David Roth: The Man Who Was Upset - Making Sense of Donald Trump's petulant reign [View all]

[muriel_volestrangler]

The article starts by relating how there was a plan in 2006 to make a cartoon called "Trump Takeover: The Ultimate Power Trip", in which Trump and family would jet around the world, fixing things. This scarcely credible idea was more the centre of a stock scam (so Trumpian) than anything with a chance of becoming reality. But the final suggested episode was "Trump and his team go to Washington to take over!", so the joke's on us, after all. It continues:

Trump eventually found a way to make this desperate bullshit work again with some help from a brilliant reality television producer, credulous reality television audiences, and generations of incandescently toxic cultural lore about business as magic. For many years, though, Trump lived in a strange public inversion of the usual superhero routine—his secret identity as a witless and grandiose scam artist was widely known, while his identity as an Extremely Impressive Person was known only to himself and a few loyal retainers. The Apprentice certainly helped restore his status, but it took the work of the political media to reveal Trump’s actual superpower.

To hear the members of the media tell it, Trump’s signature power is the ability to change the subject. With just a strange flutter of his pale eyelids and a difficult-to-parse ad-lib, Trump can swing a news cycle away from his latest lurid failure and back in the direction he wants it to go—“to distract the newshounds by shouting ‘Squirrel!’ and sending them sniffing for a new story,” as Politico’s Jack Shafer put it. This seems to give Trump entirely too much credit—does this look, from one clammy fib and ploy to the next, like a guy who has a plan?—and the media itself not nearly enough blame.

At this stage in his sublimely unexamined life and increasingly evident cognitive decline, Trump isn’t really capable of very compelling misdirections or even passably convincing falsehoods. He digresses because he loses the plot, and he lies when the truth wouldn’t look good on him; he distracts himself and tells himself lies because it is the only way to square what is actually happening with what he would prefer to be happening. (In this, he is but building on the spiritual birthright bestowed on him by his dad: Fred Trump was an ardent worshipper at the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, the reactionary business prophet who distilled many failed superpower incantations of his own in his blockbuster self-help tract, The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale presided over Donald’s first wedding in 1977, and remains Trump’s most frequently cited spiritual mentor.)
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And here at last we are beginning to circle around Trump’s true superpower, and are closer to identifying the small and stubborn thing that defines him. It’s what binds his deliriously incoherent politics, and helps him thread together his wildly far-flung grievances—Trump never forgets a slight, and pursues ancient grudges against bygone New York showbiz figures with the same tireless vigor that he brings to his campaigns against his various Deep State persecutors—into a single rancid system of being. There is nothing artful or concealed about Donald Trump, which is one of the secrets of his strange success as a politician. His lies are preposterous and glaring and never anything but the obvious opposite of what is actually true; his unquestioned desires and deeply held, deeply unreasoning bigotries and petty fixations are all absolutely untouched from the 1988 Rich Guy factory settings; the sheer mass of his annihilating selfishness leaves no room for anything like subtext. Trump is nothing but what he appears to be, and his superpower comes from this. His superpower is getting upset.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154100/making-sense-donald-trump-petulant-presidency

As Balloon Juice says, David Roth could follow in path of Charles Pierce in being a great sportswriter turned political commentator. He has a way with words and seeing through bullshit.



The full story of the Scam Cartoon From Hell is here: https://fusion.tv/story/360908/trump-magazine-boiler-room-stock/