Donald Trump’s Pantomime United Nations
The Board of Peace might be destined to fail, but it still threatens to undermine an international system in which the U.S. was once the linchpin.
- Ishaan Tharoor, New Yorker
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and some trope detritus from recent months...
Trump reserves his energies for his own interests and those of his allies. Everyone else — a majority of our fellow citizens — amounts either to an extra he occasionally brings onto the set for his performances or a villain he invokes to make himself the hero of the story.... the message of his diatribes is that the only thing he can deliver after 13 months in office is fear itself. It’s a tired act. A presidency built on reruns is rapidly losing its audience.
- E.J. Dionne Jr., New York Times
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“Trump’s shoe ritual is humiliation theater staged by a man who heard someone summarize one paragraph of a dominance-psychology book, treated it like the Rosetta Stone of dickishness, and decided to make it the operating system of the executive branch.”
-- JoJofrom Jerz
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Bret Stephens: Frank, your thoughts about President Trump’s interminable State of the Union speech?
Frank Bruni: It was the Trumpiest Trump I’d ever beheld — preposterously self-satisfied, preternaturally nasty and profoundly delusional. Most of what he boasted about was hallucinatory. I haven’t been that fully immersed in fantasy since the first “Avatar” movie. I kept thinking I should have worn 3-D glasses.
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The longest State of the Union in modern history is now over. Donald Trump held court in the House of Representatives and said little of substance, but substance wasn’t the point. This year, he intended to put on a show, with an array of guest stars and special appearances. He was happy because he was playing the roles he clearly loves: game-show host, ringmaster, emcee, beneficent granter of wishes—and, where the Democrats were concerned, a self-righteous inquisitor.
... Tonight, however, was not about communication—it was about showmanship. Almost every line was a cue for applause from obedient Republicans; they even gave Jared Kushner a standing ovation. Every few minutes, Trump told a story and reached out into the audience like the host of The Price Is Right, telling people to come on down.
... Trump managed to bait Representative Ilhan Omar into shouting at him, but for the most part, he seemed genuinely irritated that the Democrats sat through his show in stony silence.
As the whole business dragged on, the atmosphere started to seem less like a game show and more like the late-night Jerry Lewis telethons of the 1970s, in which a tired but pumped Lewis alternately griped at the audience, broke into maudlin emotion, or jumped up to welcome a new guest. The only thing Trump did not do was explain his policies—especially about war and peace—to Congress or the American people.
The largest American armada assembled since the second Gulf War is now encircling Iran. Trump never mentioned the buildup; instead he claimed that his one overriding interest was that Iran would forswear nuclear weapons forever. But the brief case he laid out was not for nonproliferation, but for regime change. The president claimed that Iran has killed 32,000 of its own people in recent crackdowns, a number far higher than most estimates. He made the accusation—rightly—that Iran is an odious regime and a supporter of terrorism. He vowed that they would never get a nuclear weapon.
And that was it. Back to the show!
But if some of the address was a game show, much of it was a bloody Grand Guignol theater of horror stories, almost all about immigrants preying on the helpless and the innocent. Trump led into these anecdotes by starting with an accusation that the Somali community of Minnesota was scamming the state. He followed up with stories of murder and mayhem, including the tale of a tractor trailer driven by someone in the country illegally—“let in by Joe Biden”—who hit a little girl. She and her father were, of course, in the audience.
..... Trump tonight went far beyond what even the most self-indulgent presidents would have envisioned. Beset by scandal, facing multiple defeats in America’s courts, and hitting levels of unpopularity that would make President Richard Nixon nod with empathy, he turned the State of the Union into a vulgar, populist carnival.
Trump made a great show of honoring a handful of U.S. military heroes. Meanwhile, thousands of young men and women are a world away, waiting for his orders to go to war. The president of the United States might have taken a moment tonight to tell their families why they’re out there, and what they’re supposed to do. But why bother? The show must go on.
- Tom Nichols, The Atlantic
