Trump's Axios interview

[Dill]

(08-05-2020, 01:07 AM)jmccracky Wrote: Wow.....I'm 18 minutes into this. Its freaking bizarre. I keep pausing it to process what I am witnessing.  

The guy in charge, with the power to direct billions of dollars in resources to problems besetting the nation--or not--doesn't seem to understand what's happening in a nation torn apart by protests as it experiences the worst pandemic in 100 years. He has no idea what causes the protests, or the pandemic, to spread, and so he wants to send in the feds and open the schools--if maybe that will get him elected.

For Trump, the question of John Lewis' legacy doesn't recall a history of civil rights struggle and accomplishment, but only a memory of the guy who never came to Trump's inauguration. The question, of course, was about what others would think of Lewis, posterity, his place in history.  But the guy didn't come to Trump's State of the Union speeches either, right, so how's THAT going down in history? Lewis wasn't the only civil rights leader anyway. There were "others." Besides Trump did more for "the blacks." Everyone knows that. So how is Trump going down in history. Shouldn't everyone really be contemplating that?

So if you are the kind of person who thinks of history as a kind of road map that shows you where you have come from, including all the wrong turns and dead ends, so you have some idea of how to negotiate those bends in the road of a still unmapped future, you have to be disturbed that the guy with the most power to influence that future, for better or worse, doesn't have much of a map. The only stops on it are places like his inauguration, some executive orders banning immigration, a really big military parade in France, and those "huge" summits with Kim. There's no Civil War, WW 2, Marshall Plan, Civil Rights struggle, wealth gap or global warming. No obligation to/responsibility for the WHOLE country.

The most deer-in-the-headlights moments came during the discussion of COVID-19.  "In some of the categories we are lower than 'the world'. . . . Look here is the United States . . . You don't know that . . . But you don't know that. . . I have a very good relationship with the country . . . ."  He just doesn't know how to compare data or manage information--how to read it or present it to others. He cannot look at graphs and see that other countries have successfully managed the virus while the US has let it get out of control. THE FREEKIN' PRESIDENT OF THE US is like an 8th grader trying give a speech he worked up 15 minutes before class, using torn out sheets of paper from his notebook rather than a PPT or even the blackboard. This is what Mattis, Bolton, and Kelly were telling us happens in daily briefings. The information doesn't ever get in to Trump's brain really. So it's "garbage out" when he talks about the continually improving pandemic situation. The presentation is ad hoc, all smoke.

It is slowly dawning over more and more people (especially millions of parents and teachers set to return to school) that the bus doesn't drive itself, and it matters greatly whether the driver knows how to drive.