Spinning madness into reason
Just yesterday, I argued that “so much of what Donald Trump does and says is not strategy so much as pathology. And feral instinct. His fanboys handle strategy.” That’s still true this morning. Among the reasons the press and some of the left’s own have trouble coming to grips with his lunacy is, as children of the Enlightenment, we put so much stock in reason. Unreason does not compute.* We all want to make a steak out of hash.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is perhaps the quickest and sharpest Democrats have to carry its message. Yet, here he is attempting to paint Donald Trump’s unhinged cats-and-dogs rant during this week’s debate as a distraction strategy. It may be instinct. Distraction may be someone else’s strategy. But it’s not Trump’s. He doesn’t think with his atrophied frontal lobes.
Piers Morgan’s guests did the same this week, offering what Trump needs to do differently and how he needs to reconfigure his campaign. He needs to fire his advisors and get new ones who will help him present himself as more presidential in coming days.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R) of Texas argued that the debate was easy for Trump to win, offering Republican counterfactuals that Trump should have (but didn’t) use to his advantage. Convincing independent’s “is very easy to do,” Crenshaw declared in Trumpian fashion. Trump just missed opportunities. Crenshaw might as easily have spun straw into gold as spin madness into rationality.
Podcaster Brian Taylor Cohen was having none of it.
“I’ve sat here listening to everyone say that Trump has to fire his advisors who steered him wrong on the debate stage. Does anybody ACTUALLY think that Trump took the advice of his advisors? He’s so easy to bait, you could dangle a cookie in front of a 4-year-old and they would have more discipline than Trump. This notion that his ADVISORS are responsible for what happened on that debate stage is a joke.”
Trump has never been more than what he is: a seven year-old in a 70-something body. If the press presented him as he is, if they reported what he said unfiltered, it would make their reporting and their reporters appear incoherent. It’s their job to make sense of the news. What do they do when there’s no sense to be made? You’re watching it live.
* When the New Age movement was in its heyday here, it was head-scratching to watch believers throw around terms like quantum and energies and frequencies to dress up magical thinking and medieval alchemy as cutting-edge science for the late 20th century.