"Mr. Trump seems to have a real fear of boredom. Even at his age he is restless; when there’s peace and quiet he seems to become anxious, as if he can’t tolerate normality. He shows little faith in quiet progress, as in: Set good policy in place and hope it succeeds inch by inch. Instead he creates drama or a crisis, arouses a counterforce, attacks this new enemy, experiences fear—will my luck hold?—defeats the new enemy, feels relief, relaxes. Then, restless again and on the prowl, he creates new drama . . .
That is a real weakness in life, needing drama. It will find you on its own. When you need it you’re always generating new stakes, and in a presidency they’re often high, and when you fail that is some big failure."
- Wall Street Journal
"Trump is willing to undermine and destroy any institution, law, norm or ideal cherished by Americans in a bonfire of his vanities"
- Maureen Dowd (the anti-theatricalism quite buried there, via the reference - probably mediated through Tom Wolfe - to the proto-Puritan Savoranola and his bonfire of the vanities). I haven't read the whole piece though
Ah she's used the pun before.
"Donald Trump refused to leave the World Cup stage. He clung to the trophy as though it belonged to him. The players celebrated around him while the cameras searched in vain for an adult willing — or able — to explain to the president of the United States that the ceremony wasn’t about him.
It happened in plain sight. It was real — yet it remains almost impossible to believe.
The psychological fragility on display was breathtaking. It was narcissism stripped of disguise, vanity without inhibition, neediness elevated to statecraft. Historians will study the footage because it captures, in a handful of seconds, something speeches and books can’t: a man so consumed by the hunger for adulation that he can’t surrender the spotlight, even when the world’s greatest athletes have earned it.
There are images that explain an era better than any speech. This was one of them.
Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico and Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, looked less like honored guests than reluctant hostages, unwilling participants in a spectacle they neither chose nor could escape. They trailed as far behind Donald Trump as protocol and dignity would allow, instinctively placing distance between themselves and the strange gravity of the moment, as though proximity itself carried risk.
Trump shuffled ahead, slightly stooped, moving with the slow, inexorable certainty of a lava flow — impossible to hurry, impossible to redirect, consuming every ounce of attention in its path. It was a procession of malice wrapped in vanity, instability wrapped in power, all bundled into a slovenly suit and Florsheim shoes straining around the swollen ankles of the American Nero.
There was something almost Shakespearean in the grotesquery of it. The leader of the world’s most powerful democracy behaved not as a statesman, but as an aging monarch who no longer distinguishes between the state and himself. Every trophy is his trophy. Every triumph is his triumph. Every stage is his stage.
Roald Dahl gave the world Veruca Salt, the spoiled child who believed every prize belonged in her hands. Lewis Carroll imagined the Mad Hatter, imprisoned inside his own absurdity. Donald Trump has accomplished something neither author attempted. He has fused both characters into a single living performance while occupying the presidency of the United States.
Then came the boos.
The stadium rejected him. It mocked him. It reviled him.
It no longer mattered.
There was a time when applause and condemnation occupied different chambers of the human heart. There was a time when shame retained the power to restrain conduct and public humiliation could provoke reflection. Donald Trump crossed that frontier years ago. He no longer distinguishes between admiration and contempt because each satisfies the same craving. To be cheered or jeered is irrelevant so long as the lights remain fixed upon him. The crowd’s hatred has become merely another form of attention, and attention is the only currency he has ever truly valued.
President Norma Desmond has reached his final cruising altitude.
There’s no longer a Donald Trump who performs for an audience. There’s only Trump performing for Trump. The man has been consumed by the character. The character has been devoured by the caricature.
The cartoon has swallowed the man.
He now exists as self-parody made flesh — a photographic joke requiring no caption, a punchline that no longer needs a setup because his mere appearance completes it. Satire has become obsolete. Exaggeration has become impossible. Reality has outrun parody.
This is the final destination of narcissism. It isn’t merely vanity. It’s the obliteration of the self beneath an invented persona until nothing authentic remains. The individual disappears inside the performance. The mask fuses to the face. Every moment becomes an audition. Every stage becomes compulsory. Every camera becomes indispensable.
The tragedy isn’t simply personal. It’s national.
The presidency was created to embody constitutional restraint, republican virtue, and public service. Donald Trump has transformed it into an instrument of perpetual self-validation. He mistakes visibility for leadership, celebrity for greatness, dominance for strength, and spectacle for achievement. The office no longer elevates the man. The man diminishes the office.
History has a merciless eye for such moments.
Long after today’s arguments have dissolved into the fog of forgotten headlines, this image will remain. A lonely, grasping figure refusing to release a trophy he didn’t win. World champions celebrating around him while he inserts himself into their triumph. Foreign leaders hanging back as though they had wandered unwillingly into someone else’s fever dream. A president incapable of understanding that the greatest office in the world confers responsibility, not ownership.
The footage will endure because it distilled an entire political age into a handful of unforgettable minutes. It required no commentary. It needed no narration. The picture explained itself.
The ceremony belonged to the champions.
Only one man believed it belonged to him.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yet another reminder of the impotence of eloquence
Even as the argument of the piece (images are the language of today) is expressed using the very linear, sustained-thought mode that has been rendered irrelevant and ineffectual
As if finely wrought tropes and subtle thinking could defeat the pathological vulgarity of Trump
It's just comfort food for the educated, isn't it?
Shocking how a single monster ego could cancel and collapse everything
And that the pushback - if it does come finally - is more to do with gas prices and the cost of living, than principles values standards and all those norms one unwittingly depended on and probably felt free to scoff at or disregard...
Still, surely those who mocked the liberals's "over-reactions" and dire warnings, who talked of Trump Derangement Disorder, are having some second thoughts now...
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