He spouts off against the elites, then stuffs his administration with billionaires, several from the very banks he vilified. He rails about big government, then pulls a big-government move with Carrier, the air-conditioner manufacturer.
.. He claims (against all evidence) to respect women, then recruits a labor secretary who once defended the pulchritudinous ads for his fast-food chain by saying: “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American.”
.. He wants the whole world to see how many important people hanker to work for him. So they show the world, posing for pictures with him and fanning out on TV to proclaim their ardor and aptitude.
.. Mitt Romney .. he appealed to the president-elect in part because he was “a camera-ready option to represent the country around the globe.”
The tweet revenge of Donald Trump
The Trump modus operandi is compelling. He deliberately ignores the way things are supposed to be done. He shows up at polite society’s party and starts smashing the nice plates. It’s appalling, but ordinary people are thrilled to bits. Why should their country be tippy-toeing around China all the time? China deserves a poke in the eye!
.. The more that Mr. Trump’s manoeuvres offend the media, the more popular he gets. When he bullied Carrier to keep several hundred jobs in the United States, opinion-leaders of all stripes were dismayed. They warned that the deal could undermine the rule of law and do permanent damage to American capitalism. But working people loved it. Even Democratic voters loved it. They want him to use his power to push businesses around.
.. Mr. Trump is the perfect leader for the Twitter age. The point of Twitter is not to have rational discussions or intelligent exchanges of different points of view. The point of Twitter is to slag your enemies and retweet your friends. The point is to rally your supporters and build a following of millions by confirming their biases and giving them a constant stream of reasons to detest the other side. It’s not just one side that’s guilty of this. All sides are.
.. Whenever he feels there’s someone in the world who might not be paying attention to him, all he needs to do is tweet. The length – 140 characters – is ideally suited to his attention span and to the complexity and depth of his ideas.
.. No need for a sustained argument. The whole idea is to emote and entertain. The greatest social-media communicator of the age turns out to be a 70-year-old orange-haired guy who can’t even use a computer.
Paul Ryan’s Dangerous Silence on Donald Trump
Other Republicans are looking to the speaker of the House for guidance on when to confront the president-elect and when to let his craziness go unchecked.
.. when he was asked about Trump’s reckless — and wholly unsubstantiated — tweet that millions of Americans had voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.
.. “I’m not really focused on these things,” Ryan said, all too blithely. Then: “I have no knowledge of such things. It doesn’t matter to me.”
.. Doesn’t matter? No, I guess a president-elect’s effort to undermine Americans’ confidence in our political system — and, beyond that, his attachment to conspiracy theories — aren’t pressing concerns.
.. Ryan’s answer was marginally better than the one given on the ABC News show “This Week” by Mike Pence, who described Trump’s tweets as “refreshing.”
.. They’re alarmed by Trump, and frequently aghast at him, but they want enough peace to steer him in the directions they desire and to minimize the damage over all.
Donald Trump is actually a fascist
All this seemingly erratic behavior can be explained — if not justified — by thinking of Trump as a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world.
.. The game has several names: “Corporate statism” is one.
.. It means, roughly, combining the power of the state with the power of corporations.
.. Just to be clear: If I’m correct that Trump actually has a governing philosophy, that’s a bad thing, not a good thing. If he actually has principles to guide him through those famous swamps he plans to drain, that’s alarming, not reassuring. Bad principles are not a good substitute for no principles. Four or eight years of bad principles may make no principles look pretty good.