The Trump Presidency

[molesworth]

He is so often incoherent that I have given up trying to listen to him live and usually only read transcripts of what he says.

I hope they make more sense than trying to listen to him.  I general avoid hearing him speak (being in the UK makes it easier) but he comes across as illiterate, inarticulate, and with the mental development of an 8-year-old.

• "We have lots of tests. They're beautiful tests. The best."
• "My uncle was a very smart man. Smartest person at MIT."
• "I understand <insert random subject>.  Nobody understands <thing> better than Donald Trump!"

It baffles me that he still has the level of support that he does.

[JayUtah]

...he comes across as illiterate, inarticulate, and with the mental development of an 8-year-old.

Yes, and he seems to have drawn out similar behavior among his supporters.  Political discourse with or among them rarely rises to any level higher than sports-like fandom.  They speak of political issues with no more articulation than cheering for their favorite team.  The farce that is the President's daily briefing illustrates my point.  As the President increasingly comes under fire from seasoned reporters on matters he is decreasing able to lie convincingly about, his base responds with things like:  "Watching Trump slam-dunk the lying lamestream media! #MAGA!"  They seem literally so caught up in the rhetoric of contention that they can't even tell you what the question was.

There is a reason Donald Trump's approval rating heavily correlates to education level.  He speaks to the uneducated in their own language.  And that language has nothing to do with any matter at hand.  It's just vague cheerleading.

It baffles me that he still has the level of support that he does.

He speaks the language of his based and doesn't burden them with overly taxing topics such as policy on trade, labor, commerce, foreign relations, constitutional government, etc.  He keeps their attention focused squarely on the designated enemy (the political left) and keeps them so stirred up in indignation that it becomes easy to lie about the facts.  Campaigning for office and executing an office require two entirely different skill sets.  Donald Trump is highly skilled at hyping a brand, but (it seems) little else.

What has baffled a lot of us, as you can see, is why the Republican Party not only endures it but also enables it and endorses it.  I think it might at first have been realizing too late that they were political hostages of an unhinged candidate.  Now I think it's a political Stockholm syndrome.  There's another hypothesis, and that's that the GOP playbook seems to include creating a diversion at some visible level of government while lesser-visible but ostensibly more powerful elements do nasty things while everyone's back is turned.  Donald Trump does a wonderful job of keeping the media focused on him.  Meanwhile you have people like Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky organizing the Senate to enact a longer-term Republican agenda.

For example, for the better part of a decade, the Senate under McConnell refused to hold confirmation hearings on any of Barack Obama's appointments to the Federal bench.  In the end that amounted to something like 200 vacancies, more than half of which have now been filled by Trump appointees.  The Senate has abrogated nearly all its lawmaking duties in favor of confirming young federal judgeship candidates as fast as possible.  And it is reported that many of these are unqualified, but are confirmed anyway by the new simple-majority rule.  But those reports are buried on page 23 of the newspaper, while the President's often inconsequential antics get banner headlines.  This is perhaps more important than the prominent debate over Supreme Court nominees.  While the high court has a great deal of influence in shaping American jurisprudence, the vast majority of actual cases are decided by these rank-and-file federal judges and not reviewed by appeals courts.  Thus it is not hyperbole to say that McConnell's legacy will include a conservative takeover of U.S. courts.  And as the courts are increasingly relied upon to resolve disputes among the dysfunctional political branches of government, politicizing the judiciary in your favor is a sort of final straw.

[JayUtah]

The classic example I remember is how Russian hackers used Facebook to organise competing protests at the same time and place in a city in the USA. And as an article pointed out a year or so ago, a room full of government hackers is cheaper than a single high-tech military aircraft.

According to my infosec friends, it's not even that sophisticated.  The exercise appears to follow a pattern of small, highly-trained groups using military-grade methods to compromise things like server farms and large numbers of fallow accounts, then turning the recovered credentials over to rooms full of relatively unsophisticated operatives to exploit.  Yes, it's still much cheaper to do that, but apparently even cheaper than you have hypothesized.  The people in the rooms are not hackers.  They're just people with the ability to point and click and follow a script.

[JayUtah]

Absolutely - the US is going to have to face second wave deaths that will make the first wave look like the odd few sick people.

...which I'm sure will be dutifully blamed on Obama, Hillary Clinton, corrupt healthcare workers, China, the mainstream media, and all the other usual suspects.  The present administration seems perfectly content to suffer casualties as long as blame for it can be shifted.

...encouraging people to break quarantine. On the other hand, there seems to be a significant number of people who actually believe him or hoax theories that have been floated.

A rally was held in my city a day or so ago in which it is estimated a crown of 1,000 people gathered in a city park in defiance of the city's and county's stay-at-home order.  This was the "Live Free or Die" sort of crowd.  The photos of the event showed a fair number of the yellow colonial-era "Don't Treat on Me" flags.  (We have a large flag manufacturing company in the valley whose owner is emphatically on the political right.)  The excerpts of the speakers' statements reported in the newspaper included exactly the rhetoric you allude to:  the virus is a hoax, it was created in a lab in the U.S. or China, it's no more contagious or lethal than the common cold, the whole thing is a government power-grab, etc.

The Trump administration seems to have abandoned claims of hoax, at least in the sense of acknowledging now that it's a real phenomenon.  Their rhetorical has moved from "This is nothing to worry about" to "We're doing very well at addressing the problem," and blaming others for their having been slow out of the gate and for allegedly fabricating facts that dispute their self-congratulatory attitude.

Is it schadenfreude to savor the irony that some of those same people will die from their own stupidity?

If the virus were harder to transmit, and its effects more immediate, then a moral evaluation would be simpler.  But since it's so easily transmissible and takes a long time to produce symptoms, it remains the case that irresponsible carriers will pose a risk to far more people than just themselves until they realize that they are infected.  The quarantine orders allow for essential public activity, but any public activity entails the risk of exposure.  If more people gather, becoming infected, and then move about in public among those who have limited their activities to the essential ones, they effectively raise the risk of necessary encounters for everyone.  Even repentant carriers won't fall ill immediately and then quickly know to quarantine themselves, hence we all have to stay quarantined until we know who's sick and who isn't.

So for me it's not Schadenfreude to imagine the far-reaching consequences of behavior like rallies.  Having endured one of the moderately nasty prior hCoV viruses myself, I don't want to repeat the experience or wish it on anyone else.  But here I just don't see it as a case of irresponsible behavior being limited in its consequences to those who engaged in it.  It's not Just Desserts, because the collateral effects of rallies and smaller-scale disobedience reach those who don't deserve it.

[jfb]

That's what baffles me.  Donald Trump's incompetence and instability have been on display long before Day One.  It should hardly surprise us anymore.  But not every Republican is as bat-crap crazy or as nefarious as Trump.  I keep asking myself at what point the rest of the party will say "Enough is enough."  I'm more than surprised to discover that this point hasn't yet been reached.  If not now, then at what point?  Peter B's post is spot-on.  America -- specifically, elected American officials, the wealthy, and the powerful -- seem to believe that any and all outrageous behavior on their part is sustainable because the institutions of the nation will somehow kick in and prevent any actual disaster, or at least insulate them from its effect.  They seem to consider it an infinitely exploitable system.  These institutions have an effect only insofar as the people they affect respect and uphold them.  Instead, people today are behaving as if there is some ineffable something about America that will magically prevent it from becoming no different than a banana republic and having all the problems that entails.

This is why I don't really care what happens to Trump himself.  He can't help it.  He's always been narcissistic and selfish, he's clearly in the grips of dementia (or substance abuse, or both), he's so far out of his league that not crapping his pants on live TV is an accomplishment.  He can go his merry way after the Presidency and totter off into antiquity, yelling at clouds and lawn boys, until he succumbs to old age (or one too many taco bowls). 

It's the enablers who need to pay.  It's the people who said, "yeah, that's fine, I can work with this."  It's the people who put any sense of honor and country and the greater good below "hey, I can benefit personally from this."  It's the people in Congress (Nunes, McConnell, Graham) and in the media (not just FOX news, but the "mainstream" media desperate for eyeballs) who need to lose their positions, their influence, their livelihoods, and learn how the other half lives. 

[gillianren]

Oh, Lindsey Graham makes me angry.  Not that I ever had huge respect for him, but the way he's turned from fighting to enabling makes me so angry.

[LunarOrbit]

He can go his merry way after the Presidency and totter off into antiquity, yelling at clouds and lawn boys, until he succumbs to old age (or one too many taco bowls).

I suspect that after Trump leaves office he'll become the next Rush Limbaugh and continue to spew lies and fan the flames of division. He will push conspiracy theories about Joe Biden etc. in order to give the Republicans a chance of regaining power. So unless he goes to prison or descends so far into dementia that he can't function, he will still be dangerous.

But yes, I agree that his enablers need to face some serious consequences. The United States also needs to shore up it's checks & balances so something like this can't happen again. One place to start is to make it clear that no one, not even the President, is above the law. That means they can't stonewall an impeachment investigation, and they should have no power over the investigators. And any Attorney General that aids the President in obstructing an impeachment investigation should be immediately removed from office.

[Zakalwe]

descends so far into dementia that he can't function,

How will we know?

[gillianren]

My firstborn's dad died yesterday morning of, among other things, dementia.  Believe me, you reach a point.  You can't string together a reasonable conspiracy theory after a certain point, for one.

[grmcdorman]

Trump isn't stringing together conspiracy theories himself, though; he's repeating what he hears on Fox (and other even more dubious places). One of the articles I was reading this week was talking about the Trump/Fox feedback loop. His language is quite simplified; it's not clear if this is because he's operating at a diminished capacity, or he's speaking to his audience, or (most likely) both.

[gillianren]

No, but if the dementia's extreme enough, you can't repeat them.

[JayUtah]

As long as we're predicting Donald Trump's post-Presidency career, and assuming he survives mentally and physically to have one:

It is customary for ex-Presidents of all parties to essentially withdraw from political life aside from the occasional smoke-blowing generalities that no one can disagree with.  I doubt Trump will do this.  He loudly criticized politicians before his term.  During his term he has violated every bit of his own criticism, as the masters of "Tweets that did not age well" have reminded us.  When he leaves office, I predict he will loudly criticize future office-holders, flipping back to contradict himself yet again.  He simply believes -- and has managed to convince an astonishing number of people -- that he is by far the best President of all time.  I think he will keep making sure that's what people think, long after it no longer matters to anyone.

[Zakalwe]

My firstborn's dad died yesterday morning of, among other things, dementia.  Believe me, you reach a point.  You can't string together a reasonable conspiracy theory after a certain point, for one.

My condolences on your loss. i've lost a parent to vascular dementia and the cognitive decline was awful to behold.

My post was in jest, as in how would we know the difference as he already is damn near as incoherent as possible. You are probably reading far more into it than my attempt at dark humour deserves.

[gillianren]

I'm just thinking about Reagan--after a while, it went beyond "I do not recall."

[jfb]

I'm just thinking about Reagan--after a while, it went beyond "I do not recall."

While true, Reagan at least had the excuse of having been shot.  No matter how healthy you are, that's a hell of a thing to recover from, and I have no doubt that contributed to the cognitive decline we saw later on. 

Trump's issues are more likely the result of a lifetime of bad habits, but the end result is the same.