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NYT Columnist Unloads On Donald Trump

  

Category:  News & Politics

Via:  johnrussell  •  7 years ago  •  9 comments

NYT Columnist Unloads On Donald Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/opinion/sunday/donald-this-i-will-tell-you.html?smid=tw-share

 

by Maureen Dowd

 

WASHINGTON — Dear Donald,

 

We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt.

 

You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician?

 

Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician.

 

After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator.

 

I was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this: Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out scorning.

 

And you, Donald, are getting a reputation as a sucker. And worse, a sucker who is a tool of the D.C. establishment.

 

 

Your whole campaign was mocking your rivals and the D.C. elite, jawing about how Americans had turned into losers, with our bad deals and open borders and the Obamacare “disaster.”

 

And you were going to fly in on your gilded plane and fix all that in a snap.

 

You mused that a good role model would be Ronald Reagan. As you saw it, Reagan was a big, good-looking guy with a famous pompadour; he had also been a Democrat and an entertainer. But Reagan had one key quality that you don’t have: He knew what he didn’t know.

 

You both resembled Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons, floating above the nitty-gritty and focusing on a few big thoughts. But President Reagan was confident enough to accept that he needed experts below, deftly maneuvering the strings.

 

You’re just careering around on your own, crashing into buildings and losing altitude, growling at the cameras and spewing nasty conspiracy theories, instead of offering a sunny smile, bipartisanship, optimism and professionalism.

 

You promised to get the best people around you in the White House, the best of the best. In fact, “best” is one of your favorite words.

 

Instead, you dragged that motley skeleton crew into the White House and let them create a feuding, leaking, belligerent, conspiratorial, sycophantic atmosphere. Instead of a smooth, classy operator like James Baker, you have a Manichaean anarchist in Steve Bannon.

 

You knew the Republicans were full of hot air. They haven’t had to pass anything in a long time, and they have no aptitude for governing. To paraphrase an old Barney Frank line, asking the Republicans to govern is like asking Frank to judge the Miss America contest — “If your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”

 

You knew that Paul Ryan’s vaunted reputation as a policy wonk was fake news. Republicans have been running on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years and they never even bothered to come up with a valid alternative.

 

And neither did you, despite all your promises to replace Obamacare with “something terrific” because you wanted everyone to be covered.

 

Instead, you sold the D.O.A. bill the Irish undertaker gave you as though it were a luxury condo, ignoring the fact that it was a cruel flimflam, a huge tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill. You were so concerned with the “win” that you forgot your “forgotten” Americans, the older, poorer people in rural areas who would be hurt by the bill.

 

As The Times’s chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse put it, the G.O.P. falls into clover with a lock on the White House and both houses of Congress, and what’s the first thing it does? Slip on a banana peel. Incompetence Inc.

 

“They tried to sweeten the deal at the end by offering a more expensive bill with fewer health benefits, but alas, it wasn’t enough!” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau slyly tweeted.

 

Despite the best efforts of Bannon to act as though the whole fiasco was a clever way to bury Ryan — a man he disdains as “the embodiment of the ‘globalist-corporatist’ Republican elite,” as Gabriel Sherman put it in New York magazine — it won’t work.

 

And you can jump on the phone with The Times’s Maggie Haberman and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa — ignoring that you’ve labeled them the “fake media” — and act like you’re in control. You can say that people should have waited for “Phase 2” and “Phase 3” — whatever they would have been — and that Obamacare is going to explode and that the Democrats are going to get the blame. But it doesn’t work that way. You own it now.

 

You’re all about flashy marketing so you didn’t notice that the bill was junk, so lame that even Republicans skittered away.

 

You were humiliated right out of the chute by the establishment guys who hooked you into their agenda — a massive transfer of wealth to rich people — and drew you away from your own.

 

You sold yourself as the businessman who could shake things up and make Washington work again. Instead, you got worked over by the Republican leadership and the business community, who set you up to do their bidding.

 

That’s why they’re putting up with all your craziness about Russia and wiretapping and unending lies and rattling our allies.

 

They’re counting on you being a delusional dupe who didn’t even know what was in the bill because you’re sitting around in a bathrobe getting your information from wackadoodles on Fox News and then, as The Post reported, peppering aides with the query, “Is this really a good bill?”

 

You got played.

 

It took W. years to smash everything. You’re way ahead of schedule.

 

And I can say you’re doing badly, because I’m a columnist, and you’re not. Say hello to everybody, O.K.?

 

Sincerely, Maureen


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JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   seeder  JohnRussell    7 years ago

tormenting him

Laugh

 
 
 
Dowser
Sophomore Quiet
link   Dowser    7 years ago

Funny!

 

 
 
 
Hal A. Lujah
Professor Guide
link   Hal A. Lujah    7 years ago

I was watching Joy Reid the other day, and one of her guests, from the top of his head, rattled off a fairly comprehensive list of things President* Trump has bungled.  It was weird, realizing that I had already forgotten about some of the stuff on the list and it hasn't even been 100 days.  Literally everything he touches turns to shit.  At some point, his ego will have to crack and all those failures will pour into his head and register as such.  The sheer volume is more than even the biggest megalomaniac can deny.  Clearly, the "winning, winning, so much winning you'll beg for the winning to stop" mantra will go down as the most prolific example of pandering and failure that politics has ever witnessed. 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Hal A. Lujah   7 years ago

Once upon a time, there were presidents for whom English seemed their native language. Barack Obama most recently. He deliberated. At a press conference or in an interview — just about whenever he wasn’t speaking from a text — his pauses were as common as other people’s “uh’s.” He was not pausing because his vocabulary was impoverished. He was pausing to put words into sequence. He was putting phrases together with care, word by word, trying out words before uttering them, checking to feel out what they would sound like once uttered. It was important to him because he did not want to be misunderstood. President Obama valued precision, in no small part because he knew he lived in a world where every last presidential word was a  speech act , a declaration with consequence, so that the very statement that the sky was blue, say, would be scoured for evidence that the president was declaring a policy on the nature of nature.

That was then. Now we have a president who, when he speaks, spatters the air with unfinished chunks, many of which do not qualify as sentences, and which do not follow from previous chunks. He does not release words into a stream of consciousness but into a heap. He heaps words on top of words, to overwhelm meaning with vague gestures. He does not think, he lurches.

Here are some examples from  TIME’ s transcript  of their cover story made out of their phone interview with the president of the United States. I have italicized the non sequiturs, incomplete propositions, indefinite pronouns and other obscurities that amount to verbal mud.

Scherer : So you don’t feel like Comey’s testimony in any way takes away from the credibility of the tweets you put out, even with the quotes?

Trump : No, I have, look. I have articles saying  it happened. But  you have to take a look at what they, they just went out at a news conference .

Scherer : Mitch McConnell has said  he’d rather you stop tweeting , that he sees it as a distraction.

Trump Mitch will speak for himself. Mitch is a wonderful man. Mitch should speak for himself.

Trump : Now the problem, the thing is, I’m not sure  they are watching anything other than  that , let’s see members of Donald Trump transition team, possibly, oh this just came out .

Trump : I took a lot of heat when I said Brexit was going to pass. Don’t forget,  Obama said that UK will go to the back of the line, and I talked about Sweden, and may have been somewhat different , but the following day, two days later, they had a massive riot in Sweden, exactly what I was talking about , I was right about that.

Trump : And then  TIME magazine, which treats me horribly, but obviously I sell , I assume this is going to be a cover too, have I set the record? I guess, right? Covers, nobody’s had more covers.

Trump : But the real story here is, who released Gen. Flynn’s name? Who released, who released my conversations with Australia, and who released my conversation with Mexico? To me, Michael, that’s the story, these leakers, they are disgusting. These are horrible people.

Scherer : And apparently there is an investigation into that as well.

Trump : Well should be, because  that’s where the whole, who would think that you are speaking to the head of Mexico, the head of Australia, or Gen. Flynn, who was, they are not supposed to release that . That is the most confidential stuff. Classified. That’s classified. You go to prison when you release stuff like that. And who would release that? The real story is, they have to work, intelligence has to work on finding out who are the leakers.  Because you know what? When things get involved with North Korea and all the problems we have there, in the Middle East, I mean, that information cannot be leaked out, and it will be by this, this same, and these people were here in the Obama years, because he had plenty of leakers also .

Trump : I inherited a mess in the Middle East, and a mess with North Korea,  I inherited a mess with jobs, despite the statistics, you know, my statistics are even better, but they are not the real statistics  because you have millions of people that can’t get a job, OK.  And I inherited a mess on trade . I mean we have many,  you can go up and down the ladder. But that’s the story. Hey look, in the meantime, I guess, I can’t be doing so badly , because I’m president, and you’re not. You know. Say hello to everybody, OK?

So it goes.

Now,  TIME’ s cover headline for this mishmash is pointed as well as clever: “ Is Truth Dead? ” — clever, at any rate, in the eyes of readers old enough to remember the 1966 prototype: “ Is God Dead ?” A still more pointed treatment is that of Ellie Shechet at  the feminist website Jezebel  — a redaction, or what be called reporting by subtraction. In the words of headline, “ We Redacted Everything That’s Not a Verifiably True Statement From Trump’s Time Interview About Truth .” Unsurprisingly, Jezebel ended up having to edit the transcript so that the passages blacked out were lengthier than the words left in.

But the problem is not just that Trump lies, or that he lies about having lied. The problem is not just that he distracts — for example, changing the subject from his entanglements with Russians to the leakers who leak stories about his entanglements with Russians. The problem is that he insinuates more than he argues. He disdains not only evidence but logic. He asserts by indirection. This is bubble-think. It makes a sort of sense only if you’re trapped in the bubble with him.

What explains this? Is Donald Trump the heir of generations of avant-garde poetry?

Probably not. What’s more likely is that he is deranged. It is a peculiar sort of derangement. It is the derangement of a man who is used to getting what he wants, and arranging his mental universe so as to convince himself that what he has gotten is what he wanted. His operating theory is that he makes things so because he is powerful. His power is such that he is not subject to laws of ordinary grammar.

These bursts of speech are like the announcements that shriek “TRUMP” from the walls of many of his hotels. They do not signify ownership. They signify…something. Whatever. They add up to a haze of indefinite implication. They constitute, in our contemporary discourse, a brand. They signify that Trump has something to do with this building. Something . If you’re privy to the code, you know that there’s a licensing arrangement. Trump has been paid to grant the use of his name. If you think it’s a good thing to be associated with his name, then he has some water, some steaks, some vodka — even a “university” — to offer you.

Trump has moved the sign system of modern capitalism toward a whole new capitalist art form — the free-floating name that describes nothing. Trump has peeled language away from meaning.

He has brought to fruition the title of the 1984 Talking Heads album:  Stop Making Sense . His regime is a nonstop exercise of “Let’s Pretend.”

His con game requires the bending of millions of knees. Americans are invited to willingly suspend disbelief, play dumb and collude in his cynicism. We agree not to notice the nonstop gibberish that spreads from the Oval Office outward. We agree to brag about our democracy when the president of the United States is responsible neither to logic, nor to evidence, nor to the American people, nor to the English language. We are expected to live in an alternative universe which is not only post-truth but altogether post-language and post-meaning. Any journalist, any talking head, any pundit, any commentator, any politician who pretends that Donald Trump makes sense has volunteered to go to work in the tailor shop where his invisible clothes are weaved.

 
 
 
Hal A. Lujah
Professor Guide
link   Hal A. Lujah  replied to  JohnRussell   7 years ago

 
 
 
Dowser
Sophomore Quiet
link   Dowser  replied to  Hal A. Lujah   7 years ago

He needs to learn some new words, instead of using the same tired old ones all the time...  I think, anyway.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Dowser   7 years ago

He is the most inarticulate president we have ever had. 

Trump: I took a lot of heat when I said Brexit was going to pass. Don’t forget, Obama said that UK will go to the back of the line, and I talked about Sweden, and may have been somewhat different, but the following day, two days later, they had a massive riot in Sweden,exactly what I was talking about, I was right about that.

 

Brutal. 

 
 
 
Dowser
Sophomore Quiet
link   Dowser  replied to  Hal A. Lujah   7 years ago

He always reminded me of Charlie Sheen...  I wonder if he has dragon blood?

 
 
 
Randy
Sophomore Participates
link   Randy    7 years ago

I love reading Maureen Dowd. She always goes right for the jugular, but with the deft touch of a surgeon. A great and as usual very, very true column from her! Bravo!

 
 

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