We're scarcely into Trump's third year of exotic paranoia and galloping immaturity, yet both of these presidential attributes have more than tripled in strength since he took office. The most recent incident to highlight his prepubescent approach to internal conflict was of course the USS John S. McCain fiasco. Here was a train wreck of melodramatic peevishness that makes one think more of middle school antics than the White House's prestige, which at any rate died more than two years ago.
It's an almost unbelievable tale of tarps, barges and USS McCain sailors turned away from Trump's oratorical pomposity on the USS Wasp (the latter of which seems to me like a favor, not an insult). It's a tale of presidential übersensitivity and a concomitant tale of scrambling subordinates eager to please the madman at a watery Berchtesgaden.
As the Times' Michelle Cottle notes: "It seems we have reached a point where the president of the United States is considered such a snowflake by his own staff members that they tripped over themselves to avoid having him even see the name of someone he didn’t like … that was inconveniently emblazoned on a destroyer within his line of sight."
Or, more broadly, the Washington Post's Helaine Olen observes that "the entire episode contains more than a whiff of a reminder of how censors in the Soviet Union made formerly prominent figures who’d fallen out of favor with Joseph Stalin disappear in official photos."
Olen also writes that "there is no reason to doubt" Trump's word that he knew nothing of the peek-a-boo game which played out at the Yokosuka Naval Base. I'd counter that there is abundant reason to doubt him: He has acted the colic toddler since he donned the mantle of authoritarian dorkdom; and off-the-reservation dissents from, and challenges to, his highness' genius instability are the only things he's well informed about. Sen. McCain provided both dissent and challenge in spades, and they still haunt this neurotically oversensitive infant of a would-be president in more than name.
Trump's thinnest of skin also reminds us of a Caligula in charge of the Roman Empire. The upside to that analogy, however, is that the Empire endured well after Caligula's subordinates had had enough of his neurotic infantilism. In the end, it would be outsider Visigoths and Huns and other rustic roughians who would decimate Rome to the fullest, not its internal, Trumpian nitwits.
Let us hope that we should be so lucky in the imminent, post-Trump age.