Writing for The New Yorker Magazine Editor David Remnick squeezes into 900 words or so the finest description of the nightmare we are living through that I’ve read to date.
Titled “The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump” his essay depicts the madness that is drumpf by comparing him to perhaps his most identical historic doppelganger:
“What made the Emperor Nero tick, Suetonius writes in “Lives of the Caesars,” was “a longing for immortality and undying fame, though it was ill-regulated.” Many Romans were convinced that Nero was mentally unbalanced and that he had burned much of the imperial capital to the ground just to make room for the construction of the Domus Aurea, a gold-leaf-and-marble palace that stretched from the Palatine to the Esquiline Hill. At enormous venues around the city, he is said to have sung, danced, and played the water organ for many hours—but not before ordering the gates locked to insure that the house would remain full until after the final encore. Driven half mad by Nero’s antics, Romans feigned death or shimmied over the walls with ropes to escape.”
Lacking Nero’s musical talent, drumpf expresses his artistic side with Twitter, fancying himself, Remnick tells us, “the Hemingway of a hundred and forty characters.”
Despite the advice of well meaning friends, Remnick could not not follow Twitler on Twitter, and he condenses drumpf’s growing dementia into two finely crafted paragraphs for us…
“Trump joined Twitter in March, 2009. His early work in the medium provided telling glimpses of his many qualities. He was observant. (“I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.”) He used facts to curious ends. (“Windmills are the greatest threat in the US to both bald and golden eagles.”) He was concerned with personal appearance. (“Barney Frank looked disgusting—nipples protruding—in his blue shirt before Congress. Very very disrespectful.”) He was fastidious. (“Something very important, and indeed society changing, may come out of the Ebola epidemic that will be a very good thing: NO SHAKING HANDS!”) He was sensitive to comic insult. (“Amazing how the haters & losers keep tweeting the name ‘F*kface Von Clownstick’ like they are so original & like no one else is doing it.”) He was post-Freudian. (“It makes me feel so good to hit ‘sleazebags’ back—much better than seeing a psychiatrist (which I never have!).”)
In due course, Trump perfected his unique voice: the cockeyed neologisms and the fractured syntax, the emphatic punctuation, the Don Rickles-era exclamations (“Sad!”“Doesn’t have a clue!”“Dummy!”). Then he started dabbling in conspiracy fantasies: China’s climate “hoax,” President Obama’s Kenyan birth, “deep-state” enemies trying to do him in. Meanwhile, he kept an indulgent eye on the family business (“Everybody is raving about the Trump Home Mattress”) and, via retweeting, sought new friends, including anti-Muslim bigots, a PizzaGate-monger, and someone who goes by @WhiteGenocideTM.”
Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, further catalogues the madness of our Nero with a good description of the horrors revealed in Michael Wolff’s, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” — but I near the limit of fair use — you should click over and read yourself; you’ll not be disappointed.
The Senate finally did Nero in, put a stop to his madness, but as Grassley and Graham demonstrated to us today, we can have little hope for such wise intervention... and the maddening music plays on, our one rope tied off to the methodical Robert Mueller.
Remnick consisely summarizes our predicament:
“In the meantime, there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.”