A malevolent Forrest Gump
by digby
Here’s an op-ed that will soothe your wired mind and make you realize you aren’t going crazy. It starts off in the opposite direction, running down all these year-end pieces about Donald Trump’s foreign policy achievements and finding that he’s a savvy player who’s been underestimated. It’s enough to make you take up drinking lighter fluid.
Here’s an example:
The historian Arthur Herman locates a “Trump doctrine” based upon the “concept of ‘principled realism,’” which he says rests on a certain “philosophical underpinning,” primarily the recognition that we live in a competitive world. The Asia scholar Daniel Blumenthal sees a White House fashioning a “strategic approach” to his region of expertise, including an “inspiring vision” for the future of the Korean peninsula.
I was ready to give up (I can only take so much bizarroworld literature.)He commends people for trying to see the bright side and recognizing that certain of Trump’s policies show a kind of rough consistency.
But seriously, people. Let’s get real:
[T]here is something amiss in the effort to uncover coherence in Trump’s statecraft. The president is the lynchpin of the American constitutional system. And there are no unresolved questions about this particular president’s capabilities.
Trump gave a number of extended interviews on foreign policy during the campaign, and they did not reveal the mind of a Talleyrand or a Metternich. One finds instead the crudest of formulations punctuated by gibberish. A single sampling must stand in for the whole: “certainly cyber has to be a, you know, certainly cyber has to be in our thought process, very strongly in our thought process. Inconceivable that, inconceivable the power of cyber.”
His most crippling weakness, however, is a gaping hole in his character that creates an insatiable craving for adulation. That in turn leads him to soak up flattery, especially from autocrats abroad.
A sumptuous banquet at the Saudi royal court and a massive five-story portrait of himself projected onto his hotel façade were enough to make Trump swoon with delight toward a country he had formerly faulted for 9/11 and ripping off the American economy. When Trump traveled to the Philippines, strongman Rodrigo Duterte greeted him with gaudy baubles that led our president to gloat over his reception: “It’s a red carpet like nobody, I think, has probably ever seen.”
For every step Trump takes that has the appearance of purposefulness, there’s another step that reveals an infantile mind giving vent to impulses never successfully subjected to discipline 65 years ago in the sandbox: “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?’” is what Trump, while on a state visit to Vietnam, tweeted about North Korea’s nuclear-armed tyrant.
In light of Trump’s mode of discourse, it is farcical to speak seriously about his foreign policy “visions and aspirations.” To expand on the “philosophical underpinning” of Trumpian “concepts” is to descend into the absurd.
The man who has boasted about grabbing women by the genitals, who cannot distinguish truth from falsity, whose ignorance is only exceeded by his hatefulness, who disses allies and puffs up dictators, whose daily intelligence briefings have been dumbed down to approach the level of The Cat in the Hat, whose own secretary of State reportedly has called him a “moron,” is more of a malevolent Forrest Gump than anything resembling a master statesman.
Amirite? He is an f-ing moron. He is a daily danger to the future of mankind. And he’s not improving.
By the way, that was written by a Republican national security expert. I doubt I agree with him on much of anything else but at least we see the same Donald Trump which is reassuring.
You are not crazy and neither am I. Whew.
.