The guy IS pimping the offoce of the American Presidency to satidfy his ‘EGO’…..
President Trump is not a renowned reader. But it increasingly feels as though someone at the White House should leave a printout of “Ozymandias” next to his TV remote.
In recent discussions, Trump administration officials reportedly told Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the Senate minority leader, that the president would unfreeze billions in funding for a delayed rail tunnel under the Hudson River — if Mr. Schumer would push to rename Penn Station in New York and Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., in Mr. Trump’s honor. Never mind that the president shouldn’t hold hostage billions in congressionally appropriated funding.
Mr. Schumer reportedly refused, thank God. It’s easy to imagine that slippery slope whizzing us to a landscape cluttered with Trump-branded turnpikes, rivers and dams stretching from the Gulf of Trump to the Golden Trump Bridge.
But do not exhale yet. Mr. Trump is still on a renaming crusade that seems aimed not at building a legacy so much as appropriating those of others. He seems to find that approach easier….
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Drawing glory and profit from the creations of others has long been part of Mr. Trump’s M.O. The Trump Organization has licensed the family name for use on other companies’ developments. At developments as far afield as Trump International Hotel and Tower Vancouver and Trump private mansions in the United Arab Emirates, licensing agreements let Mr. Trump take credit for a global real estate empire while avoiding the construction work and assuming none of the responsibility…
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No matter how rich or successful he becomes, Mr. Trump, a Queens native, remains an outer boroughs boy stewing over the contempt of his hometown’s cultural elite.
With his low popularity, Mr. Trump may be realizing that he will never win broad public adulation. Then again, maybe he’s operating out of pure, untethered vanity. Either way, he aims to elbow his way into the everyday lives of an ungrateful nation, even — especially — in places that don’t much care for him, while he can still bully people to comply.
For a dismayed public, there are consolations. Mr. Trump’s renaming effort carries the stench of stolen valor, but it results in less cruelty and human suffering than so much else the president is up to. Carving his name into buildings might be self-indulgent, but no one is getting gunned down in the process. Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the House minority leader, has derided the renaming as “presidential graffiti,” which captures its inherent pettiness….
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Trump’s Politics Are Not America First. They’re Me First.
I have never trafficked in the conspiracy theories about Donald Trump and Russia. I never thought that he was a Russian asset or that Vladimir Putin had some financial leverage on him or sex tapes to blackmail him with. I have always believed it was much worse: that Trump, in his heart and soul, simply does not share the values of every other American president since World War II when it comes to what America’s role in the world should be and must be.
I have always believed that Trump has an utterly warped value set that is not grounded in any of our founding documents, but simply favors any leader who is strong, no matter what he does with that strength; any leader who is rich and can thus enrich Trump, no matter what the leader does with that money or how he got it; and any leader who will flatter him, no matter how obviously phony that flattery is.
As long as Putin the dictator checked all those boxes more than the democratic leader of Ukraine, Trump treated him as a friend — American interests and values be damned. Putin never even had to break a sweat to make Trump his chump.
For all those reasons Trump is the most un-American president in our history…..
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Trump’s worst un-American impulses and intellectual laziness were contained in his first term in the White House by a group of serious advisers. This time around, there is no one to contain them. He has surrounded himself with sycophants. So, Trump is now basically running our country the way he ran his companies — as a one-man show free to make terrible deals.
Trump’s behavior has become so reckless, so self-absorbed, so obviously contrary to American interests — as even Republicans have long defined them, let alone Democrats — that the question must be asked: Is America now being ruled by a mad king?
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