Russia Owns the POTUS Over Me
“At the heart of our country is the idea that Americans are empowered to choose who represents them in public office. That fundamental right of governance is under siege right now and the president of the United States is not doing anything about it.
“Even worse, he is denying the threat even exists. This is an alarming dereliction of duty. This is a betrayal of the oath of office he swore to uphold. This is treasonous behavior and grounds for impeachment.”
When a “former Republican and former spokesman for Breitbart News and Republicans in Congress” like Kurt Bardella forthrightly uses those terms, you know the end is nigh. And that came back in February, long before The Donald’s “Surrender Summit” in Helsinki earlier this month. (See Bardella’s “President Trump’s Russia denialism is grounds for impeachment” from USA Today.)
The responses to what many — including a steadily increasing number of highly respected mainstream figures — have come to view as treason has become savage, and that applies not just to written and spoken evaluations but to visual ones as well. Consider these two front pages from the New York Daily News:
“Open Treason,” New York Daily News, July 17, 2018, cover
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“Who’s Your Vladdy!” New York Daily News, July 17, 2018, cover
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And it’s not just the tabloids. Time magazine’s cover for the issue on this summit took the same tack, though in a much more sophisticated way:
Nancy Burson, Trump Morphs Into Putin, Time, July 30, 2018, cover
To get the full effect and watch the actual morph as an animated gif, go to “See It: Trump Morphs into Putin on Damning New Time Magazine Cover” and scroll down. “The artist is Nancy Burson,” this article points out.
I have never seen anything remotely resembling this level of visual critique of a sitting president in the mainstream media. Even the right-wing press response to Obama’s so-called “apology tour” pales in comparison, and that came solely from one side of the political spectrum.
Codependents”R”Us
One predictable effect of narcissistic personality disorder: It generates a vortex into which everyone within its sphere of influence gets sucked, resulting in their becoming irresistibly tuned to the needs and moods (and mood swings) of the narcissist, at the expense of attention to their own well-being. Think of it as an emotional and mental black hole, inhaling everything that comes within its orbit, exhaling only the vacuum at its core.
Donald Trump eating the mic, screenshot
That describes perfectly our current president, Donald J. Trump, his nuclear family, most of his business associates, his inner circle, and sundry others. In an earlier post I explored this phenomenon in a tongue-in-cheek manner (see “Ivanka Trump Tells All,” April 1, 2017). And, in a post that preceded it, I wrote this, in all seriousness:
… I feel that Trump has either sucked me into his brain or colonized mine. And residing there, in that mad jumble of random half-digested ideas and primitive urges, as it lurches forward toward any glimmer of the public approval it craves so addictively, feels like watching a slow-motion train wreck from inside the train. I hate to look, but I can’t bear to look away.
It has only gotten worse since then. The chaos that swirls around Trump constantly — political, social, economic, global, domestic, psychological, emotional — ensures that, at any given moment, he will stand at the epicenter of public attention.
Even so, the attention Trump attracts to himself comes in several distinct degrees. However reluctantly engrossed I find myself with his words and actions, they don’t seduce me, nor persuade me change anything I believe or do in order to accommodate him. Nor does his base have to adapt in any way to embrace him; they love him just as he is, which is just as they are: xenophobic, racist, homophobic, sexist, ignorant, and full of false piety. If they had a collective motto (beyond MAGA), it would read “I’m With Stupid.”
Though they appear lemming-like enough to follow The Donald over the cliff toward which he’s heading, it remains conceivable that something in the emerging legal narrative could break the spell. I don’t know exactly what, since even the financial havoc he’s wreaking on white poor and working-class Trumpites doesn’t faze them — participation in an abortion, perhaps. Even that might not suffice for the diehards, though it could prove the last straw for the more mainstream Republican voters who have tolerated him because he fulfills other desires of theirs.
But hell hath no fury like a codependent scorned. Presently unfolding we have the serial tell-all that, like Charles Dickens, former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen has begun to publish one chapter at a time. Imminent in the offing we have testimony from Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and others, named and as yet unnamed, presently under indictment, with more of same surely to come. Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House will drop in mid-August; advance hype promises an exposé to match Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury.
Meanwhile, step by step, Robert Mueller closes in on Trump and his family. The Donald has already made it clear that, to use Thomas Harris’s telling phrase, he’ll sail Jared Kushner off the back steps like a dead Easter chick as a scapegoat. Where will that leave daddy’s girl Ivanka? Hubby disowned by Daddy, her name-branded fashion line tanked by her connection to him, and with daddy publicly humiliating her by joking that he might veto the only initiative that would make her credible as a member of his administration?
Ivanka Trump (l), Donald Trump (center) Jared Kushner (r), White House, October 16, 2017. Photo by Saul Loeb. (Screenshot from Vanity Fair feature article, November 1, 2017.)
And what happens when Mueller gets his teeth into her involvement with the money laundering that has underpinned their real-estate empire, in which she’s up to her pretty little neck? Do you think she’s ready to go to jail for Daddy Dearest, or will she sing like a songbird?
Which brings us to Donny Jr., daily more deeply implicated in treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Though alone among his siblings in leaving the nest for a spell — briefly living out of his truck, partying, and bartending in Aspen after college — he rejoined the fold and became the daddy’s-boy counterpart to his younger sister. How will he handle his father’s distancing himself when the Mueller indictment comes down, as it almost certainly will?
(And that’s not to mention Eric, hardly the swiftest puppy in the litter, but perhaps not so dumb as to willingly become the fall guy …)
One-way loyalty doesn’t really qualify as loyalty. But that’s the only form of loyalty that Donald Trump, Sr. knows. If his offspring don’t know that yet, they’re about to learn it the hard way.
DJT the Useful Idiot
“Protestors Are Gaming Google Images So When You Search ‘Idiot,’ President Trump Appears,” reads the July 19, 2018 headline. “As of Wednesday night, nine of the first ten results on Google Images searches for ‘idiot’ were of or related to President Trump,” the story continues. See for yourself.
Google search results for “idiot,” screenshot, July 24, 2018
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Guardare al Vecchio
En route to his inevitable removal from office, Donald Trump continues to prove that there is absolutely nothing that he cannot coarsen, cheapen, and vulgarize in a New York minute, whether by word or deed. He stands as living proof that while beauty may be only skin deep, ugly goes all the way through.
Things had gotten so bad back in January that the Republic Party actually had an internal debate over whether POTUS described Haiti, and assorted African nations, as “shithole countries” or, instead, “shithouse countries.”
This struck me as the epitome of a distinction without a difference. Seems others felt that way as well, with the result that some wag projected “Shithole” onto the emolument-sucking Trump International Hotel in DC:
Trump International Hotel, Washington DC, “Shithole” projection, screenshot, January 14, 2018
(Click here for the animated version of the projection.)
And someone decided to take it further afield, to the San Francisco Federal Building, and expand on it succinctly:
San Francisco Federal Building, “Shithole President” projection, Twitter, screenshot, 1-13-18
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Trump: Le Mot Juste (1)
“Trump … is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.” Philip Roth in the New York Times, January 16, 2018.
Trump: Le Mot Juste (2)
I’ll close this post with a shout-out to my erstwhile editor at the New York Observer, Graydon Carter. Whenever I see a photo or video of Donald Trump speaking, making his characteristic (and often oddly bilateral) gestures, I can’t help but look at his hands. Which inevitably evoke Carter’s decades-old yet indelible summing up of Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” That’s not exactly image-making, but it surely qualifies as captioning of an extremely high order.
•
More indictments coming soon; make some popcorn and grab your remote.
•
(For an index of links to all posts in this series, click here.)
•
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SPJ Research Award 2014
Kremlingate: The Visuals (3)
“At the heart of our country is the idea that Americans are empowered to choose who represents them in public office. That fundamental right of governance is under siege right now and the president of the United States is not doing anything about it.
“Even worse, he is denying the threat even exists. This is an alarming dereliction of duty. This is a betrayal of the oath of office he swore to uphold. This is treasonous behavior and grounds for impeachment.”
When a “former Republican and former spokesman for Breitbart News and Republicans in Congress” like Kurt Bardella forthrightly uses those terms, you know the end is nigh. And that came back in February, long before The Donald’s “Surrender Summit” in Helsinki earlier this month. (See Bardella’s “President Trump’s Russia denialism is grounds for impeachment” from USA Today.)
The responses to what many — including a steadily increasing number of highly respected mainstream figures — have come to view as treason has become savage, and that applies not just to written and spoken evaluations but to visual ones as well. Consider these two front pages from the New York Daily News:
“Open Treason,” New York Daily News, July 17, 2018, cover
•
“Who’s Your Vladdy!” New York Daily News, July 17, 2018, cover
•
And it’s not just the tabloids. Time magazine’s cover for the issue on this summit took the same tack, though in a much more sophisticated way:
Nancy Burson, Trump Morphs Into Putin, Time, July 30, 2018, cover
To get the full effect and watch the actual morph as an animated gif, go to “See It: Trump Morphs into Putin on Damning New Time Magazine Cover” and scroll down. “The artist is Nancy Burson,” this article points out.
I have never seen anything remotely resembling this level of visual critique of a sitting president in the mainstream media. Even the right-wing press response to Obama’s so-called “apology tour” pales in comparison, and that came solely from one side of the political spectrum.
Codependents”R”Us
One predictable effect of narcissistic personality disorder: It generates a vortex into which everyone within its sphere of influence gets sucked, resulting in their becoming irresistibly tuned to the needs and moods (and mood swings) of the narcissist, at the expense of attention to their own well-being. Think of it as an emotional and mental black hole, inhaling everything that comes within its orbit, exhaling only the vacuum at its core.
Donald Trump eating the mic, screenshot
That describes perfectly our current president, Donald J. Trump, his nuclear family, most of his business associates, his inner circle, and sundry others. In an earlier post I explored this phenomenon in a tongue-in-cheek manner (see “Ivanka Trump Tells All,” April 1, 2017). And, in a post that preceded it, I wrote this, in all seriousness:
… I feel that Trump has either sucked me into his brain or colonized mine. And residing there, in that mad jumble of random half-digested ideas and primitive urges, as it lurches forward toward any glimmer of the public approval it craves so addictively, feels like watching a slow-motion train wreck from inside the train. I hate to look, but I can’t bear to look away.
It has only gotten worse since then. The chaos that swirls around Trump constantly — political, social, economic, global, domestic, psychological, emotional — ensures that, at any given moment, he will stand at the epicenter of public attention.
Though they appear lemming-like enough to follow The Donald over the cliff toward which he’s heading, it remains conceivable that something in the emerging legal narrative could break the spell. I don’t know exactly what, since even the financial havoc he’s wreaking on white poor and working-class Trumpites doesn’t faze them — participation in an abortion, perhaps. Even that might not suffice for the diehards, though it could prove the last straw for the more mainstream Republican voters who have tolerated him because he fulfills other desires of theirs.
Meanwhile, step by step, Robert Mueller closes in on Trump and his family. The Donald has already made it clear that, to use Thomas Harris’s telling phrase, he’ll sail Jared Kushner off the back steps like a dead Easter chick as a scapegoat. Where will that leave daddy’s girl Ivanka? Hubby disowned by Daddy, her name-branded fashion line tanked by her connection to him, and with daddy publicly humiliating her by joking that he might veto the only initiative that would make her credible as a member of his administration?
Ivanka Trump (l), Donald Trump (center) Jared Kushner (r), White House, October 16, 2017. Photo by Saul Loeb. (Screenshot from Vanity Fair feature article, November 1, 2017.)
And what happens when Mueller gets his teeth into her involvement with the money laundering that has underpinned their real-estate empire, in which she’s up to her pretty little neck? Do you think she’s ready to go to jail for Daddy Dearest, or will she sing like a songbird?
Which brings us to Donny Jr., daily more deeply implicated in treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Though alone among his siblings in leaving the nest for a spell — briefly living out of his truck, partying, and bartending in Aspen after college — he rejoined the fold and became the daddy’s-boy counterpart to his younger sister. How will he handle his father’s distancing himself when the Mueller indictment comes down, as it almost certainly will?
(And that’s not to mention Eric, hardly the swiftest puppy in the litter, but perhaps not so dumb as to willingly become the fall guy …)
One-way loyalty doesn’t really qualify as loyalty. But that’s the only form of loyalty that Donald Trump, Sr. knows. If his offspring don’t know that yet, they’re about to learn it the hard way.
DJT the Useful Idiot
“Protestors Are Gaming Google Images So When You Search ‘Idiot,’ President Trump Appears,” reads the July 19, 2018 headline. “As of Wednesday night, nine of the first ten results on Google Images searches for ‘idiot’ were of or related to President Trump,” the story continues. See for yourself.
Google search results for “idiot,” screenshot, July 24, 2018
•
Guardare al Vecchio
En route to his inevitable removal from office, Donald Trump continues to prove that there is absolutely nothing that he cannot coarsen, cheapen, and vulgarize in a New York minute, whether by word or deed. He stands as living proof that while beauty may be only skin deep, ugly goes all the way through.
Things had gotten so bad back in January that the Republic Party actually had an internal debate over whether POTUS described Haiti, and assorted African nations, as “shithole countries” or, instead, “shithouse countries.”
This struck me as the epitome of a distinction without a difference. Seems others felt that way as well, with the result that some wag projected “Shithole” onto the emolument-sucking Trump International Hotel in DC:
Trump International Hotel, Washington DC, “Shithole” projection, screenshot, January 14, 2018
(Click here for the animated version of the projection.)
And someone decided to take it further afield, to the San Francisco Federal Building, and expand on it succinctly:
San Francisco Federal Building, “Shithole President” projection, Twitter, screenshot, 1-13-18
•
Trump: Le Mot Juste (1)
“Trump … is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.” Philip Roth in the New York Times, January 16, 2018.
Trump: Le Mot Juste (2)
I’ll close this post with a shout-out to my erstwhile editor at the New York Observer, Graydon Carter. Whenever I see a photo or video of Donald Trump speaking, making his characteristic (and often oddly bilateral) gestures, I can’t help but look at his hands. Which inevitably evoke Carter’s decades-old yet indelible summing up of Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” That’s not exactly image-making, but it surely qualifies as captioning of an extremely high order.
•
More indictments coming soon; make some popcorn and grab your remote.
•
(For an index of links to all posts in this series, click here.)
•