Now I know Trump has said a lot of crazy shit, but somehow you’re thinking/hoping this is all a bit of an Wizard of Oz act and that he will come out from behind the curtain and reveal himself as a human being and responsible POTUS now that he’s won.
In that context I had an uncanny valley reality/unreality confusion moment listening to the news a few days ago where Trump was responding to intelligence assertions that the Russian hacking was specifically targeted to help Trump win by only releasing compromising material from networks tied to the Democrat re-election efforts and none from the GOP networks.
He’s burbling along about how this was impossible and that the reason they could not infiltrate the GOP was that he (Trump) had personally warned Priebus to increase security and make the GOP campaign networks unhackable and commented “I’d like to think I had something to do with that”.
What? … *really…"*I’d like to think I had something to do with that".
We’re talking serious matters having to do with national security and HE feels compelled to thrown in that HE was the real reason the GOP networks did not get compromised by the Russians.
It was just a little throw away bit of self aggrandizement but… it’s just so batshit to feel you need to pat yourself on the back yet again. You are the fucking POTUS and you still need more? It all crystallized for me at that moment. It’s not an act, those hopes are gone. We’re not dealing with someone for whom his public persona is some cleverly managed means to an end. He is a genuine, certified egomanic.
Now, I’m not going to make my past mistake of underestimating him but this isn’t going to be settle down into a normal Presidency. This is going to be a 4 year carnival ride.
I’m truly surprised that the OP is posting this as a revelatory moment; most of us have known what was posted in the OP for months, some of us for years.
I can’t remember why I did this, but in 1987 or 1988 I read The Art of the Deal. I didn’t get very far into it before I realized that he was, is and always will be a pathological egomaniac.
I’m not up on how you Canadians look at your PM in terms of institutional reverence but Americans (in general) are invested in the notion that the person who wins the office is (to some degree) transformed by the importance of the office. This has not happened at all with Trump. Not even a little a bit, he’s going to be the most powerful individual on Earth and he continues to act like an insecure, angry manchild.
Also, Trump was underestimated by many, including myself, and in that scenario you try to find out why your opponent triumphed. And in the end the reality was that he understood the tone of the zeitgeist better than the Democrats. Ok so he played us, he’s not a dummy, (cause then we’d be super-dummies). But then we’re back to “I protected the GOP from hacking! ME! ME!”
Putting together the picture of a canny political player who does not have a controlled personality but is actually a true, unvarnished, unapologetic egomaniac is strange. I’m not going to pretend it’s not a bit discombobulating.
Since when? I mean really, what kind of magical thinking would lead someone to assume a person, completely unsuited to lead the dominant country on the planet, would suddenly “grow” into it just because?
If you watched his TV show, this is nothing new. The people that won the Apprentice, were the one’s that, in the board room, could talk about all the positive contributions (spun or otherwise) they were responsible for. Even though there were teams, the people that blew their own horns, or had other people praise them, were the winners. In Trump’s world, there’s no “I” in “team”, but there sure as hell is an “I” in “win”.
Trump didn’t understand jack shit. He got lucky. Everything just happened to fall into place for him, against all odds. The irony is that he’s so thick-headed and egotistical that he has no clue how lucky he got. He lost the popular vote by a greater margin than anyone since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876.
No… he did not just “get lucky” he understood the electoral math and executed a successful election strategy at a fraction of the cost of the Democrats. His plans were quite deliberate and in retrospect were smarter analytically than the Democrats. I underestimated him once and I will not do so again. He may be an egomaniac but he is not a dummy. The party with the stupider strategy lost.
But it’s not as if this is a surprise because many narcissistic man-children jhave been elected President before, and all grew into the office, and Trump is some exception. He was the exception already. He is obviously going to be a disaster at best and a global catastrophe is not at all unlikely. There’s never been a candidate like him who even sniffed the White House.
Who’s the WORST candidate or winner on my lifetime? I dunno… George W. Bush? Dukakis? George McGovern? None of those men were narcissistic evil clowns ready to sell state secrets to the highest bidder. All were sane men who wanted to serve their country.
When people show you who they are, your job is to see.
This is as true now as it was when it was G. W. Bush beating the drum for war in Iraq.
The real heartbreaking realization is that even though you see clearly, you can do nothing to avert the tide taking you where it will. You just have to make sure you keep your boat in good repair and hope you can ride out whatever conditions you’re being carried into.
And some of us for decades. I knew Trump for what he was, back in the '70s, when he sued an elderly couple for calling their grocery store Trump’s, because it was HIS name… even though it had been theirs longer. And he won.
It’s appalling how many Americans still can’t see what a self-absorbed douchebag he is.
That seems a foreign concept to me. The incoming PM is what he/she is, based on past experience with that person. I never expect a “road to Damascus” moment when they suddenly become a better person by taking an oath of office.
(Nor do we have this fascination with “bipartisanship” which I’ve seen from Americans on the boards. The job of the Opposition is to oppose; of course the Opposition will try to make the PM a one-term PM. I didn’t grok the outrage about McConnell’s approach to Obama.)
Like Grey, I fail to see why anyone is surprised by that. The primary and the election campaigns certainly demonstrated that to me, over the course of a year and a half.
Me too. From what we saw of Trump during the campaign, and indeed before, it would be absolutely astonishing if he grew into the kind of person who is minimally fit to discharge the office to which he has just been elected. No offence to the OP, but anybody who saw this as a realistic possibility was simply deluding themselves.
This. If you even have just the smallest amount of metal in your character, the crucible of the office of US president will forge you into a stronger, harder person, as we saw happened with G.W. Bush after two terms.
But Trump is pure cookie dough, and I think the crucible of the office will turn him to powder.
Yeah…wrong. Trump’s handlers may have outlined a strategy for the best states to campaign in, but it was a longshot. The things that really swayed the election were the Russian hackers and the wishy-washy FBI investigation. Trump had zero control over any of that. Even up until Election Night, his only long-term strategy was to blame illegal immigrant voters for making him lose, he said so in many campaign speeches.