When It’s All About My President’s Bully Pulpit
Read Time:7 Minute, 33 Second
Political experts have trouble understanding our President’s actions, not because of the complexity of his behavior, but because of its simplicity. There is not an ounce of nuance within him. His path is always the shortest distance between one point.
People are funnier than anybody.
That was a stray comment from my father, decades ago when he still walked among us. I miss him only partly for his insights.
In any human, the complexity of motivations, self-image, insecurities, and childhood life-lessons forgotten but still applied, all combine to a total larger than the sum of its parts. And so it must be with Donald Trump.
The human experience resists definitive analysis. The Goldwater rule applies.
Still, we can, and must, look for patterns in outward behavior.
The patterns for Donald Trump are not hard to find. The difficulty for political types is not my President’s complexity, but rather his simplicity.
Kevin Drum’s comment on expert overreaction to one @realDonaldTrump tweet:
There’s no “it” to make sense of. It’s a five-year-old making mud pies and being praised for it by Fox News and a bunch of Twitter trolls.
Some of those tweets do crack me up. The FBI strives to protect its investigations from disruption and its sources from assassination. So @realDonaldTrump poses a serious question: Why isn’t the FBI giving massages to Judicial Watch?
Sadly, the original tweet was repealed and replaced.
Joe Keohane, writing for Politico, read years of tweets, then spent a few days with the real Donald and found a pattern. The tweets started as a self-promotional gimmick, then evolved into a late-night, early morning method of venting resentments to be picked up and read by followers.
The tweet storms are a late development in the entire saga of Donald. The first came when he was in his 60s.
Confrontation, however, is as old as Donald himself. Adrenaline addiction is acquiring some academic acceptance as a real health issue. My president does seem to be addicted to animus, provoking ever-escalating levels of conflict.
Any of us will fight for survival when necessary. Donald finds his survival threatened when faced with even the mildest of criticisms.
John McCain’s journey from war hero to loser was not provoked by capture. McCain had been reacting to attacks on immigrants when he was quoted thusly:
This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me … Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.
Very hurtful to me and fired up the crazies might not seem particularly incendiary to the casual onlooker. But they transformed McCain, as Mr. Trump saw him. What we remember was this:
He is not a war hero… He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK? I hate to tell you.
The real issue was this:
He hit me, he’s not a war hero.
We witness a host of similar transformations.
An award-winning actress criticizes Mr. Trump for making fun of a reporter’s disabilities. She becomes “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood.”
A conservative news personality tells him that many women don’t like his derisive comments about women. She goes from being a news personality to “a lightweight. I couldn’t care less about her”, with “blood coming out of her wherever.”
A US Army captain dies in combat, saving his troops from a suicide attack. He is decorated posthumously, awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. His mother grieves in silence. She cannot bear to speak about his death. But they are a Muslim family who has criticized Mr. Trump’s attacks on Muslims. And so, under Mr. Trump’s attack, she goes from grieving mother to simpering weakling:
She had nothing to say. She probably — maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me. But plenty of people have written that. She — she was extremely quiet. And it looked like she had nothing to say. A lot of people have said that.
Humor is not exempted from vehement retaliation. When it is at his expense, it is simply another form of attack. Late night hosts are attacked right back, without the humor, by next morning. It is not that he lacks a sense of humor. He does not recognize the concept. His one attempt at a round of gentle jabs turned a sympathetic audience into a hostile mob, with Mr. Trump as their target.
Here she is tonight, in public, pretending not to hate Catholics.
I don’t know who they’re angry at Hillary, you or I.
Yeah. They had forgotten that he was hilarious.
A beauty queen, from decades past, remarks that Mr. Trump had been mean to her. She goes retrospectively from Miss Universe to a fat-girl problem child. Mr. Trump describes the change.
She was a Miss Universe contestant and ultimately a winner who they had a tremendously difficult time with as Miss Universe … she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.
And, of course, the real issue, the issue that occurred to him only after she had described him as mean:
Not only that, her attitude…
Her attitude. Attitude carries a lot of value for Mr. Trump. Even the most minor of criticisms are to be regarded as ruthless attacks, requiring quick retaliation, the likes of which … well, you know the rest.
That last is instructive. When not fighting ruthlessly against the slightest of slights, our President attacks those who cannot fight back. In that, he is not unlike any third-grade sandlot bully.
When his overwhelming retaliation to even the most oblique criticisms become reflected in policy, things become deadly serious. People die.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz could scarcely contain her anger when administration spokespeople referred to the rescue efforts in Puerto Rico as a good news story.
Dammit! This is not a good news story. This is a people-are-dying story.
That was not aimed at Mr. Trump, but rather at rescue efforts that were ineptly administered. She was blasting official carelessness. It did not matter. My president took it as a personal attack.
And so, she went from being a brave public official, putting her own well being on the line to rescue as many as she could reach, to a public whiner leading people unwilling to help themselves.
…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017
…want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017
It was as if our President had forgotten that Puerto Rico is part of the United States and that citizens of that beleaguered island are American citizens.
The most vulnerable minorities are subject to attacks backed by the full weight and power of the federal government.
The policy goes from this…
Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States…
…to travel bans.
From this…
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.
… to something even worse.
The attacks on immigrant children, infants torn from parents, have been portrayed as largely resulting from ineptitude combined with bad policy: the ineptitude of separating families without bothering to think through a plan to eventually unite them.
But incidents of bad faith pile up.
In the middle of the deportation court hearing yesterday, the ACLU found out the mother and daughter they were representing were already being deported, and on a plane flying from Texas back to El Salvador. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the government to return Carmen and her daughter to the United States, and called the deportation “outrageous.”
The evidence is pushing us from criticizing the lack of a plan to reunite, to condemning what looks like a plan never to reunite.
We see mothers and fathers trying to save their children from death, and we order them to sleep on bridges waiting for processing, knowing that Mexican authorities will eventually remove and send them back to be killed.
In our name, our government beats up on little kids because their parents desperately seek safety as refugees under the US and international law. If they try to get in without waiting on bridges, they are separated and confined.
Congressman Paul Ryan, soon to retire Speaker of the Republican House of Representatives, describes himself as a sort of breakpoint, preventing President Trump from acting on his worst impulses.
I can look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy.
If what we have seen does not represent the worst, it takes some effort to imagine what the worst might be.
President Theodore Roosevelt described the Presidency as a bully pulpit.
President Donald Trump seems to regard the bully part of that a little too seriously.
In Case You Missed It: Let’s Kill Democracy To Save It
As always, many thanks to my friend and partner of FairandUnbalanced.
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I’m trying to think of any other president who spent most of his time insulting, defaming, libeling and slandering critics and opponents or worse, tried to get them locked up.
Sure, it’s a personality disorder, but it keeps his supporters from dwelling on the fact that an innocent man doesn’t risk prison trying to stop any and all investigations.
He is a bully and I’m certain he has always been one. Turkey is a good example of his latest bullying.
OK. Now don’t get me wrong because this is a really good article, but that’s what it’s supposed to be an article, not a book. LOL.