This is who he is
Yesterday Trump held a “summit” with some people from the news media – and pitched a Hitler-style fit at them for covering him in such a meany unfair way.
I wish I were joking.
David Remnick heard from people who were there.
He points out the obvious: that any idea that the job would make Trump a wiser and better human is dead as a stone.
First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News reporter Katy Tur’s coverage of him to a photograph the news network has used that shows him with a double chin. Why didn’t they use “nicer” pictures?
For more than twenty minutes, Trump railed about “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. When he was asked about the sort of “fake news” that now clogs social media, Trump replied that it was the networks that were guilty of spreading fake news. The “worst,” he said, were CNN (“liars!”) and NBC.
This is where we are. The President-elect does not care who knows how unforgiving or vain or distracted he is. This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years.
That. He doesn’t care who knows what a fucking baby he is. He doesn’t care that he’s revealing himself, hourly, to be too childish and petulant for junior high school. He doesn’t care that we can all see what a vain greedy self-obsessed buffoon he is. He must not even realize that that’s what he’s showing us.
It’s mind-boggling. I’ll never get used to it. The grotesquerie cannot be assimilated.
The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign.”
Another participant at the meeting said that Trump’s behavior was “totally inappropriate” and “fucking outrageous.” The television people thought that they were being summoned to ask questions; Trump has not held a press conference since late July. Instead, they were subjected to a stream of insults and complaints…
From the guy who will be president in a few weeks. They’re the fourth estate, and he thinks it’s a good idea to summon them to his GoldVomitorium in order to try to bully them. He thinks he gets to tell them what to do.
Kellyanne Conway, who managed Trump’s campaign and who is now his senior adviser, said that the meeting had been “very cordial, candid, and honest.”
Participants said that Trump did not seem entirely rational about his criticism of the media, nor did he appear any more informed about policy than he had been during the campaign. When one participant pointed out that all Presidents and Presidential candidates believe they get bad press, Trump said, “Not Obama!”
In fact, Trump went on at length about how much he has come to like the current President—how “great” they are getting along and how he “loves” Obama. He said that since the two met at the White House, two weeks ago, they have spoken twice on the phone. When I interviewed Obama for nearly two hours last week, he was obviously doing his best to avoid insulting or provoking a man whom he had previously declared “unfit” and “uniquely unqualified” for the Presidency. During the President’s trip to Europe and Peru, sources said, one foreign leader after another came to Obama in a mood of shock and alarm, including Angela Merkel, of Germany.
Well of course they did. What’s not to be terrified about?
Participants said that Trump did not raise his voice, but that he went on steadily at the start of the meeting about how he had been treated poorly. “It was all so Trump,” one said. “He is like this all the time. He’ll freeze you out and then be nice and humble and sort of want you to like him.”
“But he truly doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment,” the source continued. “He doesn’t. He thinks we are supposed to say what he says and that’s it.”
And he doesn’t know he doesn’t understand it, and he doesn’t know that it matters that he doesn’t understand things like that.
Also, he will have the nukes. He’ll use them. I don’t think there’s any way he won’t. He has no inhibitions, no understanding, no impulse control, no ability to reason or check himself – why would he not use them?
He could be game over. It’s looking likely.
I suppose there’s always the possibility of operators defying their orders.
To make a giant overgrown baby Commander-in-Chief of the most bloated military machine on the planet…even if he doesn’t use the nukes, he can do so much damage there may be no real recovery for decades.
From infancy directly to senile dementia in only seven brief decades. “Clear and present danger”?
In Soviet Russia, the Secret Service secretly serviced the current Chairman. More than once. (And sometimes the runner-up too.)
@ Blood Knight You sir, are an optimist.
This is where American exceptionalism takes you. Everyone sits around and nods sagely, of course Trump’s dreadful and of course we don’t approve of his rhetoric but it’s not like he can do anything too bad. There are structures in place to prevent the worst excesses. It can’t happen here.
It not only can happen here, it is happening. Right now.
Global warming offset by a nuclear winter?
Who cares, by then? Cut off your nose to spite your face, sawing off the branch you sit on, and so on.
Please by all means do all of that on a personal level, dear Donkey from the Dumps, but don’t be an ass to the rest of humanity. You may have heard the term sometime.
@Claire:
I’m really not; but since I have no ability to affect the outcome one way or the other I’ll focus on what I can do.
Donate. Volunteer. Protest. Intervene. See how far my white male privilege can get others…
#NeverForgive #NeverForget
@Blood Knight I was kinda joking. There’s nothing optimistic in hoping for outright mutiny. :-(
To your hashtags I would like to add… #NeverAgain.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1348138331871291/?type=3&theater
And of course the slow nuke of climate change is already detonating at a rate of 4 Hiroshima bombs a second. Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero at this very moment, this accumulation of energy would continue for many decades due to the enormous inertia of the climate system. That’s just how long it would take for the global temperature to stop rising. Getting back to “normal” temperatures is going to take millennia.
Of course this all assumes that there are no unpleasant surprises in store, which seems unlikely. Despite all this talk of “alarmism” and “hysteria”, climate scientists are actually far more guilty of understatment than overstatment (Naomi Oreskes has called it “erring on the side of least drama”). If the edge of the cliff is 100 ft ahead, then aiming to stop after 180 ft is not “half as good” as aiming to stop after 90 ft. And there are many such “cliffs”:
– Ice reflects lots of energy-carrying sunlight back into space. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means less ice, which means less reflection of sunlight, which means even more global warming.
– Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means more water vapor, which means more greenhouse effect, which means even more global warming.
– Permafrost stores vast amounts of Methane, which is yet another greenhouse gas. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means melting permafrost, which means more methane in the atmosphere, which means more greenhouse effect, which means even more global warming.
– The oceans absorb vast quantities of carbon (which is a serious problem in itself, since it leads to ocean acidification). But warm water holds less carbon than cold water. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means warmer oceans, which means less absorption of carbon by the oceans, which means more carbon in the atmosphere, which means even more global warming.
– Etc… etc…
At some point these positive feedback-loops may become self-perpetuating, such that the planet will keep warming even if we cut our carbon emissions to zero…
…which, of course, we are not doing. We already have 5 times more fossil fuels in store than we can possibly burn while having a reasonable chance of limiting global warming to 2 degrees (which is already way too high, maybe fatally). And we are still looking for more. It’s the most urgent existential threat our species has ever faced, and it’s hardly even on the cultural radar. As I have previously written elsewhere, it’s as if we’re in a car heading for the cliff mentioned above, and the only discussion going on inside mainstream culture is whether we should aim to stop after 1000 ft or 1500 ft (or never).
But at least with the Paris accord – for all its shortcomings – we finally had in place a strong international consensus that the problem was real and that something (just not something in particular) needed to be done about it.
Enter Trump.
THE END
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