Donald Trump Won’t Leave Us Alone

How and when does Trump end?

.. Trump doesn’t end. Whether he’s the nominee or not, moves into the White House or consoles himself at Mar-a-Lago, he’ll never shut up and never slink off — not after the convention, not after Election Day, no matter how resounding his defeat, no matter how grotesque his path there.

.. It’s because he’s a showman, not a statesman, a point he copped to on Monday in one of his most revealing remarks yet.

“I can be presidential, but if I was presidential I would only have — about 20 percent of you would be here, because it would be boring as hell,” he told a crowd in Superior, Wis.

.. Those stunts and screeds will continue, because Trump is an attention junkie who has become accustomed to the highest doses imaginable of his beloved drug. He’ll say what he must and do what it takes for his fix.

.. Journalists gave news consumers precisely what they demonstrated that they wanted. This is too often omitted from critiques of Trump’s media dominance, which comes at a time when news organizations can more quickly monitor precisely which stories and interviews are being watched and read.

.. From my seat, most of the Trump coverage was negative: the Mexican “rapists,” the Muslim ban, the blood coming out of Megyn Kelly’s “wherever,” the mocking of John McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, the boasts about his penis, the shrugging about the Ku Klux Klan. These tempests could — and should — have done as much to quash Trump as to elevate him

Trump Shows His Inner Rabbit

In a dramatic highlight of the last Republican debate, Trump accused the Bush administration of deliberately deceiving the American public about the invasion. (“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none.”) It was a potentially historic moment: a top Republican candidate for president attempts to lead his party into a frank reappraisal of the Bush-Cheney administration’s inherent honesty.

Here we are, one week later: “I’m not talking about lying. … Nobody really knows why we went into Iraq.”

Meanwhile, reporters continue to ask Trump supporters what the attraction is. And his fans say that he tells it like it is.

What to Tell Donald Trump

We should tell Trump that the man who constantly invokes his popularity is the one who worries that he’s unlovable. The man who refers incessantly to his riches is the one who frets that he’s worthless.

Is there a needier billionaire on the planet?

.. We should tell him that, and we should add that he has practically collaborated with the enemy by playing into a narrative of Muslim persecution and a grand war between civilizations.

He has given the Islamic State and other barbarians a piece of propaganda as big as any of his resorts and as shimmering as any of his office towers.

.. So Ted Cruz reacts to the San Bernardino massacre by visiting a firing range and promising such extensive bombing of the Middle East that he’ll find out “if sand can glow in the dark.”

 

Addicted to Distraction

“The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention,” Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” “We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.”

.. My initial commitment was to limit my online life to checking email just three times a day: When I woke up, at lunchtime and before I went home at the end of the day. On the first day, I succeeded until midmorning, and then completely broke down. I was like a sugar addict trying to resist a cupcake while working in a bakery.

.. What I failed to take into account was that new emails would download into my inbox while I wrote my own. None of them required an immediate reply, and yet I found it impossible to resist peeking at the first new message that carried an enticing subject line. And the second. And the third.

In a matter of moments, I was back in a self-reinforcing cycle.

.. During those first few days, I did suffer withdrawal pangs, most of all the hunger to call up Google and search for an answer to some question that arose.

.. Finally, I feel committed now to taking at least one digital-free vacation a year. I have the rare freedom to take several weeks off at a time, but I have learned that even one week offline can be deeply restorative.