Trump, The Man and the Image
His words increasingly signify his confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.
The result ain’t oratory. Still, the words entertain, wound, outrage, delight, bemuse, stupefy. More than a year into Trump’s candidacy, they also signify the speaker’s confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.
.. The praise Trump elicits from voters for his “authenticity,” for “telling it like it is,” elides the fact that he is committed to hiding his human side from the world and, for that matter, from himself. “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see,” he confessed to one of his biographers, Michael D’Antonio.
.. A man in touch with his emotions would recognize that in regard to this circumstance his emotions are mixed.
One remarkable revelation was an account published online, in March, by Stephanie Cegielski, the former communications director of the Make America Great Again super pac. Cegielski told of being informed by colleagues, in March, 2015, that Trump would be running for President, with the goal of polling at, say, twelve per cent, and finishing second in the delegate count. (“A protest candidacy.”)
.. At some point, it will hit his followers that they’ve been sold out by a huckster who coveted their votes only for the sake of his colossal self-regard. And that, all along, he had nothing real to offer.