Consoler in chief
by digby
Samantha Fuentes, who was shot in both legs during the Parkland assault, said she had felt no reassurance during a phone call from the president to her hospital room last week.
“He said he heard that I was a big fan of his, and then he said, ‘I’m a big fan of yours too.’ I’m pretty sure he made that up,” she said in an interview after being discharged from the hospital. “Talking to the president, I’ve never been so unimpressed by a person in my life. He didn’t make me feel better in the slightest.”
Ms. Fuentes, who was left with a piece of shrapnel lodged behind her right eye, said Mr. Trump had called the gunman a “sick puppy” and said “‘oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,’ like, seven times.”
I think what gets to me is that the first thing he said to her was that she’d heard she was a big fan of his. There is literally no occasion on this earth in which he doesn’t feel the need to stroke his own massive ego. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over the fact that tens of millions of Americans revere a man who cannot ever stop bragging about himself. Setting aside everything else that’s wrong with him, this is the one personality characteristic that sets my teeth so on edge I often have to leave the room or change the channel when I hear it.
I’m stunned that people feel affection for this cretinous boor. And yet as I watch the CPAC crowd ecstatically applaud his ridiculous, inane speech I’m reminded of something that Never Trump conservative Ben Howe said yesterday on MSNBC when asked how people feel about him. He said they love him more than ever but it’s not about policy or anything of substance. It’s about “liberal tears” by which he means that they love him because he offends people like me.
I guess everyone’s got a right to be motivated by whatever motivates them but that doesn’t strike me as a very meaningful reason to back Trump. It’s not worth the cost, it really isn’t. Liberals aren’t going anywhere. Just as conservatives will always be with us, so too will liberals. Egging on a man like Trump, who can’t even find the decency within to talk to someone in the midst of a tragedy without patting himself on the back, is ultimately soul destroying. Many of these people will look back on this time and be horrified that they degraded themselves for such a cruel, shallow, fleeting pleasure.
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