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His vanity & neediness show a man more concerned w/ promoting his own brand than helping his country
A man whose interest in policy could charitably be described as intermittent, Trump’s main concern appears to be burnishing his personal brand. Staff loyalty is important. It’s equally important not to overshadow the star, as Nikki Haley found to her cost. The president is known to spend much of his working day watching cable news and had surely noticed Haley’s rise. The United Nations lunch was an exercise in public humiliation, a crude warning of what would happen if she failed to toe the line. What could she do but grin?
The last 100 days have exposed many of Trump’s election promises as bluster and silenced the more paranoid of his liberal critics who saw a Svengali-like master psychologist at work behind the storm of lies and inconsistencies. We now know that he is what he appears to be – a vain and needy old man who leans on his daughter and resents the world for not loving him as he thinks it should.
His ignorance, thuggishness and insecurity are weaknesses, in that they have damaged his country and the integrity of the office he holds, but they are also part of what makes him a successful politician. He has a nose for the raw dynamics of power. His capriciousness puts his opponents off balance and he reframes debates around his own simple binaries: great/not so great, beautiful/terrible. He has reset the bar to an absurdly low level and as other politicians hop back and forth over it like performing dogs, they are stripped of dignity. The news media offer an almost daily spectacle of officials contorting themselves to cover for his latest incoherent pronouncement. Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, is a spectacle in abjection, squirming as he lies to a scornful press corps.
If Trumpism means anything, it is as an ideological prelude to oligarchy. The president has demonstrated that he intends to use his office to enrich himself and Congress appears to be resigned to letting him do it. The judiciary has emerged as the only serious check on an executive branch that is at best erratic, at worst actively corrupt. The Russia inquiry, which various Republican-run committees are currently trying to lose in the weeds, is gradually exposing a network of connection to Russian state interests within Trump’s inner circle. If it ever touches on the president’s personal financial obligations, the picture could get much uglier.
But Russia has distracted a lot of the “resistance”’, who are busy researching conspiracies in the hope that this will be a short cut to the president’s impeachment and removal. The unpalatable truth is that their elected representatives are unlikely to move for impeachment in the near future. Establishment Democrats have revealed their own corruption, the shameful fact that for all their talk, they are more invested in the maintenance of order than in opposing a presidency whose only saving grace is the incompetence and confusion that prevents it rolling out its pernicious agenda with greater efficiency.
The last 100 days have exposed many of Trump’s election promises as bluster and silenced the more paranoid of his liberal critics who saw a Svengali-like master psychologist at work behind the storm of lies and inconsistencies. We now know that he is what he appears to be – a vain and needy old man who leans on his daughter and resents the world for not loving him as he thinks it should.
His ignorance, thuggishness and insecurity are weaknesses, in that they have damaged his country and the integrity of the office he holds, but they are also part of what makes him a successful politician. He has a nose for the raw dynamics of power. His capriciousness puts his opponents off balance and he reframes debates around his own simple binaries: great/not so great, beautiful/terrible. He has reset the bar to an absurdly low level and as other politicians hop back and forth over it like performing dogs, they are stripped of dignity. The news media offer an almost daily spectacle of officials contorting themselves to cover for his latest incoherent pronouncement. Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, is a spectacle in abjection, squirming as he lies to a scornful press corps.
If Trumpism means anything, it is as an ideological prelude to oligarchy. The president has demonstrated that he intends to use his office to enrich himself and Congress appears to be resigned to letting him do it. The judiciary has emerged as the only serious check on an executive branch that is at best erratic, at worst actively corrupt. The Russia inquiry, which various Republican-run committees are currently trying to lose in the weeds, is gradually exposing a network of connection to Russian state interests within Trump’s inner circle. If it ever touches on the president’s personal financial obligations, the picture could get much uglier.
But Russia has distracted a lot of the “resistance”’, who are busy researching conspiracies in the hope that this will be a short cut to the president’s impeachment and removal. The unpalatable truth is that their elected representatives are unlikely to move for impeachment in the near future. Establishment Democrats have revealed their own corruption, the shameful fact that for all their talk, they are more invested in the maintenance of order than in opposing a presidency whose only saving grace is the incompetence and confusion that prevents it rolling out its pernicious agenda with greater efficiency.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/29/donald-trump-first-100-days-ignorant-thuggish-insecure
