Accusing others of everything he’s been accused of: lying, shirking responsibility, delaying responses.
Pure, vicious, lashing out alternating with whining. Drinking on and on.
Doling out punishment where he can (cutting funding for WHO), claiming credit where he can.
I am not exactly a paragon of moral courage, but I don’t think I could live with myself if my response in his position were as craven and inept as his. I’d want to go hide my face. Social death at a minimum.
Now a horrific bit of rhetoric “I’ll be authorizing the 50 governors to implement my reopening plan according to local conditions.”
Translation: you can’t break up with me, I break up with you. You’re not leaving and doing your own thing, I’m authorizing you too.
Now a long list of names of companies/CEOs, hospital associations etc. Awful, cringey public complicity engineering. Like tedious Oscar thank-you speeches that drone on, but here it’s a list of “people who have agreed to endorse my crime syndicate at gunpoint.”
You do NOT want to be on this list of droned names if you can avoid it, but you can’t risk saying no if asked, because conspicuous absence puts a target on your back.
A political horror movie playing out live right now. Mitch McConnell has engineered a ritual death of democracy.
This is not Fox vs CNN. Whatever channel you’re watching this on, the live, unedited, in-context posture is horrifying all by itself. You can’t blame filter bubbles for any response. Any trumpies who read this as a strong display of effective leadership are too far gone to return
I think we're at the stage of his confidence game where followers are looped in to continue justifying their prior commitment by overlooking their misgivings at each stage.
OK, so I'm not imagining that the tone around Trump nonsense is different today. I'm not actually watching, just watching the watchers, as it were. And today seems worse.