Donald Trump, our first millennial president

Everybody — but especially the olds — loves to hate on millennials. We’re lazy, entitled, emotionally stunted, spendthrift, narcissistic, promiscuous snowflakes.

.. But if Bill Clinton was once our “first black president,” surely Trump can be our first millennial president.

.. despite the fact that as of Monday — more than a month after Hurricane Maria hit — four-fifths of the island still has no power. A quarter lacks clean drinking water.

.. This is hardly the first time Trump has insisted upon, or even invented, accolades to celebrate his own mediocrity. He claimed to have received environmental awards that never existed. His golf clubs displayed fake Time magazine covers featuring his face.

.. Millennial Trump overshares constantly on social media, sometimes even Instagramming his food. He live-tweets his favorite TV show instead of getting real work done. Although no longer a minor, he still requires constant helicopter parenting from the grown-ups around him, as if he’s in an adult day care.

.. he can’t tolerate speech that hurts his feewings . Words that offend him are “unfair,” “frankly disgusting,” “bad for the country.” He then tries every weapon available to shut down those words.

.. Trump personally demanded that the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate media outlets he dislikes and suggested that networks should have their broadcast licenses revoked. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in subsequent days a Morning Consult poll found that half of Republicans agreed with him.

Huh. It’s almost as if 19-year-olds aren’t actually the country’s greatest threat to the First Amendment.

.. Trump casts himself as a perpetual victim, the uncontested winner of the oppression Olympics.

.. As with millennials, Trump has taken on loads of debt — though to be fair, that seems to bring much more joy to Trump than to 20- and 30-somethings. Maybe because real millennials expect to pay it back.

.. Morally lax, prone to revisionist history and obsessed with identity politics, Trump exemplifies all that is annoying and wrong with my generation — at least according to every Lena-Dunham-despising crank who once walked uphill both ways.

.. Like any true millennial, Trump refused to pay his dues in an industry where he had no experience. Instead, on the strength of his personal brand alone, he declared himself entitled to the top job. Self-promotion leading to immediate professional promotion?

 

Why is Donald Trump so bad at the bully pulpit?

Why is Trump so bad with words? Blame reality television, Twitter and political talk shows.

Trump “cannot give a speech without his hosts distancing themselves from his rhetoric.”
.. Consider Trump’s three biggest rhetorical own-goals over the past week.
  1. His “fire and fury” statement on North Korea forced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to try to talk the United States off a ledge.
  2. Trump’s belated response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ejection of U.S. diplomats was even worse:
  3.  Trump attempted to address the violence triggered by white nationalists in Charlottesville with a namby-pamby statement that blamed “many sides” for the violence.
    • It is odd that a president who claimed to despise political correctness with respect to Islamic terrorists suddenly chose to be circumspect in describing homegrown neo-Nazi terrorists.
    • Trump was more willing to call his country’s intelligence community Nazis than he was to call actual Nazis Nazis.

.. Running for office repeatedly tends to hone one’s rhetorical instincts. At a minimum, most professional politicians learn the do’s and don’ts of political rhetoric.

.. Trump’s political education has different roots. He has learned the art of political rhetoric from three sources:

  1. reality television,
  2. Twitter and
  3. “the shows.”

His miscues this past week can be traced to the pathologies inherent in each of these arenas.

..  I have seen just enough of the “Real Housewives” franchise to know that this genre thrives on next-level drama. No one wants to watch conflicts being resolved; they want to watch conflicts spiral out of control. So it is with Trump and North Korea. He never sees the value in de-escalating anything, and North Korea is no exception. Calm resolution is not in the grammar of reality television.

.. I am pretty familiar with Twitter, and the thing about that medium is that it is drenched in sarcasm. It is a necessary rhetorical tic to thrive in that place. The problem is that while sarcasm might work on political Twitter, it rarely works in politics off Twitter.

.. Finally, there are the political talk shows. If there is one thing Trump has learned from that genre, it is the “both sides” hot take. Pundits are so adept at blaming a political conflict on both sides that the #bothsides hashtag is omnipresent on political Twitter.

.. These people are bigots. They are hate-filled. This is not just a protest where things, unfortunately, got violent. Violence sits at the heart of their warped belief system.

.. substantive problems with Trump’s reaction to each of these three crises

  • .. He seems overly eager to escalate tensions with North Korea and
  • steadfastly does not want to call out Vladimir Putin or white nationalists by name.
.. his limited grasp of the bully pulpit. He ad-libbed all these rhetorical miscues. In doing so, he relied on tropes he had learned from reality television, social media and political talk shows.
Those tropes might work for a reality-show hack desperate to engage in self-promotion. They do not work for the president of the United States.

Bobby Sticks It to Trump

our Russia-besotted president does share some traits with Dostoyevsky’s spiraling protagonist, Rodion Raskolnikov.

.. Both men are naifs who arrive and think they have the right to transgress. Both are endlessly fascinating psychological studies: self-regarding, with Napoleon-style grandiosity, and self-incriminating. Both are consumed with chaotic, feverish thoughts as they are pursued by a relentless, suspicious lawman.

.. We are in for an epic clash between two septuagenarians who both came from wealthy New York families and attended Ivy League schools but couldn’t be more different — the flamboyant flimflam man and the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.

.. One has been called America’s straightest arrow. One disdains self-promotion and avoids the press. One married his sweetheart from school days. One was a decorated Marine in Vietnam. One counts patience, humility and honesty as the virtues he lives by and likes to say “You’re only as good as your word.”

.. Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio says the president has been lying reflexively since he was a kid bragging about home runs he didn’t hit. He gets warped satisfaction from making up stuff, like those calls from the head of the Boy Scouts and the president of Mexico that the White House just admitted never happened.

Back when he was a Page Six playboy, Trump even invented two P.R. guys to play on the phone with reporters, so he could boast about himself three times as much, including fictitious claims of dating Carla Bruni and being hit on by Madonna.

He is never deterred by the fact that he can be easily caught. But considering he survived the “Access Hollywood” video, it’s no wonder he has a distorted sense of what is an existential threat.

A White House adviser told me recently about how scary Mueller’s dream team is, and how Jared Kushner should be nervous. Every time Mueller adds a legal celebrity to his crew, the music gets cued for an “Ocean’s Eleven” or “Dirty Dozen” array of talent.

  • One lawyer helped destroy the New York City mafia;
  • another helped bring down Nixon;
  • another tackled Enron;
  • others are experts on foreign bribery and witness-flipping.

As GQ’s Jay Willis wrote, “If these people were coming for you over a parking ticket, you’d be thinking about liquidating your life savings.”

.. Trump does not yet seem to fathom that Mueller is empowered in a way no one else is to look at all sorts of things. This isn’t some tiff over a casino, where Trump can publicly berate opposing counsel and draw him into a public spat. Mueller won’t take the bait.

The Scaramucci Show: New Communications Director Unloads Nasty Attack on White House Colleagues to Opposition Party

Move over President Donald Trump. You are yesterday’s news. It seems like this is now The Anthony Scaramucci Show. And Trump better get used to it.

in a rambling rant that was so outrageous and discordant that reporters wondered whether Scaramucci drunk-dialed Lizza, was drunk with power, or, revealing he was unqualified for his communications director job, did not know how to smoothly go on and off the record — like Trump skillfully did recently with three New York Times reporters — so that such inflammatory comments do not reflect badly on his boss.

.. It is also interesting that Scaramucci had nothing bad to say about globalists Jared Kushner, Gary Cohn, and Dina Powell during his rant.

.. His comments about Bannon also sound like someone falsely hating in another person what he secretly may hate about himself.

.. Since accepting the communications director job, Scaramucci has promoted his book from the White House podium. Despite having told students not to brag about Harvard, Scaramucci has name-checked his alma mater nearly every chance he gets, acting like someone who needs to reference “Harvard” to try to prove to others that he is not in over his head and actually belongs. Scaramucci, the ultimate self-promoter and brand-builder, also ran the “SALT” conference, which is a wanna-be Davos-style conference that brings together globalists and members of the permanent political class from the D.C. swamp to hobnob and self-perpetuate.

.. Legacy media reporters have also mocked Scaramucci for vowing to crack down on leakers given that he was reportedly known as the “go-to” leaker for those seeking info from Mitt Romney’s and Jeb Bush’s campaigns.

..  Stephanie Ruhle, one of the savviest anchors around when it comes to Wall Street and someone who obviously knows even more about the financial industry than she publicly reveals, said on Thursday evening that Scaramucci’s comments may make it more difficult for him to sell off his hedge fund firm to Chinese investors, which is a deal he must seal and get approval for in order for Scaramucci to officially work in the White House.

If Scaramucci is tarnishing his brand at the moment when it needs to be the most spotless and pristine, then imagine the disregard he will have for Trump’s brand, which Trump has built up over his lifetime. If Trump thinks that Scaramucci’s outbursts will damage Trump’s brand for the long haul, he may see Scaramucci as a gamble that is not worth taking.