On the one hand,many of the pro-Trump thinkers seem to believe that for all his distinctive vices, Trump would probably end up governing largely as a conventional Republican.
.. Reagan-era conservatism had its time and failed, these Trump-supporting intellectuals suggest, and the time has come to roll the dice, to embrace a change agent even if he seems gross and seedy and bigoted, because the alternative is staying on a fatal course.
.. Others take the more modest view that Trump is correct on particular issues (immigration, foreign policy, the importance of the nation-state) where the bipartisan consensus is often wrong, and his candidacy is a chance to vote against an elite worldview that desperately needs to be chastened and rebuked.
.. If Trump gets restrained by his advisers, he’ll be a typical Republican, this combination would go, and if he stays true to his own essential Trumpiness, he’ll be the scourge our rotten system needs.
.. What remains is this question: Can Donald Trump actually execute the basic duties of the presidency? Is there any way that his administration won’t be a flaming train wreck from the start? Is there any possibility that he’ll be levelheaded in a crisis — be it another 9/11 or financial meltdown
.. Trump’s zest for self-sabotage, his wild swings, his inability to delegate or take advice, are not mere flaws; they are defining characteristics. The burdens of the presidency will leave him permanently maddened, perpetually undone.
.. Months ago, I worried that Trump was too authoritarian to be entrusted with the presidency. That worry has receded a bit, because authoritarianism requires a ruthless sort of competence that Trump cannot attain.
The Problem with Trump Isn’t His Debating Skills
what was really outside any norm of decency was what he thought even after you had dutifully distilled away the incoherence and the manic improvisations. Talking, again, about President Obama’s birth certificate, he displayed not only the usual pathological inability to admit to an error—any error, ever—but an underlying racism so pervasive that it can’t help express itself even when trying to pass as something else.
.. Yet Trump continued last night his self-congratulations for compelling the President to do this, along with the grotesquely racist notion that it was “good for him” (i.e., for the President). It slowly dawned on the listener that this was all of a piece with the rest of Trump’s racial attitudes: he believes that, as a rich white man, he had a right to stop and frisk the President of the United States and demand that the uppity black man show him his papers. Stop-and-frisk isn’t just a form of policing for Trump; it’s a whole way of life.
.. It was of a line with his equally bizarre notion that owning a country club that doesn’t actively discriminate against black people is not a minimal requirement of law but a positive achievement of the owner.
.. His cruelty to Alicia Machado was unleavened by any apparent respect for her as a human being in any role other than as an envelope of flesh—an attitude he only doubled down on the following morning by complaining that she presented what he saw as an obvious problem as a reigning Miss Universe: she had gained “a massive amount of weight” (by Trump standards, that is). Again, this wasn’t a problem of how he chose to present his beliefs; the problem is with the beliefs. This wasn’t a question of preparation. It was that the things he actually believes are themselves repellent even when coherently presented. This was not a bad performance. This is a bad man.
The Building Blocks of Learning
Sixteen hundred years ago, Augustine argued that the essence of a good life is choosing the right things to love and loving them well.
But over the past several centuries our models of human behavior have amputated love. Hobbes and other philosophers argued that society is a machine driven by selfishness. Enlightenment philosophers emphasized reason over emotion. Contemporary social science was built on the idea that we’re self-interested, calculating creatures.
This philosophical shift has caused unimaginable harm, especially in the sphere of education.
.. Basically what’s happened over the past generation is that we’ve put enormous effort into improving the academic piece of schooling, but progress has been nil because the students’ emotional foundation has been collapsing under our feet.
.. while some teachers are good at raising their students’ test scores, other teachers are really good at improving their students’ school engagement. Teachers in the first group are amply rewarded these days, but teachers who motivate their students to show up every day and throw themselves into school life may not even realize how good they are, because emotional engagement is not something we measure and stress.
There’s No Such Thing as Nice Trump
On Tuesday night, celebrating the end of the primaries, he had also used a prompter, eyes darting back and forth between the transparent screens as he enunciated each canned, lifeless word. The speeches were boring, and Trump—the consummate entertainer, skilled at taking the pulse of a crowd—looked miserable giving them.
.. He announced he was unveiling an addendum to his famous slogan: “Make America great again—for everyone!”
.. Wilson had little patience for the idea that Trump might still turn it around. “He’s 70 years old. He’s a narcissistic sociopath. He’s not going to change,” he said. “There is no better version of Donald Trump, no mindful, serious, presidential version, only the reality-TV, con-man, pro-wrestling dipshit Donald Trump.”
.. For Trump’s most loyal supporters, however, his unfiltered persona is nothing to apologize for, nothing that requires toning down; it’s a big part of what drew them to him in the first place. Over and over they tell me: He’s not a politician. He’s not politically correct. He speaks his mind. What happens to that appeal if Trump starts acting like a normal, boring, inoffensive candidate?
.. The core narrative of Trump’s speeches continues to be the story of his march to victory in the primaries. The way he came down the escalator a year ago, the way he proved the pundits wrong, the way he almost won Iowa and triumphed in New Hampshire and barreled through the rest of the states, even though the establishment tried to rig the system against him.
.. Dwight D. Eisenhower, great guy—you know, he won the Second World War,” Trump proclaimed. “Though I think other people had something to do with it, in all fairness. But he was given a lot of credit for winning the Second World War; he runs for president—I beat him. Richard Nixon, we beat Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan, who we love—we beat Ronald Reagan. We beat Bush, we beat everybody.”
Had he just maligned as losers some of the historic greats of the Republican Party? He had. And the crowd was whooping and whistling, their cheers echoing in the hangar’s massive space, and Trump was having fun.