Chris Hayes has an important book recommendation for Donald Trump
by digby
This interview with Chris Hayes in the New York Times’regular feature “By The Book” about books and writers is just great and you should read all of it. But as is so often true, Chris channels my thoughts, this time in regards to what I feel is the scariest aspect of Trump’s presidency:
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
Well, it’s pretty clear the president doesn’t read, so I wonder if there’d be a movie or TV series that would make more sense. But in terms of books, I think Tony Judt’s “Postwar,” which is, in its own way, about how the postwar international order was created, and why, for all its tremendous faults, it is worth preserving. The thing that terrifies me most is world war, and I feel as if we’ve entered into a period in which the generation of people who lived through world war have nearly all died and we’ve forgotten, as a kind of global society, just how horrible it is.
Trump is of an age that should know better but he’s such a solipsistic imbecile, that he didn’t think he needed to be seriously prepared for the presidency before he ran and so has no understanding of how all this works.
On the morning after the election, I wrote this and it remains my greatest concern:
We wake up today to a fundamentally different world than the one in which we woke up yesterday. The nation our allies looked to as the guarantor of global security will now be led by a pathologically dishonest, unqualified, inexperienced, temperamental, ignorant flimflam man. Things will never be the same. And we have no idea at the moment exactly what form this change is going to take, which makes this all very, very frightening.
As Hayes says, the post WWII order has tremendous faults. It was imperfect but it did manage to keep us from another World War — not to mention nuclear conflagration. But to simply toss it away as Trump is doing, partially by intention and partially because he’s a psychologically impaired moron is terrifying.
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