Trump’s Elevator Skips a Few Floors
I did not watch Donald Trump’s two-hour breakdown at the CPAC conference, but it must have been incredibly bad, because more than a few journalists are asking why mainstream news outlets downplayed his lunacy.
As Amanda Marcotte noted the next day, mainstream outlets used euphemisms that failed to convey the disjointed, phantasmic nature of his raving, or his inability to stop. Bandy X. Lee, the Yale psychiatrist who has bucked her profession to sound the warning about Trump’s mental problems, puts it bluntly: “[We are] colluding on the most basic point: by telling ourselves that the mental unwellness we see is not what we are seeing.”
Part of the problem is that not that many people have seen the spectacle; two hours is a long time to listen to a crazy old paranoid’s foam-mouthed rambling. But enough people are talking and writing about it to make it clear we’ve gone from behavior that isn’t normal for a president to behavior that isn’t normal outside a dementia ward, and word is bound to spread.
Donald Trump has always created his own, better reality than the real one. That’s why all his buildings pretend to have more floors than they really do. This propensity for bullshit was well-known to the electorate, so obviously 63 million people didn’t care.
But it’s now beyond political considerations. The man is unfit for independent living, let alone high office. Lots of people in Washington know it but are too scared to do anything. They’ll soon face a day when not doing anything is even scarier, which is the day they will finally do something.
I continue to wonder why the “sane” Republicans continue to pretend Trump is ok. Even someone like Ken Simpler, who didn’t face a primary, really could have helped himself in the general election by acknowledging reality. It is baffling.
Also – the wisdom of “the markets” is moot. I guess they know that they are governed by cartoon physics. They, like Wile E. Coyote, will not fall as long as they don’t look down.
When the Republicans see no more advantage, no more profit from Trump the tide will be turned and the truth spoken, but not until then. They never do what is right just because it is what the nation needs.
^Yep.
He is the tool. Not the tool they really wanted but still even the dullest tool in the shed is better than no tool. When he has outlived his usefulness they will turn, not openly mind you, because there could be collateral damage to the GOP brand. But they will turn.