Well, 8 PM Tuesday came and went, to paraphrase TS Eliot, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” In the latest episode of Trump’s reality show presidency, he decided he’ll give Iran “another two weeks” (we’ll get to that in a minute) to open the Strait of Hormuz because something something Pakistan something.
Some are suggesting it was a predictable TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — while others, including at least one retired general who was on MSNOW, say sources tell them that the commanders at CENTCOM simply and bluntly refused to carry out his and Whiskey Pete’s orders to commit massive war crimes.
In either case, it shouldn’t surprise us that Trump has backed down. Throughout his entire life, this nepo-baby has only been good at two things beyond inheriting and squandering his father’s money.
The first has been manipulating the press to get publicity for himself, a skill he fine-tuned in the 1980s (as I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink) and has been on display throughout this Iran debacle (and the entire past decade).
He started with the New York tabloids and talk shows, then graduated to a national stage when he began accusing Barack Obama of having been born in Kenya. Now he does it daily from the White House and his tacky golf motel in Florida.
You could argue that he came by this skill honestly, driven by his being raised by a psychopathic father and a distant, sickly mother. He never felt loved, and never learned how to love, turning all his efforts into getting attention — which he translated into approval and love — from others. His deep sense of being unloved and unworthy underlies and drives much of his own psychopathy.
And his literal hate for anybody — particularly women — who doesn’t completely defer to him shows up almost daily in press conferences and on his helicopter and plane trips when he slaps down mostly-women reporters with epithets like “piggy” and “you’re stupid” for having had the temerity to ask him a non-flattering question or one that may reveal his criminality or ignorance.
His other, second skill was learned: NBC spent literally millions of dollars teaching Trump how to be a reality show host, which is the other role he’s playing now.
There can be little doubt that this cruel narcissist got pleasure and a deep satisfaction from telling people less powerful than him, “You’re fired,” but it was NBC’s producers and media consultants who taught him how to raise expectations, heighten tension, drag out a tease, and the importance of always rebooting the show at least every two weeks, lest the public forget the storyline and move on.
His perverse delight in turning others’ lives upside-down by firing them, first experienced in real time on The Apprentice set, now translates into the callous way he jettisons anybody in his orbit he doesn’t consider appropriately obsequious; Pam Bondi is just the most recent in a long list of people he went out of his way to humiliate.
His Cabinet meetings similarly reflect his lessons learned doing TV for NBC when he’d gather people around a table in the boardroom TV set the network had to create because his actual offices in New York were so shabby. He’d go around the table giving each contestant an opportunity to not only make a case for their business idea, but also to slather him with praise and adoration.
Above all, both of these trainings taught him the importance of dominating the news cycle with the tease, which is what we’ve been seeing this past week in particular.
When he was just a pathetic, always-failing hustler in the Big City, he’d wake up every morning asking himself what he could do or say that’d get him on Page One or Page Six of The New York Post; now his question is how to dominate every night’s coverage of the evening news. Or every news show, all day, if possible.
Threatening genocide certainly pulled that one off:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
That insane message should have immediately provoked articles of impeachment from any and every congressional Republican with even a fragment of loyalty to our Constitution, the rule of law, and humanity itself. Instead, we got a very revealing, deafening silence.
The problem with suggesting genocide — and the reason why no other American president has been stupid and reckless enough to try this in our entire history — is that America making such a threat establishes for every despot in the world that mass killing is now okay again. International law and the Geneva Conventions don’t mean a thing; when you’re a star, they let you do it.
Putin’s bloody, vicious attack on Ukraine is now justified; if America can threaten it, why are you criticizing Russia? And when Xi decides to take Taiwan, who will dare stand up to him when he threatens nuclear annihilation? Not to mention the dozens of tinpot dictators who now feel similarly liberated.
And the bonus for Trump is that nobody’s talking about his allegedly raping 13-year-olds, his sons getting into the defense contractor gravy train, his bitcoin and selling-pardon grifts, his destroying the White House’s East Wing, his hanging his picture all over DC like he’s Saddam, his inflation, the price of gas, his hanging Putin’s picture in the White House along with our past presidents, or any of the other daily obscenities and indignities his regime visits upon us.
Trump thinks he’s living inside a reality show, one of the few things he knows how to do well. Sociopaths and psychopaths, after all, don’t see other humans as real people like them with actual hopes, dreams, and feelings. They think they’re the only “real” person in the world, and only their emotions matter. Everybody else is simply a prop on the set, here to facilitate their whims.
His limited mental capacity and inability to feel empathy prevent him from understanding the consequences of the things he’s done, from his illegal tariffs to his war-crime bombing of little boats in the Caribbean, to his joining accused war criminal Netanyahu in attacking a country that represented no threat whatsoever to America (and was on the verge of giving him a better deal than they had Obama).
He’ll never understand; he’s simply not capable of it. Any more than he could understand the damage he did to the women he assaulted or the girls who claim he raped them, the small-business contractors he stiffed, the customers he conned with his multiple grifts — from his fake university to the worthless merchandise he hawks to his crypto scams — or the victims of the MAGA cult he fashioned around himself to bleed dry financially and then discard when the votes and dollars were in.
But America and the world will pay the price, and it won’t be paid easily or quickly. It’ll take at least a generation for this nation to heal from the damage Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his GOP toadies have done.
We got a two-week reprieve. We must use it to impeach this man and remove him from office, as over 85 lawmakers have already publicly called for.
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You can always count on TACO!
This is a perfect essay. Concise but includes most of how we got here.