Through
it all, Trump’s tweets and damply volatile public presence have always
been just what they were; the sheer bulk of the man’s damage has always
crowded out subtext. There was never any chance that he would grow with
or into his important new job, and he has never even suggested
otherwise. He has had exactly the presidency that his public life would
suggest—a brazen win, followed by an inevitable decline born of laziness
and pure hubristic dipshittery, and finally a catastrophic and
vehemently denied collapse. This is the story of his life, and the story
of his presidency.
But the pressures behind
Trump’s failure did more than reiterate how manifestly incapable he is
of doing the job he backed into four years ago. They brought every
discordance that made this moment possible into harmony. The country
has, belatedly and perhaps inevitably, come to mirror its leader.
America itself was as uncanny and arbitrary and disastrously stupid as
the president it elected on the day that it put Trump in office—just as
angry, just as confused, just as unappeasable and deluded. It has only
been in these last few bottomed-out weeks, though, that it has truly
come to feel like him.
Trump’s monotonous
days have proceeded as usual even as the nation has staggered into a
slow-rolling slog through preventable illness and death, and economic
collapse, and paroxysms of unaccountable state violence. There has been
not just no growth, but no change. It’s unclear at this point whether
Trump even likes the things he does most often, which are gossip on the
phone with other rich people he knows, berate the doll-eyed careerists
and clammy grifters who come and go through his offices, watch
television, play golf, and eat the sort of high-end catered luxury fare
that has been congealing on country club steam tables since Gerald Ford
was president.
But this, too, scarcely
matters: They are just the things he does because they are what he
believes rich men do. That there is nothing really animating them—no
desire beyond the cessation of an unceasing insecurity, no pleasure
beyond the knowledge that he has two scoops of ice cream where everyone else has one—is
what keeps them constant and has held them all fast for decades.
There’s nothing he really wants, beyond credit and praise, and there’s
no sense that he even really wants either of these beyond his fear of
their opposite numbers. Still, how much Trump wanted the dumb things he
wanted is the single biggest reason he is in office today. Not wanting
anything else, he has mostly just sat there since, watching himself on
television and following various numbers up and then down. And there he
stands still, very much at the center of things and with no remarks
prepared, canted forward at an unusual angle and squinting. He can do no
other.
No comments:
Post a Comment