For the last few months I’ve made a real effort to not see his face nor hear his voice.
If you’ve tried this, you know it is near impossible. I long ago turned off news alerts, I’m not on Twitter, I don’t watch cable ‘news’, and I don’t even receive newsletters via email anymore, but there he always is, on-camera every day (when he’s not golfing), often multiple times a day, and his face and/or name besmirch the front pages of every website from the NYT to WaPo to AP to The Atlantic to the Wall Street Journal.
He is inescapable.
Yesterday I did a lot of driving, which means I topped off my tank — gas is more than a dollar more per gallon than it was on Inauguration Day — and listened to some radio news. I’m not going to link to any of it. You can find it easily, and you’ve likely suffered watching/listening to most of it already, but can I just say: There is something desperately, desperately wrong with this man.
His daily rants about needing the ballroom, first for bigger parties and now for safety; first for $200M paid by him and private donors and now with a $1B appropriation from Congress.
The incessant bragging about acing a cognitive test, which he thinks is an IQ test.
The way he spoke about genital mutilation, his election results, the Nobel Peace Prize, and nuclear annihilation while in the Oval Office surrounded by young kids.
The way he continually deflects about the Iran war and gets away with deflecting.
He’s Jesus. He’s Doctor Jesus. He’s fighting with the Pope.
He posts random memes and statements on his Truth Social account all hours of the day (isn’t he working?) and night (isn’t he sleeping?).
And does no one think it was batshit crazy that he appeared completely nonplussed after the White House Correspondents Dinner shooter? That he held a press conference right away in which he went on and on about, yet again, his ballroom? That he did a 60 Minutes interview less than 24 hours later and was his normal, obstreperous self?
That the ballroom the ballroom the ballroom, which increasingly feels like a metaphor for his entire second presidency, is forefront — in addition to his obsession with acing repeated cognitive tests — when we are at war in the Middle East?
Where are the detailed, deeply sourced stories from the dozens of White House reporters, who are in the room and on-camera with him almost daily, about his mental acuity?
On my long drive home yesterday, I listened to a big portion of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s press conference.
Know who sounded presidential?
Marco.
Marco sounded presidential simply because he answered questions. He was not a combative, incoherently rambling, elderly man droning on and on about what kind of marble and windows and funding are suddenly needed for a now-$1B ballroom no one wants and no one asked for.
Coherence.
That is the low low bar for our next president.
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