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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPulitzer Prize winner David Remnick knocks it out of the park as usual
On April 29th, Donald Trump will have occupied the Oval Office for a hundred days. For most people, the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is the luxury of not following politics with a nerve-racked constancy. Trump does not afford this. His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but its worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office.
Trump has never gone out of his way to conceal the essence of his relationship to the truth and how he chooses to navigate the world. In 1980, when he was about to announce plans to build Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, he coached his architect before meeting with a group of reporters. Give them the old Trump bullshit, he said. Tell them its going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.
This is the brand that Trump has created for himselfthat of an unprincipled, cocky, value-free con who will insult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his gaudiest purposes. I am what I am, he has said. But what was once a parochial amusement is now a national and global peril. Trump flouts truth and liberal values so brazenly that he undermines the country he has been elected to serve and the stability he is pledged to insure. His bluster creates a generalized anxiety such that the President of the United States can appear to be scarcely more reliable than any of the worlds autocrats. When Kim In-ryong, a representative of North Koreas radical regime, warns that Trump and his tweets of provocation are creating a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment, does one man sound more immediately rational than the other? When Trump rushes to congratulate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for passing a referendum that bolsters autocratic rule in Turkeyor when a sullen and insulting meeting with Angela Merkel is followed by a swoon session with Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the military dictator of Egypthow are the supporters of liberal and democratic values throughout Europe meant to react to American leadership?
Trump appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. He thinks out loud, and is incapable of reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed, and, at times, it seems, unhinged. Journalists are invited to the Oval Office to ask about infrastructure; he turns the subject to how Bill OReilly, late of Fox News, is a good person, blameless, like him, in matters of sexual harassment. A reporter asks about the missile attack on Syria; he feeds her a self-satisfied description of how he informed his Chinese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike over the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that youve ever seen.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/a-hundred-days-of-trump
SaveOurDemocracy
(4,400 posts)NewJeffCT
(56,828 posts)excellent article
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,708 posts)kimbutgar
(21,055 posts)Everytime he opens that anus shaped mouth he is spouting bull$hit.
BSdetect
(8,994 posts)They joined his election subverise activities. Traitors stick together until one seeks a lesser sentence?
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)not fooled
(5,801 posts)All dump had to do was stay the course and not screw it up...but of course the pukes had to set the presidency and Federal Government ablaze.