Being president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.
— Michele Obama, 2012
I read opinion pieces that lament how Trump can change direction several times in an afternoon. They talk about, say, his support for the LGBTQ, or trade, or taxes, or health care, and how his actions don’t follow logic or his prior statements. They wonder why he changes his position so abruptly, given the logic. They debate how this or that position makes more sense, logically.
That’s cray-cray. Stop wasting the effort. As near as I can tell, President Blockhead hasn’t changed an opinion in 50 years. He doesn’t modify, and he doesn’t adjust. Trump doesn’t gauge how his actions have worked, or reevaluate after seeing what happened the last time. He is not that guy. The 20-something Trump doing his first shady deals sounds exactly like Trump today. Hell, his hair hasn’t even changed.
So, jeeze, stop discussing the fine details of his positions as if he believes any of it. When Trump supports an issue, then directly contradicts his own position five minutes later, it doesn’t mean he’s changed. Even insane people don’t change sides that quickly. The flip-flops are a ‘tell’ that he never believed what he’d said. He was just mouthing words he thinks might help him with stuff he does care about.
Trump isn’t a Nobel prize-level thinker. Who here considers the President a deep and subtle guy?
(Really? You over there? You’re seriously on the wrong blog site, Bubba.)
Trump operates at a pretty basic level. Something is good for Donald, it’s bad for him, or… well, the rest: the vast majority of stuff he has no stake in. Trump doesn’t care about suffering, war, justice, equality, rights, yadda, yadda, yadda. (I imagine Donnie only hears the wah-wah-wah sound that adults make in Peanuts cartoons.) Trump doesn’t care about America, the Presidency, democracy, good governance, decent behavior, or any of that. If he did, he’d act differently.
Trump hates things that annoy him, and he tries to make them go away. You know, political opponents, the free press, the legislature, the courts, independent legal prosecution, checks and balances, or any objective oversight. He hates people with principles or morals, because he knows he can’t trust them to act in Trump’s interest.
Trump brings principled people near him, now and then, when it suits him, but his first action is to break them, destroying their credibility. Reduce them to laughingstocks, so they have no future outside Trump, and no choice but to serve him absolutely. Think of Sean Spicer, sent out to lie about Trump’s crowd huge crowd sizes. (“She’s got huuuge… tracts of land.”) And Trump made Spicer lie about the weather, for god’s sake! First time up. Or when Trump, shortly after bringing McMaster in, then sent McMaster out to vehemently deny something that Trump almost gleefully admitted a few hours later.
Yesterday’s photo-op with Rex Tillerson, H. R. McMaster, and Nikki Haley was both frightening, and obvious. These three aren’t loyalists, and they get their own press coverage. Sad for Trumpie. So Trump made the Secretary of State, the US representative to the UN, and the National Security Advisor stand there as mute props in his new TV show while Trump mouthed off some extra-crazy noise while they stood there, wincing.
Trump wanted to humiliate them publicly. I doubt that will be enough to break them down to the simpler apparatchiks Trump prefers, but maybe he can get them to quit. Or maybe he just likes hurting people.
No part of this should surprise anyone. Trump’s actions and motives are right there on the surface, easy to see. This is a guy who’s willing to talk happily about starting a nuclear war in the worst possible place on earth — North Korea — just because Kim Jong Un started talking trash about him after the UN voted for severe sanctions. Kim said he’d make the US pay a “thousand-fold for all the heinous crimes” against North Korea, and Trump’s “fire and fury” shtick started the next day.
I started this post days ago, and every day brings new outrages. Now we have the riots in Charlottesville that appear to have been set in motion by the Virginia police, and Trump’s response lamenting the mistakes on all sides.
Way to go, Brownie.
