Being Donald Trump: a
president living in his own fantasy world
By Tim Naftali,
March 23, 2017
Thanks
to the energy of Time magazine's Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer and
the self-absorption of our President, someone opened the portal into Donald J.
Trump's brain -- like in the movie "Being John Malkovich" -- in the
form of what for the want of a better description is a stream of consciousness interview
with the Donald Trump.
When
Woodrow Wilson introduced the concept of the presidential press conference, he
stipulated that they should be off the record and that the president would not
be quoted directly. FDR was first to loosen
those restrictions somewhat, but it was not until the advent of live televised
press conferences in the 1950s that some spontaneity and much more transparency
were introduced into presidential utterances.
This
Trump interview is an argument for perhaps a little less spontaneity in
presidential statements, for the sanity of the Republic.
You
have to read it for yourself. Highlighting it would suggest a logic and flow
that it didn't have. I have read it, and here's what I can tell you: It is
crystal clear that Americans elected a man who is happily, though defensively,
living in his own reality.
All
presidents are, to a certain extent, defensive. And when a scandal looms like a
cloud over the White House, as the Russia hacking matter now does, presidents
are understandably even more defensive. Think of JFK after the Bay of Pigs,
Nixon during Watergate (though his last public speech as president was
unscripted and therefore very revealing of his hyperactive id), Reagan after
Iran Contra, Clinton about Whitewater and Lewinsky.
But
presidential efforts at self-explanation, especially at critical moments,
usually involve briefers, speechwriters, editors and the president himself is
usually accustomed to thinking in sentences, if not paragraphs. Nixon, Carter
and Reagan, for example, kept daily diaries.
The
Time interview reflects none of these things. It is Trump, raw, uncut,
unplugged and, some might conclude, a little unhinged. The public saw that only
a few times with Richard "I'm not a crook" Nixon. With this man, it
is almost a daily occurrence.
I can't
capture all of what the interview includes, but here's some of what it doesn't:
Remorse
for branding the Cruz family as accessories to the JFK assassination: nope, Trump
says he was just repeating something he read in a "newspaper story."
But the problem is not that apparently inside the Trump-portal the National
Enquirer is a newspaper worth a presidential citation -- let's not get too
elitist, OK?
The
problem is that Trump can seriously cite "a picture of Ted Cruz, his
father, and Lee Harvey Oswald, having breakfast" and not understand that
in not having rejected that canard in the first place, he is revealing himself
to have no common sense.
Embarrassment
for citing a nonexistent event in Sweden? Nope. He claims riots that occurred
in Sweden days after he made his statement confirms that he was prescient.
Indeed,
Trump thinks of himself some kind of
latter-day Nostradamus, a seer, who is driven by unfailing instinct. "I'm
a very instinctual person," he said, "but my instinct turns out to be
right." He repeatedly reminded Time
that he predicted that the Leave side would prevail in the Brexit vote.
Regret
for imprecise comments about the US commitment to defending its NATO allies?
Are you kidding? Trump wants us to know that when "Germany was over
here" -- Trump either forgot Chancellor Angela Merkel's name or he
believes that the entire country visited the Oval Office -- he told her/it that
"you have to pay your NATO bills, and they don't even dispute it,
OK?" The President does not seem to know that German Defense Minister
Ursula von der Leyen subsequently denied that Germany owed any money to NATO.
On the
wiretapping Trump Tower allegation, he simply can't retreat from the idea that
Obama was spying on him. The news that House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes may have sent him some kind of a
lifeline -- it didn't -- works its way through this interview, and apparently
the man’s brain, like some kind of earwig. Six times he mentioned the fact that
Nunes had a press conference.
This
trip through Trump’s brain might seem amusing if it did not reveal the enormous
cost of presidential self-absorption. He only mentioned Wednesday's terrorist
attack in London once -- and only as a distraction from the public paying
attention to the Nunes press conference on the wiretapping matter. "Now
probably obliterated [the import of Nunes' statement]," Trump said,
"by what's happened in London." You can see clearly what mattered
most to him.
On
social media, there is a lot of sharing of the Trump's final sentence
fragments. Focusing on those last comments is but a reminder that for this man
the fact he won legitimates every instinct he has ever had and he is not yet
prepared to be challenged, on practically anything. "Hey look, in the
meantime, I guess, I can't be doing so badly," he told all of us through
Time. "Because I'm president, and you're not."
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