He’s a human Failure to Read the User’s Manual

Alexandra Petri on what Trump is.

The Trump presidency is the discovery that what you thought was a man in a bear suit is just a bear. Suddenly the fact that he wouldn’t play by the rules makes total sense. It wasn’t that he refused to, that he was playing a long game. It was that he was a wild animal who eats fish and climbs trees, and English words were totally unintelligible to him. In retrospect, you should have suspected that after he just straight-up ate a guy. But at the time everyone cheered. It was good TV. Also, he was your bear.

Who can help? The people in there with him are the people who did not realize that what they had on their hands was an animal. Now they are trying to whisper him, like a horse. Do horses understand whispering? Horses probably think that people are just conspiring against them all the time. Horses are probably quite paranoid and delusional. But at least a horse would not fire the FBI director.

It is bringing your drunk relative to a party where you need to impress people for work, but 24 hours a day, and your co-workers are the entire world, and some of them have nukes.

It is like expecting a cardboard cutout of a pro wrestler to perform open-heart surgery.

It is like watching a golden retriever try to disable a bomb. The dog can’t determine which is the red button and which is the green button. It can’t see color. It’s a dog, for Pete’s sake. What did you expect?

He’s a human Failure to Read the User’s Manual.

He’s a cartoon character. He only looks real on TV. When real things are put into his hands he drops them, and people get hurt.

Confidence is good, up to a point. Now here is someone who thinks juggling hand-painted Fabergé eggs will impress you. Not because he is so supremely confident in his ability to juggle, but because he literally doesn’t know what they are. That they’re breakable. Only your house is in the egg. You are in the egg. Everything you care about is in the egg.

Obviously, you should read the whole thing. Genius.

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