This Is All Donald Trump Has Left

 

 

"It’s so easy to see the shape of what Trump wants in the ways that he lies and lies about what is—in the way he gooses crowd numbers, in the way he tells stories about strong men weeping at his feet in gratitude for all he’s done for this country, in the gap-intensive conspiracies and bizarre causal helixes that he invents to explain away his failures. What’s most striking about Trump’s lies, beyond their overwhelming volume and bombast, is how they reflect his own monomania. So Many Are Saying various things that somehow all wind up being about him; they’re Saying It More And More because there is nothing else and no one else that he could imagine anyone wanting to talk about. The metastasizing They that opposes him grows by the day, and cares about him every bit as much as he cares about himself. They will do, are always somewhere doing, whatever it takes to make him look like an idiot who fucks up and lies constantly. Nothing, certainly not the lives of any number of strangers or whatever is left of any national ideal, is more important than the survival of his most obvious throwaway fantasy.

Everything returns to him, sometimes along a longer arc than others, but always in good time. His obliterating vanity can sometimes give this a darkly comic aspect, as when he was hilariously and transparently jealous of the few days of theatrical bipartisan mourning that followed John McCain’s death, but it is generally too ghoulish to laugh at. Trump’s engagement with the world is fundamentally an envious one—other people possess what should be his, everything that is not him is just getting in his way. This is why his response to the challenge of his office seems to top out at blustering and uncomprehending impatience. Those opiate deaths and wildfires and our fortnightly mass shootings are Quite Frankly So Tragic, but it is palpable that the only real response Trump has to them is that they distract from what everyone had been talking about before, which was and by rights should continue to be him."

read article by David Roth

This Is All Donald Trump Has Left