How to interview a serial liar and narcissist who is unfit to be president
President Trump’s peculiar brew of relentless dishonesty and utter shamelessness often acts as a shield against his interviewers. The lies tumble out at such a furious pace, and the display of corrupt motives is so blatant, that pinning Trump down on them is like (and apologies for the cliche, but nothing else is better) nailing jello to a wall.
Axios’s Jonathan Swan conducted a stunning interview with Trump that is gaining praise for getting around this problem. But the full import of how Swan did this, I think, is still eluding attention, and properly accounting for it exposes core truths about this extraordinary moment that we still struggle to find the right language to express.
Again and again, Swan practically pleaded with Trump to demonstrate a shred of basic humanity about the mounting toll under his presidency, and to display a glimmer of recognition of responsibility for it. Again and again, Trump failed this most basic test.
The beseeching quality of those lines of inquiry contrasted jarringly with Trump’s serial inability to rise to this fundamental threshold, or even to perceive what was being asked of him. This, I think, is the source of this interview’s unsettling revelatory power — and it captured a crucial aspect of Trump’s unfitness to serve as president that I suspect a majority of the country has figured out.
Swan noted that experts believe “the wishful thinking and the salesmanship is just not suitable at a time when a pandemic has killed 145,000 Americans,” and added: “For the past five months, it’s been, ‘the virus is totally under control,’ and the cases have been going up and the deaths have been going up.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/04/how-interview-serial-liar-narcissist-who-is-unfit-be-president/?hpid=hp_save-opinions-float-right-4-0_opinion-card-d-right%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
Awesome job exposing Trump for what he truly is... a narcissistic sociopath.
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I read a lot of stuff, both good and bad, but completely ignoring whatever “point” this author is trying to make, I simply note that it is written in beautiful English.
-Laelth
The author of that article evokes the tone of the interview with amazing skill.
You spurred me on to get his book on kindle, An Uncivil War.
