I Know You Are, But What Am I?

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

An entertaining read, but what does it say about his political opponents, to be defeated by a man so wretched, and so incompetent, except in the art of gambling in exercises of pretension with Other People's Money?


Originally shared by Anne-Marie Clark

This is one of the best articles I've seen describing Trump's personality, by a male sportswriter who pulls absolutely no punches. This guy nails what makes Trump tick.

"It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him—old, uninformed, amorphously if deeply aggrieved.

"There’s a reason for this. Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life. He has no friends and no real allies; his inner circle is divided between ostensibly scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless ones, all of whom hold him in low regard and see him as a potential means to their individuated ends. There is no help on the way; his outer orbit is a rotation of replacement-level rage-grandpas and defective, perpetually clammy operators.

"Trump now 'executes' by way of the The Junior Soprano Method. When he senses that his staff is trying to get him to do one thing, Trump defiantly does the opposite; otherwise he bathes in the commodified reactionary grievance of partisan media, looking for stories about himself. It takes days for his oafish and overmatched handlers to coax him into even a coded and qualified criticism of neo-Nazis, and an instant for him to willfully undo it. Of course he brings more vigor to the latter than the former; he doesn’t really understand why he had to do the first thing, but he innately and deeply understands why he did the second. The first is invariably about someone else—some woman, there was a car accident, like during or maybe after that thing—and therefore, as an asshole, he does not and cannot really care about it. The second is about him and therefore, as an asshole, he really, really does."
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-president-of-blank-sucking-nullity-roth

Comments

  1. Blatant truths, strongly stated, just the way they should be. Subtleties of irony and satire would fail pathetically in the case of the character that he is. This can serve well as the beginner's primer for following the journey of Trump. And "his hyperactive laziness"! I liked that phrase. The trouble about Trump is that these are the tricks that make Trump tick

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is just about perfect. The opening couldn't have been better; any person who understands dog thinking and how we misunderstand them goes a long way with me.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Entremet

Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh