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Here’s how to score Trump’s State of the Union address
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/01/29/heres-how-to-score-trumps-state-of-the-union-address/?utm_term=.fdc734475545 (Opinion | Here’s how to score Trump’s State of the Union address)
How to score President Trump’s big speech? Don’t. The urge to treat Trump’s big address tomorrow as yet one more win or loss in the nonstop sportsification of American civic life is worse than wasted effort. It gives Trump exactly what he wants and exactly what should be withheld.
My advice is just don’t watch it. Any actual information will be readily available and amply disseminated on Wednesday. Spare yourself the pomp and propaganda. And the headache and high blood pressure and possible nausea.
But if must watch and must score, this is how to do it.
Rating: Dangerous. Rate the speech dangerous if he delivers one of his patented attacks on enemies, near or far, real or imagined. His capacity to divide us is well known, and the threat is greater to our civic fabric than to whomever he is targeting.
Rating: Dangerous. Rate the speech dangerous if he suddenly goes off-script and starts rambling incoherently, as he is prone to do. This may overlap with the first category in the form of a gratuitous, crazed attack on someone, flavored with Trump-branded toddler logic. Additional evidence of an unstable, unreliable hand on the national tiller, and nuclear codes, will be yet another example of how close to the brink we live, and how the executive branch of government is becoming the holy expletive branch.
Rating: Dangerous. Rate the speech dangerous if he stays on script, and teleprompters his way to a vaguely normal-sounding presidential address in the measured, understandable way that only a speechwriter could make possible. In fact, this may be the most dangerous of all, because it will be the biggest misrepresentation of who he actually is. Trump knows that the nation hungers for normalcy, and he knows how delivering it in sporadic doses is greeted, every time, with a sigh of misplaced hope that the White House maybe hasn’t become the National Bughouse.
In other words, yes, anything he says is dangerous. Because he is dangerous, no matter what kind of performance he delivers tomorrow. The largest danger is forgetting that for an hour. Or even a minute.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/01/29/heres-how-to-score-trumps-state-of-the-union-address/?utm_term=.fdc734475545 (Opinion | Here’s how to score Trump’s State of the Union address)
How to score President Trump’s big speech? Don’t. The urge to treat Trump’s big address tomorrow as yet one more win or loss in the nonstop sportsification of American civic life is worse than wasted effort. It gives Trump exactly what he wants and exactly what should be withheld.
My advice is just don’t watch it. Any actual information will be readily available and amply disseminated on Wednesday. Spare yourself the pomp and propaganda. And the headache and high blood pressure and possible nausea.
But if must watch and must score, this is how to do it.
Rating: Dangerous. Rate the speech dangerous if he delivers one of his patented attacks on enemies, near or far, real or imagined. His capacity to divide us is well known, and the threat is greater to our civic fabric than to whomever he is targeting.
Rating: Dangerous. Rate the speech dangerous if he suddenly goes off-script and starts rambling incoherently, as he is prone to do. This may overlap with the first category in the form of a gratuitous, crazed attack on someone, flavored with Trump-branded toddler logic. Additional evidence of an unstable, unreliable hand on the national tiller, and nuclear codes, will be yet another example of how close to the brink we live, and how the executive branch of government is becoming the holy expletive branch.
Rating: Dangerous. Rate the speech dangerous if he stays on script, and teleprompters his way to a vaguely normal-sounding presidential address in the measured, understandable way that only a speechwriter could make possible. In fact, this may be the most dangerous of all, because it will be the biggest misrepresentation of who he actually is. Trump knows that the nation hungers for normalcy, and he knows how delivering it in sporadic doses is greeted, every time, with a sigh of misplaced hope that the White House maybe hasn’t become the National Bughouse.
In other words, yes, anything he says is dangerous. Because he is dangerous, no matter what kind of performance he delivers tomorrow. The largest danger is forgetting that for an hour. Or even a minute.
The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump
The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump
The problem with Donald Trump is not that he is imbecilic and inept—it is that he has surrendered total power to the oligarchic and military elites. They get what they want. They do what they want. Although the president is a one-man wrecking crew aimed at democratic norms and institutions, although he has turned the United States into a laughingstock around the globe, our national crisis is embodied not in Trump but the corporate state’s now unfettered pillage.
Trump, who has no inclination or ability to govern, has handed the machinery of government over to the bankers, corporate executives, right-wing think tanks, intelligence chiefs and generals. They are eradicating the few regulations and laws that inhibited a naked kleptocracy.
They are dynamiting the institutions, including the State Department, that served interests other than corporate profit and are stacking the courts with right-wing, corporate-controlled ideologues. Trump provides the daily entertainment; the elites handle the business of looting, exploiting and destroying.
Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, a process begun before the election of Trump, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it.
The elites’ moral and intellectual vacuum produced Trump. They too are con artists. They are slicker than he at selling the lies and more adept at disguising their greed through absurd ideologies such as neoliberalism and globalization, but they belong to the same criminal class and share many of the pathologies that characterize Trump.
The grotesque visage of Trump is the true face of politicians such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Clintons and Obama, unlike Bush and Trump, are self-aware and therefore cynical, but all lack a moral compass.
As Michael Wolff writes in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the president has “no scruples.” He lives “outside the rules” and is “contemptuous of them.” And this makes him identical to those he has replaced, not different. “A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar—except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not,” Wolff writes.
Trump, backed by the most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, including https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/01/05/rebekah-mercer-the-billionaire-backer-of-bannon-and-trump-chooses-sides/?utm_term=.33711e0a9aa6 (Robert and Rebekah Mercer), Sheldon Adelson and Carl Icahn, is the fool who prances at the front of our death march. As natural resources become scarce and the wealth of the empire evaporates, a shackled population will be forced to work harder for less. State revenues will be squandered in grandiose projects and futile wars in an attempt to return the empire to a mythical golden age. The decision to slash corporate tax rates for the rich while increasing an already bloated military budget by $54 billion is typical of decayed civilizations.
Empires expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves and then go bankrupt. The Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires all imploded in a similar fashion. The lessons of history are clear. But the illiterate charlatans who seize power in the dying days of empire know nothing of history. They are driven by a primal and inchoate lust for wealth, one that is never satisfied no matter how many billions they possess.
The elites in dying cultures turn everything into a commodity. Human beings are commodities. The natural world is a commodity. Government and democratic institutions are commodities. All are mined and wrecked for profit. Nothing has an intrinsic value. Nothing is sacred. The relentless and suicidal drive to accumulate greater and greater wealth by destroying the systems that sustain life is idolatry. It ignores the biblical injunction that idols always begin by demanding human sacrifice and end by demanding self-sacrifice. The elites are not only building our funeral pyre, they are building their own.
The elites, lacking a vision beyond satiating their own greed, revel in the intoxicating power to destroy. They confuse destruction with creation. They are agents of what Sigmund Freud calls the death instinct. They find in acts of national self-immolation a godlike power. They denigrate empathy, intellectual curiosity, artistic expression and the common good, virtues that sustain life. They celebrate a hyper-individualism embodied in celebrity, wealth, hedonism, manipulation and the ability to dominate others.
They know nothing of the past. They do not think about the future. Those around them are temporarily useful to their aims and must be flattered and rewarded but in the end are ruthlessly cast aside. There is no human connection. This emotional numbness lies at the core of Trump’s personality.
The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump
The problem with Donald Trump is not that he is imbecilic and inept—it is that he has surrendered total power to the oligarchic and military elites. They get what they want. They do what they want. Although the president is a one-man wrecking crew aimed at democratic norms and institutions, although he has turned the United States into a laughingstock around the globe, our national crisis is embodied not in Trump but the corporate state’s now unfettered pillage.
Trump, who has no inclination or ability to govern, has handed the machinery of government over to the bankers, corporate executives, right-wing think tanks, intelligence chiefs and generals. They are eradicating the few regulations and laws that inhibited a naked kleptocracy.
They are dynamiting the institutions, including the State Department, that served interests other than corporate profit and are stacking the courts with right-wing, corporate-controlled ideologues. Trump provides the daily entertainment; the elites handle the business of looting, exploiting and destroying.
Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, a process begun before the election of Trump, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it.
The elites’ moral and intellectual vacuum produced Trump. They too are con artists. They are slicker than he at selling the lies and more adept at disguising their greed through absurd ideologies such as neoliberalism and globalization, but they belong to the same criminal class and share many of the pathologies that characterize Trump.
The grotesque visage of Trump is the true face of politicians such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Clintons and Obama, unlike Bush and Trump, are self-aware and therefore cynical, but all lack a moral compass.
As Michael Wolff writes in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the president has “no scruples.” He lives “outside the rules” and is “contemptuous of them.” And this makes him identical to those he has replaced, not different. “A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar—except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not,” Wolff writes.
Trump, backed by the most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, including https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/01/05/rebekah-mercer-the-billionaire-backer-of-bannon-and-trump-chooses-sides/?utm_term=.33711e0a9aa6 (Robert and Rebekah Mercer), Sheldon Adelson and Carl Icahn, is the fool who prances at the front of our death march. As natural resources become scarce and the wealth of the empire evaporates, a shackled population will be forced to work harder for less. State revenues will be squandered in grandiose projects and futile wars in an attempt to return the empire to a mythical golden age. The decision to slash corporate tax rates for the rich while increasing an already bloated military budget by $54 billion is typical of decayed civilizations.
Empires expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves and then go bankrupt. The Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires all imploded in a similar fashion. The lessons of history are clear. But the illiterate charlatans who seize power in the dying days of empire know nothing of history. They are driven by a primal and inchoate lust for wealth, one that is never satisfied no matter how many billions they possess.
The elites in dying cultures turn everything into a commodity. Human beings are commodities. The natural world is a commodity. Government and democratic institutions are commodities. All are mined and wrecked for profit. Nothing has an intrinsic value. Nothing is sacred. The relentless and suicidal drive to accumulate greater and greater wealth by destroying the systems that sustain life is idolatry. It ignores the biblical injunction that idols always begin by demanding human sacrifice and end by demanding self-sacrifice. The elites are not only building our funeral pyre, they are building their own.
The elites, lacking a vision beyond satiating their own greed, revel in the intoxicating power to destroy. They confuse destruction with creation. They are agents of what Sigmund Freud calls the death instinct. They find in acts of national self-immolation a godlike power. They denigrate empathy, intellectual curiosity, artistic expression and the common good, virtues that sustain life. They celebrate a hyper-individualism embodied in celebrity, wealth, hedonism, manipulation and the ability to dominate others.
They know nothing of the past. They do not think about the future. Those around them are temporarily useful to their aims and must be flattered and rewarded but in the end are ruthlessly cast aside. There is no human connection. This emotional numbness lies at the core of Trump’s personality.
WASHINGTON — The day after President Donald Trump fired James Comey, he became so furious watching television footage of the ousted FBI director boarding a government-funded plane from Los Angeles back to Washington, D.C. that he called the bureau’s acting director, Andrew McCabe, to vent, according to multiple people familiar with the phone call.
Trump demanded to know why Comey was allowed to fly on an FBI plane after he had been fired, these people said. McCabe told the president he hadn’t been asked to authorize Comey’s flight, but if anyone had asked, he would have approved it, three people familiar with the call recounted to NBC News.
The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015.
McCabe replied: “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.
