More and more, he’s starting to seem genuinely cognitively impaired to me. Didn’t his dad die from Alzheimers?
This will end well, Bikers for Trump plan to provide “wall of meat” security at Inauguration Ceremony.
As if that situation wasn’t volatile enough, Trump tweeted positively about it, pretty much egging them on and giving his implied consent. The only question remaining is, will he issue them armbands?
Should work out well.
Saw Rachael Maddow’s bemused coverage of this last night. You gotta admit that “wall of meat” is not only an amusing phrase but also sounds delicious. Also, the Altamont bikers were part of the Hell’s Angels were they not? Not all bikers are in “gangs”.
Absolutely. There are plenty of great people out there riding. The problem isn’t that they’re bikers, the problem is that they’re going into the Inauguration thinking that they have a mission to provide security and take on protesters, and that they have implied consent from the new President to do so. You could replace Bikers for Trump with Plumbers for Trump, CPAs for Trump or Mimes for Trump and have the exact same issue, a large group of loosely organized people who feel like they have a mandate to “keep the peace”, which many will interpret as a license to start shit with anyone they define as “out of line”. It’s a shitshow waiting to happen.
I think you just summed up the entire Trump presidency.
That’s correct. And to be clear, I’m going to go out on a limb and say the 1969 Altamont Hell’s Angels were likely a million times more badass and “One Percenter” than a bunch of old retired guys on weekend Harleys.
At the same time, we have police, secret service, and even Washington DC security. I’m a lot more confident in their abilities to keep the peace than a bunch of overzealous bikers.
Ha! Pretty much.
Trump’s immediate response should have been to Tweet out something like “I’m so glad that Bikers for Trump will be attending the Inauguration! I value your support always, and look forward to seeing you there. I hope you all have a great time in D.C., but please leave the security to the D.C. Metro police and the federal agencies whose job it is to ensure we all have a safe and happy Inaugural weekend. I would hate to see any of my supporters get into trouble with the law for taking matters into their own hands. Thanks again for your support!”
Of course that is the response of a mature and sane individual who is concerned about the safety and security of all the people planning to attend his Inauguration as President of the United States. Instead we have Donald J. Trump, who is treating his election to the most prestigious and honored public office in the country as if he just won a WWE battle royale cage fight.
Lost in Trumpslation: An Interview with Bérengère Viennot (LARB)
But come January 20, the head that will count will be the Donald’s. And yet, as the title of your piece announces, Trump presents “un casse-tête inédit et désolant,” or an unprecedented and depressing headache. Could you explain why?
Well, as I said, you have to be able to get into someone’s mind in order to translate his speech and reformulate it into your own language. Trump is not easy to translate, first of all, because, most of the time, when he speaks he seems not to know quite where he’s going. In my essay, I took the example of the interview he gave to The New York Times. He seems to hang onto a word in the question, or to a word that pops into his mind, repeating it over and over again. He shapes his thought around it and, sometimes, succeeds in giving part of an answer — often the same answer: namely, that he won the election. Trump seems to go from point A (the question) to point B (himself, most of the time) with no real logic. It’s as if he had thematic clouds in his head that he would pick from with no need of a logical thread to link them.
That is not at all the way I am used to thinking, which, in itself, would not matter so much, as I very often have to translate things that are unfamiliar to me. But here’s the other problem with Trump: even once you’ve understood his point (or lack thereof), you must still express it in your own language. You realize, at that moment, that you have written something very unpleasant to read. Trump’s vocabulary is limited, his syntax is broken; he repeats the same phrases over and over, forcing the translator to follow suit. If she does not, she betrays the spirit of the original piece. The translator has to translate the content and the style. So that is what I do, and reading Trump in French, which is a very structured and logical language, reveals the poor quality of his language and, consequently, of his thought.
They need to follow his facial expressions and gestures more.
I believe nonverbal communication is well outside the scope of the kind of translation work that Viennot does, but I totally see your point. (Also, her readers do in theory have access to the nonverbal stuff.)
Count me in the group of people who feel like DJT is actually saying something when I can actually hear him speaking, particularly when there’s video, despite my personal opinions about him and his platform. But a split second later as I try to parse what I just heard, it unfailingly turns out to be meaningless and I have no idea what was actually said. But when I’m reading a DJT transcript, it tends to be complete garbage right from the start.
He Has This Deep Fear That He Is Not a Legitimate President (POLITICO)
Kruse: Michael, in your book, and other places, too, he has talked about how much he enjoys fighting. And he certainly fought a lot of people throughout the campaign, and he hasn’t stopped fighting. From Meryl Streep to the intelligence community, he’s still picking fights. Do you think he is going to pick fights with leaders of other countries? In other words, is there any indication that he would be able to separate the interests of the country now from his own personal pique?
Blair: Zero.
O’Brien: Absolutely not. There will be no divide there. The whole thing has been a vanity show from the second he ran to the Republican Convention. I think we can expect to see the same on Inauguration Day. He’s been unable to find a clean division between his own emotional needs and his own insecurities and simply being a healthy, strategically committed leader who wants to parse through good policy options and a wide series of public statements about the direction in which he’ll take the country.
Blair: There’s a fusion, I think, of his childhood, an emphasis on being combative, being killers—as his dad famously instructed his boys to be—but also, I think, his own competitive nature, and then his grasp in early adulthood that being a bully and really putting it to other people and not backing down often works. He also had his church background telling him that being a success was the most important thing and that got fused with the sort of ‘You want a crowd to show up, start a fight,’ P.T. Barnum-type thing early on in his career. And then Roy Cohn as a mentor, a guy who stood for cold-eye calculus about how bullying people works. And you put all of those pieces together, that he’s been doing this his whole life, and I don’t see a single reason for him to back down. He’s going to go full blast ahead with that.
Fifty years of empirical research in personality psychology have resulted in a scientific consensus regarding the most basic dimensions of human variability. There are countless ways to differentiate one person from the next, but psychological scientists have settled on a relatively simple taxonomy, known widely as the Big Five:
Extroversion: gregariousness, social dominance, enthusiasm, reward-seeking behavior
Neuroticism: anxiety, emotional instability, depressive tendencies, negative emotions
Conscientiousness: industriousness, discipline, rule abidance, organization
Agreeableness: warmth, care for others, altruism, compassion, modesty
Openness: curiosity, unconventionality, imagination, receptivity to new ideas
Most people score near the middle on any given dimension, but some score toward one pole or the other. Research decisively shows that higher scores on extroversion are associated with greater happiness and broader social connections, higher scores on conscientiousness predict greater success in school and at work, and higher scores on agreeableness are associated with deeper relationships. By contrast, higher scores on neuroticism are always bad, having proved to be a risk factor for unhappiness, dysfunctional relationships, and mental-health problems. From adolescence through midlife, many people tend to become more conscientious and agreeable, and less neurotic, but these changes are typically slight: The Big Five personality traits are pretty stable across a person’s lifetime.
The psychologists Steven J. Rubenzer and Thomas R. Faschingbauer, in conjunction with about 120 historians and other experts, have rated all the former U.S. presidents, going back to George Washington, on all five of the trait dimensions. George W. Bush comes out as especially high on extroversion and low on openness to experience—a highly enthusiastic and outgoing social actor who tends to be incurious and intellectually rigid. Barack Obama is relatively introverted, at least for a politician, and almost preternaturally low on neuroticism—emotionally calm and dispassionate, perhaps to a fault.
Across his lifetime, Donald Trump has exhibited a trait profile that you would not expect of a U.S. president: sky-high extroversion combined with off-the-chart low agreeableness. This is my own judgment, of course, but I believe that a great majority of people who observe Trump would agree. There is nothing especially subtle about trait attributions. We are not talking here about deep, unconscious processes or clinical diagnoses. As social actors, our performances are out there for everyone to see.
And 4 years and some change later… Literally what Trump will be doing.
I was poking fun at ravenight, actually :) I think Trump is a total tool, and won’t defend him in any way until I see his universal healthcare plan put into action without hitting the nuke button the next day.
So… Alex Jones gets a spot soon right?