The NYT's lead story this morning features an analysis of our autocrat's magnificent contradictions and general incomprehensibilities. Gaza, Black History Month, DEI, a third term, Greenland, Zelenski — each a blur of verbal flip-flops.
"Since storming back into office, Mr. Trump has used a dizzying rhetorical tactic of shifting positions like quicksand, muddying his messages and contradicting himself, sometimes in the same day. The inconsistencies have presented the American public with dueling narratives at every turn, allowing people to pick and choose what they want to believe about the president’s intentions," writes the Times factually.
His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt — a mere child who's been exposed in her short life to nothing but Fox News-TrumpThink distortions — has said that Americans "recognize the beauty of the art of the deal." Beautiful indeed, if one enjoys the misleading gibberish of a used car salesman.
The story's analysis then comes from two historians: Yale's Jason Stanley, a specialist in propaganda, and Princeton's Julian Zelizer, an Americanist with whom I have never disagreed, until today.
"He says so much, you can’t really pin him down," says Prof. Zelizer. "The point isn’t to have a contradiction, the point is to have cover. The reality of our modern information world is that you can pick and choose what you want to believe. He instinctively knows that."
Those final four words strike me as charitable, even though the good professor certainly did not intend them to be gracious in form. Trump has instincts for sure, but his ill-schooled, uninformed, dissociative brain is wholly incapable of understanding, appreciating and then deploying "the reality" of most anything, save his one talent: lying about it.
Alternatively, the scholar of propaganda hit on the precise reality of Trump. "Once you undermine consistency, the shared sense of reality, you’re undermining the basis of democracy," says Prof. Stanley. "If there’s no shared sense of reality, we can’t collectively make decisions. So the only decision maker will be the disrupter in chief. If you’re constantly contradicting yourself, you’re constantly lying" (emphasis mine).
This post is a rush job. I have, at last, landed at my new home of Everett, Washington, although last night was yet another hotel stay. And so now I must be checking out toot sweet. My apology for the hurry. Yet there remains one more word — on the post's title.
When I was perhaps 15 years of age, my incorrigibility nearly landed me instead in reform school. This I spared myself by taking a full-time job, post-permanent expulsion from high school, all five days worth. My parents had me see a psychiatrist. Weird kid. The learned gentleman uttered only one sensible line to my parents, not all of which I can recall. What I do recall was his "before he goes off and fucks a flying donut...." Again, that is.
In time I did, in fact, cease fucking flying donuts. Donald Trump never has. And I thank Providence or whatever for one blessing: I never — not once in my times of incorrigibility and "illicit" (that too is charitable) behavior — became the wretched, lying criminal that is America's autocrat.
Welcome to the Pacific Northwest, PM. Although gray and moist a lot of the time, when the sun is out, Seattle and vicinity is spectacular!