes him more powerful. “You know,” he told Esquire in 1991, “it doesn’t really matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
Such respect.
Back to the Post.
Trump’s self-absorption also haunted him during the debates. Clinton has spent the past few months trying to frame the election as a referendum on him. She’s succeeded, in part, because Trump’s favorite thing to talk about is, well, Trump.
And he takes everything personally. Trump started his answer on the Supreme Court vacancy, for example, by noting that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said nasty things about him and claiming that she was “forced to apologize.”
Indeed, and when he tried to defend his love for Putin he included “he says nice things about me.”
We apologize for this extended trainwreck. We join you in hoping it will be over soon.
As Francis Fukuyama said today, the real worry is that next time Trump’s baton will be picked up by someone more intelligent and self-disciplined than he is.
“Nobody expects a giant toddler to try to be president of the US, and yet there he is.”
Precisely.
Trump’s default mode is that of a toddler who has lost his dummy, or pacifier as such is called in America.
Toddler, dummy spit and tantrum: three expressions essential to anyone who wishes to make a realistic assessment of Trump and the prospect of his Frankenstein Presidency.
Oh yes, and fingers: as related to nuclear button; grope; molestation.
That remark about such a nasty woman was all the more incredible because he had just referred to both Clinton and Obama as “stupid” – several times. They were “stupid”; Assad was “smart”.
Unfortunately, there is a contingency that does actually want just that, and they are riled up. He is riling them up further by his antics, and they are determined that any outcome that doesn’t favor Trump must be rigged. They are riled up because they are white, and male, and there are people who are not white, or not male, or both not white and not male, that are allowed to have rights in this country, and they don’t like that. Orange is okay, but other forms of not white are simply not allowed in their vision of the United States.
If Trump should happen to win, we should change our name to the Untied States.
What Author says @ 1. Yes.
One thing about Trump though is that his (meretricious) “celebrity” is most of why he got this far. Nobody else has exactly that kind & amount of celebrity, so maybe his baton will decompose before anyone manages to pick it up.
Girlfriend suggested (and I wholeheartedly agree) that Trump genuinely doesn’t understand the difference between “I respect women” and “Women make me horny”. Only in that framework does “nobody respects women more than I do” really make any sense. It would also mean that instead of that statement being a ridiculous, over the top attempt at ‘winning’ an argument, it was actually about his manliness and virility and heterosexuality all along.
Hmm. I think it’s “I love women” that actually means “Women make me horny.” I think Trump uses the word “respect” because he understands, in his toddler way, that it’s what you’re supposed to have for women, so he says he has it, without pausing to think about what it means and whether he really does have it or not. In other words I think it’s not a misunderstanding of the word, it’s just a straight-up self-serving lie.
Today in Vox, Ezra Klein points that Clinton played Trump:
“Trump’s meltdown wasn’t an accident. The Clinton campaign coolly analyzed his weaknesses and then sprung trap after trap to take advantage of them.
“Clinton’s successful execution of this strategy has been, fittingly, the product of traits that she’s often criticized for: her caution, her overpreparation, her blandness. And her particular ability to goad Trump and blunt the effectiveness of his political style has been inextricable from her gender. The result has been a political achievement of awesome dimensions, but one that Clinton gets scarce credit for because it looks like something Trump is doing, rather than something she is doing — which is, of course, the point.”
She played him like a violin.
She played him like a Trumpenhorn.
Didn’t see much, but the favourite bit of that part I did see was Clinton pointing out Trump’s pattern of behaviour, claiming that things are “rigged against him” any time things don’t go his way. She lists everything from the current election, the case against Trump U, the FBI investigation against her. One of the items on her list was Trump claiming the Emmy Awards were rigged when his show failed to win for the third year in a row. In the background Trump says something like “Yes, I should have won,” perfectly underlining her point. Instead of realising how whiny and petulant this laundry list of slights and failures made him look and keeping quiet, he is compelled to reiterate about how his show should have won an Emmy, making him look whinier still. She laid out a big, shiny cartoon bear trap, with gleaming, pointed teeth, labelled BEAR TRAP, and he stepped right in it. Well played Ms Clinton!
We may be seeing why she seems to get what she wants, or some of it at least, in negotations with adversaries. Playing people like violins is apparently one of her (many) unadvertised talents.
I was particularly pleased with that article because I don’t often see anyone, particularly a man, acknowledge all the work and thought that goes into succeeding without appearing to ‘do anything’, a skill generally associated with women.
Your Name’s not Bruce? @ 10 – oh yes – that was an outstanding part. I cited it in my list of the things I laughed at (“his “I shoulda got that””). It was so astonishing that he took the bait.