Time to wake up people. After a month recuperating from the grueling campaign Donald Trump is back in our faces.
The presidential election last month was a disappointment to say the least. And ever since then it’s felt as if the air has just been slowly leaking out of the opposition. Much of the mainstream media seems to be attempting to change course and curry favor with the new administration while Democratic officials appear to be in shock. In some ways it’s reminiscent of the days in the lead up to the Iraq war, with a quiet resignation taking the place of the febrile excitement that characterized the push to rally around the flag. People just seem enervated and spiritless. Sometimes it’s hard to remember why we fight when it all seems so futile.
Well, I think the opposition is about to get its mojo back. And that’s because for the last month all we saw (to the extent we were even paying attention which many of us couldn’t bring ourselves to do) was the news telling us about what Trump is doing, who he’s nominating and what he’s planning. And that’s all bad! In fact, it’s worse than many of us thought it would be.
But all that has a sense of unreality because Trump himself, for the first time in years has been scarce. It’s been reported that he was completely exhausted at the end of the campaign, which is to be expected for a man pushing 80 years old. So he was happy to spend the last month holding court down at Mar-a-Lago with his new best bud, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and basking in the adoration of his many fans and sycophants. He has not been in front of us and that absence has led to the sense of ennui among the opposition. Unless he’s out there I think many people understandably put him at the back of their minds and forget how crazy it is that such a man is going to be the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Again.
In the last few days he emerged from his Florida lair and flew to Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame. And it all came flooding back:
I don’t think anyone really knows why Trump shakes hands with Macron like that but it’s just weird. So is the fact that instead of Melania, he brought along his new BFF Elon Musk whom he apparently can’t be without even for a minute. At some point just before the ceremony, Musk walked up to Trump who was seated with the dignitaries, they had words and Trump, appearing annoyed pointed his finger at Musk who retreated back to the seat he was assigned.
Why is it that these scenes only happen when Donald Trump is on the world stage? He makes a fool of himself and the country everywhere he goes.
While it was a relief not to have to see or hear him for the last month it made it easy to chalk up the horror of his campaign rhetoric to the heat of the moment and his desire to win at any cost. His appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday put any such thoughts to rest. He’s just as angry, vengeful and batshit crazy as he was on the campaign trail.
In a wide ranging interview Trump defended his tariff scheme saying that he doesn’t believe tariffs cost the consumer more but he can’t guarantee that they won’t. Insufferably blathering on forever about his supposedly historic first term’s massive economic success he said:
I think they’re beautiful. It’s going to make us rich. We’re subsidizing Canada to the tune over $100 billion a year. We’re subsidizing Mexico for almost $300 billion. We shouldn’t be — why are we subsidizing these countries? If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state.
That is insane. The US is not subsiding Canada and Mexico and this trolling about them becoming a state is simply insulting. He told Welker that when he spoke with the president of Mexico on the phone and threatened her with a 25% tariff:
[W]ithin ten minutes after that phone call, we noticed that the people coming across the border, the southern border having to do with Mexico, there was at a trickle. Just a trickle. In fact, I called the border. See, unlike my opponent, I do call the border a lot. And I said, ‘How’s the border looking today?’ They said, ‘There’s nobody here.’ They couldn’t believe it.”
He “called the border?” Is there a central switchboard or something? And the “invasion” stopped within 10 minutes of his threat to impose tariffs? Were they all vaporized? That he could think anyone would believe such an absurd fantasy is delusional.
That was the tip of the iceberg. He said he thought the entire January 6th Committee should be put in jail. He insisted he would leave it up to his FBI nominee Kash Patel and Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi to ultimately decide whether his enemies should be prosecuted though, so I suppose we can always hope they weren’t watching TV on Sunday morning. He also says he will likely pardon all the January 6th insurrectionists unless it turns out some were actually Antifa or perhaps FBI plants.
He says he will end birthright citizenship on the first day, that American citizens of undocumented immigrants can be deported with them, that the Biden administration allowed 13,000 murders into the country when the statistic actually represents the past 40 years, and that he thinks RFK Jr should look into whether vaccines cause autism (they don’t.) There is so much more.
But just writing down that brief synopsis sane-washes him. The best thing you can do is either watch the whole interview, which is painful, or read the transcript which is simply mind-boggling. He literally makes no sense half the time and the rest of the time he’s filibustering, lying, bullying and deflecting. It’s not new but it’s worse than before.
He’s mentally a complete mess and it’s fair to speculate that there’s a reason that Elon Musk is stuck to his side like superglue these days. Is Musk is his Rasputin? Perhaps it would be smarter for Meet the Press to interview him instead of this man who has completely lost the thread.
Once the country sees him as president again I suspect that the disconsolate lethargy so many have been feeling will lift and we’ll see some energy return to the opposition. It had better. Hiding our heads in the sand isn’t going to make him go away.
Salon