Posted Wednesday morning, April 15, 2020.
President Trump cheerfully just saying stuff at a press briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, flanked by Attorney General William Barr (left) and Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator (right), March 22, 2020. Uncredited AP photo via the Daily Mail.
He just says stuff.
He says stuff he thinks makes himself look good to himself and to his base.
He says stuff to sell his brand of snake oil to the rubes. He’s a salesman, first and foremost, a dishonest one, and he’s always, always selling.
He says stuff to show off how smart, how tough, how clever, and how right and righteous he thinks he’s been---of course, he’s none of those things, not smart, not tough, not clever, and never right, except by accident or when someone has put the words in his mouth, and he’s never righteous, although he’s constantly self-righteous.
He says stuff just to hear himself say stuff. He’s his own favorite entertainer and orator, his own most enthusiastic audience.
He says stuff because he thinks it’s funny. Really. He thinks he’s funny. So do the mobs at his rallies. Mostly what he and they find funniest is the outrage of smarty-pants liberals and journalists who don’t find him the least bit funny. But every now and then, he is funny. He gets off a one-liner you just have to laugh at. He could have had a career as the M.C. in the kind of second-rate nightclubs in his casinos where B- and C-listers performed for the non-celebrities, small-timers, tourists, and retirees flush with money they’d won at the slots.
He says stuff to shut people up. He says it loudly and repeatedly to anyone who makes him feel dumb, less important in his own eyes, wrong, or just mad.
He says stuff because he’s desperate to get himself out of rhetorical dead ends he’s jibbered and jabbered, blithered and blabbed his way into.
He says stuff because he’s recognized he’s said something he shouldn’t have said or something he should have said but not in a way he meant to say it.
He says stuff that makes no sense because he leaves out the context, mixes up both syntax and order, can’t summon the facts he needs to back it up either because he never bothered to learn the facts or he simply forgot or he assumes he knows them because he assumes he knows everything. He interrupts his own train of thought routinely, going off on tangents, but then stumbling back to the point he was in the middle of making before he went off track, so that the completion of a thought happens minutes afterward, with a lot of word salad in between, and in order to understand what he meant by one thing he said, you have to connect it yourself to something else he said later.
He says stuff that’s incoherent, self-contradicting, bordering on gibberish and often crossing that border, for similar reasons and because he can’t summon the right words. Remember, once upon a time, he was a decent public speaker. That’s how he stayed in business even when his businesses were failing and why the New York media covered him incessantly---he was good for a quote---and why Howard Stern liked to have him on his show. He’s slipping mentally but like many people suffering from incipient dementia he isn’t aware of it. He thinks he’s still what he was.
He says stuff just to wake himself up. The job of presidenting bores him. He’d rather be playing golf or hosting dinners and weddings and parties at Mar-a-Lago.
He says stuff that’s stupid, crazy, inflammatory, and outrageous because he’s irresponsible and arrogant, undisciplined, and too lazy and vain to exercise the self-control necessary not just to sound like a President but like a decent, grown-up, and relatively sane human being.
But mainly he says stuff to cause the chaos, confusion, discord, disharmony, and the sound and fury in which he thrives.
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