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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDavid Remnick: The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/the-increasing-unfitness-of-donald-trumpJanuary 15, 2018 Issue
The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump
The West Wing has come to resemble the dankest realms of Twitter, in which everyone is racked with paranoia and everyone despises everyone else.
By David Remnick
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Future scholars will sift through Trumps digital proclamations the way we now read the chroniclers of Neros Rometo understand how an unhinged emperor can make a mockery of republican institutions, undo the collective nervous system of a country, and degrade the whole of public life.
Trump joined Twitter in March, 2009. His early work in the medium provided telling glimpses of his many qualities. He was observant. (I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.) He used facts to curious ends. (Windmills are the greatest threat in the US to both bald and golden eagles.) He was concerned with personal appearance. (Barney Frank looked disgustingnipples protrudingin his blue shirt before Congress. Very very disrespectful.) He was fastidious. (Something very important, and indeed society changing, may come out of the Ebola epidemic that will be a very good thing: NO SHAKING HANDS!) He was sensitive to comic insult. (Amazing how the haters & losers keep tweeting the name F*kface Von Clownstick like they are so original & like no one else is doing it.) He was post-Freudian. (It makes me feel so good to hit sleazebags backmuch better than seeing a psychiatrist (which I never have!).)
In due course, Trump perfected his unique voice: the cockeyed neologisms and the fractured syntax, the emphatic punctuation, the Don Rickles-era exclamations (Sad! Doesnt have a clue! Dummy!). Then he started dabbling in conspiracy fantasies: Chinas climate hoax, President Obamas Kenyan birth, deep-state enemies trying to do him in. Meanwhile, he kept an indulgent eye on the family business (Everybody is raving about the Trump Home Mattress) and, via retweeting, sought new friends, including anti-Muslim bigots, a PizzaGate-monger, and someone who goes by @WhiteGenocideTM.
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, and then in the first days of the Administration, some commentators counselled their colleagues to ignore the early-morning salvos about small hands or large crowds. Stop Being Trumps Twitter Fool, Jack Shafer, of Politico, advised, just after the election. Trumps volleys were merely a shrewd diversion from serious matters. By this time, Shafer wrote, youd expect that people would have figured out when Donald Trump is yanking their chain and pay him the same mind they do phone calls tagged Out of Area by caller ID. Sean Spicer, the Presidents first press secretary, insisted otherwise. Trump, he pointed out, is the President of the United States, and so his tweets are considered official statements by the President of the United States.
Spicer was right: a pronouncement by the President is a Presidential pronouncement. But Trumps tweets are most valuable as a record of his inner life: his obsessions, his rages, his guilty conscience. No bile goes unexpectorated. Trump, who does not care for government work, is more invested in his reputation as a creative writer, declaring more than once that somebody said that he is the Hemingway of a hundred and forty characters.
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Scandal envelops the President. Obstruction of justice, money-laundering, untoward contacts with foreign governmentsit is unclear where the special counsel Robert Muellers investigation will land and what might eventually rouse the attention of the U.S. Senate. Clearly, Trump senses the danger. A former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has been indicted. A former national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, has admitted to lying to the F.B.I. and has become a coöperating witness. The President sees one West Wing satrap and Cabinet official after another finding a distance from him. Where is my Roy Cohn? he asked his aides angrily, according to the Times, when his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, defied his wishes and recused himself from the Russia investigation.
In the meantime, there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States. ?
Scarsdale
(9,426 posts)showed the gop "leaders" just standing by. If any of them really honored the USA, or even their positions, they should have walked out in disgust. He is their representative, and obviously he is CRAZY. A mass exodus would have made a statement. What is he holding over them? Russian money they took? Blackmail tapes from the Russians? Doing nothing in the face of this dangerous man proves that their loyalties do not lie with this country.
madaboutharry
(40,247 posts)There must be so much that the public has not heard about. Things that have happened behind closed doors that have not yet leaked out. It is terrifying.
During the eight years of the Obama presidency, Americans woke up every single day secure in the knowledge that President Obama had the nation's interest and security as his primary concern. Regardless of what was going on in the world we knew that The President of The United States was giving deep thought to and deliberation before taking action. We knew that the President of The United States surrounded himself with competent, experienced, and intelligent advisors. That is now gone.
I think it was Jimmy Kimmel who said that living in America with Trump in The White House is like being a passenger in a car with a drunk driver.
L. Coyote
(51,129 posts)trusty elf
(7,404 posts)the sty's the limit!
Genius!
Is that a raccoon doing the dog?
dalton99a
(81,708 posts)oberliner
(58,724 posts)So the Republicans don't really care about any of the rest of it.