Tim Kreider wrote this exceptional piece on Donald Trump. I really, really recommend reading it, because it captures the whole media failure of the past decade.
He starts by talking about the movie Psycho that starts as a crime thriller, and everyone - especially the investigator Arbogast - thinks they are in a crime story. In fact, they are in a horror/monster movie, and that tension is what makes Psycho one of the greatest films of all time.
Anyway.
Kreider's point is that journalists think that they are covering a politician, when in fact, they are covering an idiotic monster. This is the crux of it:
If you’re writing an op-ed or political analysis, or appearing as a guest on a podcast or discussion panel, you feel a professional obligation to try to come up with a novel insight, a “hot take”—ideally, something smarter than whatever all the other smart writers and speakers are saying that day. Something other than the obvious. The problem is, the object of so much of that labored ideation, Donald Trump, is obvious. He is not a complex figure of Nixonian contradictions. There are no depths to plumb; his biographers are going to have to pad out their books with a lot of background information and photo sections. He does not engage in subtle Machiavellian maneuvering; the only moves he knows are the playground rudiments: brag. Deny. Bully. Bribe. There’s nothing there for a smart person to figure out; they’re writing think pieces about a guy who doesn’t. His operating principles, the only rules you need to remember to understand absolutely everything he does, are simple:
1) He is a very stupid person who has never read or learned or ever been really interested in anything that didn't directly benefit him and (not unrelated)
2) He genuinely doesn't give a shit about anything other than himself - not his voters or his party or his allies in Congress or his "friends"/business associates or his own family. I have no doubt he would sell his daughter to a Saudi prince if he could negotiate a good price.
He also does not have what you would call a hidden agenda. His goals are as crude and basic as a flatworm's. He wants:
A) to make as much money as possible any way he can
B) to have everyone pay attention to him all the time
And - increasingly a priority the past few years -
C) to stay out of prison
(His conspicuous cognitive decline complicates all of the above, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental principles at work.)
The fallacy’s derivation notwithstanding, I’m not arguing that Donald Trump is psychotic; he’s not that interesting. He has the conscience of a toddler and the ethics of a tick but he isn’t mentally ill. He’s just a soft, spoiled, weak, mean rich kid who no one’s ever said no to and no one’s ever loved. He inhabits a sterile inner landscape of panicky, fragile vanity and unappeasable, suppurating resentment.
Josh Marshall once talked about Trump's Razor. The idea was based on Occam's Razor that - all evidence being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. With Trump's Razor, the stupidest and most venal explanation is usually the accurate one.
"Why doesn't Trump try and address Democratic attacks on affordability?"
Because he's a big dumb donkey.
"Why does he keep screwing up the situation with Iran?"
Because he's a big dumb donkey.
"Why does he harp on his vanity projects in DC as opposed to kitchen table issues?"
Big. Dumb. Donkey.
Weider continues (the format seems to work here):
“Sanewashing” is what critics call the journalistic tendency to try to describe and explain Trump in the language of conventional politics, presuming that it’s a media conspiracy to normalize his pathology and gaslight us all into thinking we’re overreacting. There may be some truth to this, but I think the explanation is more complicated; people who have spent their careers covering politics simply don’t have a vocabulary for what’s happening now; they’re like noir detectives in a slasher film. There’s no real precedent for someone who wields more power than any other individual in human history simply having no idea what he’s doing, or behaving with such naked, shameless self-interest. They can’t not report on what the President said or did that day; but it’s too terrifying, unimaginable, to acknowledge that the guy with access to the nuclear codes knows much less about geopolitics than your fourth-grader, or that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is way lower on his to-do list than building that bigass arch. Two days ago, after Trump dismissed the Iranian leadership, whom he’d earlier called “smart, strong people” as “scum,” I got to listen to a White House correspondent halfheartedly float the notion that the abrupt contradiction might’ve been a bargaining tactic, struggling to avoid the conclusion that nothing the President of the United States says really means anything much at all.
If we ever have a clear understanding of this era, we have to grapple with the fact that Trump is a reasonably stupid person who has one skill - selling "Donald Trump" - and we have tens of millions of Americans who are also dumb enough to believe in what he's selling. That latter point is not one Weider makes, but I think is important. If you're a political junkie, how do you reconcile your years of study and passion with the realization that millions of your fellow countrymen - this bedrock of democracy - are fucking just as stupid as Trump is?
Read the whole thing.
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