The President Still Has No Clothes

[babylonsister]

The President Still Has No Clothes
The coronavirus has made Trump’s deficiencies more apparent. We still don’t quite know what to do with him.
By Dahlia Lithwick and William Sage
May 20, 20206:02 PM


Expressing his skepticism about the utility of widespread coronavirus testing, President Donald Trump recently said: “When you test, you find something is wrong. With people.”

We may never have the tests to determine exactly what is wrong with Trump himself. But we know that something is wrong, and we have known this for a long time. We know that he fails to exhibit emotional qualities we reasonably expect of a leader, particularly in times of crisis. Most notably, he fails to have empathy for (or, at a minimum, awareness of) human illness, suffering, and death. We also know something is wrong because we have heard, seen, and read statements by the president that are inconsistent, factually incorrect, tangential, and more than occasionally incoherent. Depending on the topic and setting, these behaviors range from intermittent to continual. Years have been wasted in an intramural debate among mental health experts over whether to diagnose the president remotely, and what such a diagnosis might be. But that, too, is a distraction from what is directly in front of our eyes.

There is, even as the president blurs the line between reality and fantasy while talking about a lethal pandemic, a tendency to puzzle over the president’s actions, to wonder if they are somehow part of a complex political strategy. Is the president’s behavior “genius,” as a recent Washington Post commentary chose to call it, while still labeling it “irrational”? A simpler explanation is that both his distracting tweetstorms and incompetent leadership arise from the same underlying cause, even if we cannot label it, and the correct descriptor is not “brilliant.” But despite years of largely uninformed incoherence, it’s still difficult for many of us to resist the temptation to find order in the mess.

In the absence of psychiatric or cognitive tests Trump may never undergo, we cannot establish that some affirmative condition accounts for his daily shortage of rational output. This leaves us in the uncomfortable position of having to document only what Trump lacks. And while proving a nullity seems impossible, the truth is that one doesn’t need a Ph.D. in clinical psychology to observe and record the ordinary human behaviors the president hasn’t mastered. Any rational observer can do it. The burning question is why we don’t.

Anyone and everyone charged with reporting on this president should make a fundamental commitment that describing or interpreting this president’s statements and actions must highlight, on an ongoing and even repetitive basis, what they don’t see. Reporters, public intellectuals, and pundits should stop filling in Trump’s gaps for him and should allow as full a picture as possible to emerge of his cognitive and personal incompleteness. Not doing so explicitly has resulted in four years of rationalizing, contextualizing, and indeed—in popular parlance—“normalizing” a president few of us would trust to take care of a pet over the weekend.

more...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/trump-emperor-no-clothes.html

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. This! Somebody has finally pointed out that Trump has no strategy at all.

For anything. He's not even trying to distract from something else when he says or does something bizarre, which would imply a strategic purpose - he just says stuff.

COVID-19 has done less to break another journalistic habit that conceals Trump’s vacuity: conflating impulse with strategy. Why does media coverage rush to supply rational motives that may not exist? Because the demands of continuous media attention require storytelling, and the power of narrative lies in laying out motivation and conflict. A leader’s expected focus in this pandemic—to build common purpose, save lives, and restore confidence in economic activity—does not motivate Trump. So, reporters and commentators assume that something equally significant must be motivating him instead, like campaign strategy. Accordingly, Trump’s endless, chaotic disputes and frequent outbursts are routinely described as intentional distractions from his own incompetence or malfeasance, as dog whistles to rally his base, or as veiled signals to members of his own administration.

The better explanation is that he is just talking, on impulse. Certainly, Trump has a pervasive sense of self-interest, whether reflected in power, adulation, or immunity from criticism. But the frequency and character of his attacks suggest they are the consequence of poor impulse control more than any deep strategy. They evidence Trump’s own distraction; they need not have the purpose, and should not have the effect, of distracting others. COVID coverage has been increasingly cynical in the motives it supplies for Trump’s impulses—such as Chris Cuomo’s interpretation of Trump’s use of hydroxychloroquine to make Republicans seem braver than Democrats. But it has not reduced the media’s basic attribution error: There is no grand strategy here.

[ananda]

2. We don't know what to do with him?

He needs to be removed from office, tried,
convicted, and locked up!

[smirkymonkey]

3. K&R

[Zambero]

4. And very thin skin to boot

The vacancy light is on upstairs as well. Not a pretty picture!