The former Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell once described him as a "despicable human being" and this is one of the kinder things. McConnell was the one who allowed Trump to avoid impeachment after 6 January 2021 by the way
No doubt other presidents had their darker side too, nobody aspiring to become POTUS or reaching a position where that is a possibility, can be a saint, let's be honest. But Trump is unique. He has all the vices with not a single redeeming virtue. He is a walking, talking amalgam of every imaginable character flaw and perhaps some that are yet to be uncovered.
And yet, these are not, in themselves, the most worrying things for me. Putin probably shares a lot of them but he is not entirely deranged.
If it wasn’t for the $413 million gifted to him by his father, Trump would almost certainly have ended up either on skid row or working as a gofer in the mob. He is virtually unemployable. There are doubts that he can actually read written English. In one deposition hearing his attorney is desperate to prevent Trump from reading a contract out loud and Trump himself says he has forgotten his reading glasses so doesn't do it. Has anyone ever seen him wearing glasses?
Trump knows the world isn’t flat but is rich enough to insist that it is and more importantly, have his devotees do the same. This is how the alternative reality of Trump World is created and sustained.
The debate on how he succeeded has only just started, but some openly argue that most US voters are so gullible they actually believe what he says.
To remind us all, these are a few of the hundreds and hundreds of utterly bizarre things that have emerged from Trump's mind at press conferences and the like, with video evidence:
- That the new F35 stealth fighter jet can't be seen and is invisible to the naked eye.
- Injecting light or disinfectant into the human body can cure Covid-19
- The noise from wind turbines (windmills as he calls them) causes cancer
- The revolutionary army in 1776 America succeeded by taking over the airports
- That water is wet from the standpoint of ......water
There are entire YouTube channels devoted to recording his stupidity.
I expect Trump’s second term to proceed much like the first. Mostly in chaos and turmoil. His first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, described by Trump on his appointment as a “world-class player and dealmaker,” lasted 423 days before being fired via Twitter with Trump then claiming he was “as dumb as a rock.”
This will be the pattern from next January. Trump veers from selecting sycophants who will do his bidding and take the blame when it all goes wrong, and appointing safe pairs of hands who are then forced out for arguing against Trump’s more deranged ideas.
We know what the White House is like when he's in it. Miles Taylor, a member of the first Trump administration, writing in The New York Times in 2018 after he left, says his leadership style “is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective. Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back."
Stephanie Grisham, who served Trump from 2017 to 2021, in her book on the experience says:
"Working as Trump’s spokesperson was like sitting in a beautiful office while a sprinkler system pours water down on you every second and ruins everything on your desk — except in this case the water took the form of tweets and words and statements.
"I can give you endless metaphors to describe the Trump White House from a press person’s perspective — living in a house that was always on fire or in an insane asylum where you couldn’t tell the difference between the patients and the attendants or on a roller coaster that never stopped — but trust me, it was a hot mess 24/7. How people did the job without going crazy was a question in itself.
"Maybe none of us did. Trump, by the way, never understood that he usually was the one screwing up the messaging. Instead, he would complain to me, “I need a P. T. Barnum!” as his spokesman, just as he would always say, “I need a James Baker!” whenever he was complaining about his current chief of staff. By P. T. Barnum, I think he meant a communications whiz who could somehow charm reporters into writing whatever he wanted them to write. But maybe he just meant he wanted some expert con man. After all, P. T. Barnum’s most famous line was “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
She talks of the Trump White House where "everything was like a clown car on fire running at full speed into a warehouse full of fireworks."
Trump is a clown, a buffoon an ignoramus. He doesn’t read, has no attention span whatsoever. Tony Schwarz, the ghost writer of The Art of the Deal and other people who have interviewed him doubt he has ever read a single book in his entire life. He appears to have no intellectual curiosity about anything, and has to have complex reports distilled into a few coloured pictures Janet and John style.
He is as divisive internally as he is with the country as a whole. He is said to set people against each other in a divide-and-rule approach ("Steve Bannon says I should fire you").
His problem is that the US economy is actually in good shape with the Wall Street Journal quoting the IMF last month saying it 'leads the world' with good growth and low inflation. He can only ruin it - and he will.
