Will the REAL Donald J. Trump please step forward?……
The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.
I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)
But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic…..
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Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.
He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.
Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.
When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.
If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?
It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full….
This Alabama hurricane fiasco is one of the most riculous of Trumps many insanities.
And,yes,I know the media has the right and maybe the obligation to report anything the President Of the United States says, but maybe it’s time even for them to let it go.
Republicans couldn’t care less .Trump can say anything he wants, lie numerous times a day, and insult whomever he desires and they will still support him.
Hence MY feeling this is a BS Story
Of course it is NOT a BS story. If someone in Cape Hatteras believed that Trump was telling the truth , he may have chosen not to prepare for the hurricane. Or someone in Alabama May have undergone costly and expensive preparation when it was not needed.
Truth matters – and lying about the weather erodes US trust in even believing in a weather report. In fact, Trump’s actions are criminal. Jack is correct that Republicans are morally indifferent, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should be.
It disturbing to me that anyone could think this is as BS stoty.
Z?
Donald Trump HAS been lying his WHOLE life….
He got his present job lying….
He’s been LYING for almost a week about something that did NOT happen….
That people KEEP believing him?
Well that’s a problem THEY have…
But this tory in my mind IS complete Bull Shit….
Unimportant….
And a media treasure chest part of the reason Trump is able to do his sidewalk act and get away with it with 40% of Americans and virtually no one else….
Actually ,If you think about it,Zreebs has apoint.
Think a Trump cultist in Hatteras.I mean who is he gonna believe those lying bastards at the National Hurricane Center or his Master?
I acknowledged Z’s point…
But the basic IS Bull Shit nevertheless…
Maybe that is or could be, the new (although hardly original) name for a minor-league sports team: The Alabama Hurricanes. (nicknamed the Vulcan Winds by sportswriters for The Montgomery Advertiser.
Maybe the President is getting his REAL, non-fake news from ESPN, YES and NESN.
Or perhaps he has trouble as a lifelong New Yorker, distinguishing ’Bama from the Bahamas.
or maybe he just diesn’t know WTF he’s doing like most of us think?