"This is all Donald Trump has left" Amazing summation of Trump's character [View all]

[Demovictory9]

All Trump wants, all he has ever wanted, is to be able to keep doing and taking and saying whatever he wants whenever he wants. He ran for president for this reason and this reason only.

https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/this-is-all-donald-trump-has-left-1830329753

For someone who does it so frequently, Trump is not especially talented at lying. His dissimilations are all easy to see through; the things he heatedly accuses his enemies of doing are always things that he has done himself, is currently doing, or obviously aspires to do in the future. He is always desperate, in the way that selfish and needy people are always desperate. His fears transparently run the show, both the normal human fear of failing and the more specific ones he picks up on the cable news channel he watches, which splits its broadcast day between fulsomely flattering coverage of him and armchair generalship in a sprawling race war the network is imagineering out of rhetorical abstraction and into bloody existence. Watching hours of that every day would destabilize anyone; for Trump, who is very vain and very stupid and has always cared more about TV than anyone should, the result is equilibrium, or entropy.

It’s so easy to see the shape of what Trump wants in the ways that he lies and lies about what is—in the way he gooses crowd numbers, in the way he tells stories about strong men weeping at his feet out of fulsome gratitude for all he’s done for this country, in the gap-intensive conspiracies and bizarre causal helixes that he invents to explain away his failures. What’s most striking about Trump’s lies, beyond their overwhelming volume and bombast, is how they reflect his own monomania. So Many Are Saying various things that somehow all wind up being about him; they’re Saying It More And More because there is nothing else and no one else he could imagine anyone wanting to talk about. The metastasizing They that opposes him grows by the day, and cares about him every bit as much as he cares about himself. They will do, are always somewhere doing, whatever it takes to make him look like an idiot who fucks up and lies constantly. Nothing, certainly not the lives of any number of strangers or whatever is left of any national ideal, is more important than the survival of his most obvious throwaway fantasy.

Everything returns to him, sometimes along a longer arc than others, but always in good time. His obliterating vanity can sometimes give this a darkly comic aspect, as when he was hilariously and transparently jealous of the few days of theatrical bipartisan mourning that followed John McCain’s death, but it is generally too ghoulish to laugh at. Trump’s engagement with the world is fundamentally an envious one—other people possess what should be his, everything that is not him is just getting in his way. This is why his response to the challenge of his office seems to top out at blustering and uncomprehending impatience. Those opiate deaths and wildfires and our fortnightly mass shootings are Quite Frankly So Tragic, but it is palpable that the only real response Trump has to them is that they distract from what everyone had been talking about before, which was and by rights should continue to be him.


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Trump won’t stop. He won’t stop because he’s never told the truth in his life and because this is all he has and all he has ever had. He wakes up every day to the mess he’s made and says and does whatever he must, at whatever cost, to get through the day. Like many in his generation, Trump has mistaken the end of his life for the end of the world. He can’t imagine, let alone care about, what will be left after he is gone, if only because no one who matters to him will be around for it. His politics, such as they exist, boil down to this: he is trying to hold on, and will spend the rest of his life trying not to be found out. Every day is like this now. He could do this forever—he talks often about serving for longer than one more term—but that’s mostly because he has so much invested in never stopping. He is over-leveraged as always; he can only ever do more.