Will they? Won't they?
BY TANYA GOLD
Tuesday 29 May 2018
... It’s been on-off, on-off, like a teenage date, but, in the end, I don’t think Trumpton will be able to resist the weird frisson of meeting someone he can’t necessarily control. It will be a narcissism disco dance-off: two of the world’s most influential nutters, with competing, and yet linear Daddy issues, solving – or bringing to crisis – an until now insoluble conflict. It’s so exciting it’s almost like ... TV. This, I must again remind you, is how liberal democracies fall: the substitution of dangerous reality with something that has the aesthetic of entertainment. Because none of this seems real. It seems, rather, like a succession of ever more bizarre headlines. The news is interesting! The news is a drug with ever bigger tits. I mean hits! ...
Even if Trumpton-supporting Americans are mad there is no downside for Trumpton here. Just think of the newsprint. "Trumpton saves world." "Trumpton destroys world." Who cares, if you are a malignant narcissist with no empathy? It has long been said that stars don’t read their read their cuttings, they just weigh them, and Trumpton, like Joan Crawford, is a star. (Do check out her swansong Trog, in which she interacts with “a living troglodyte”.) We are paying attention to this and not the fact – just pick one, this is mine – that the US has separated some immigrant children from their parents and has now, er, lost them. And he can always spin it. Defame the press and you can write your own reality, if you can hold a pen. And if you can’t hold a pen, you can pay someone to hold one for you ...
Some Trumpologists are saying since the North Korea summit – tabled and cancelled and now tabled again – that Trumpton is a foreign policy genius, like Blofeld, and maybe he is, in the same way that my four-year-old son is a foreign policy genius. Because I never know what he’s going to do next either, and yet he isn’t going to get a Nobel Prize as substitute for the Emmy he surely would have preferred ...
But is this healthy? Diplomacy by reality TV, spin, lie? Government by neurosis? This is normal for tyranny. Tyranny does madmen well. It likes them. The US needs something better – oh, I give up. I’m a Libtard and, one way or another, I’m gonna burn. Twitter said so.
http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/donald-trump-north-korea-summit
