In recent weeks, the Trump centipede has been dropping so many shoes on an almost daily basis – sometimes several shoes within a 24-hour timespan – that a month-old assessment of an unhinged Trump and his hapless administration may seem to have been written an eternity ago.
But, except for some “minor” issues such as the leaking of some of the most sensitive national security information to the Russians and possible obstruction of justice (even possible impeachment), Trump is still the “fake and a fraud” he was a month ago.
That is how New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow characterized the 45th U.S. president in a Times column on April 20.
Reflecting on Trump’s “mounting reversals, failures and betrayals,” Blow comes to the above conclusion which for some is “affirmative reinforcement,” for others, a “devastating revelation.”
Copyright conventions prevent me from quoting the entire op-ed, which can and should be read here. However, here are a few of the most pertinent points, most of them addressed to those who placed their faith “in a phony” and who must now “feel most cheated and…most contrite” as Trump’s promises “are crashing to earth like a fleet of paper airplanes”:
• He oversold what he could deliver because he had no idea what would be required to deliver it, nor did he care. He told you what you wanted to hear so that he could get what he wanted to have. He played you for fools.
• That wall will not be paid for by Mexico, if in fact it is ever built. If it is built, it will likely look nothing like what Trump said it would look like.
• His repeal and replace of Obamacare flopped. That failure endangers his ability to deliver on major tax reform and massive infrastructure spending.
• Trump cares only about Trump, his brand and his image, his family and his fortune. Indeed, his personal philosophy as president might best be described as clan over country.
• Instead of being a grenade-throwing iconoclast bent on blowing up the D.C. establishment and the big-money power structures, he has stocked his inner circle with billionaires and bankers, and he has bent to the establishment.
• Trump sold himself as a populist only to line his own pockets. Trump built his entire reputation not as the champion of the common man, but by curating his image as a crude effigy of the cultural elite.
Blow cites evidence of how Trump’s image “among Americans as someone who keeps his promises has faded in the first two months of his presidency,” but is amazed by the almost inexplicable phenomenon that, even so, Trump voters show “very little buyer’s remorse.”
Could it be because “the stubborn human resistance to admitting a mistake should never be underestimated,” Blow wonders and commiserates with Trump’s ardent supporters:
“Admitting that Trump is failing, even when he is failing you and your family specifically, is an enormous pill to swallow. Acknowledging that your blindness, selfishness and fear compelled you to buy into a man who is selling you out may take more time.”
Perhaps, one month later, in view of the most recent Trump outrages and hopefully before “…the union crumble[s] into ashes and [Trump’s] Twitter tirades push us into an impulse war,” his most loyal supporters will begin to see the light.
Perhaps…
Lead image credit donkeyhotey.com
