Donald Trump won’t have you believing for a second that the FBI busted down his door and found a pile of classified documents strewn across the floor, as if he were preparing an entry for his Burn Book. Instead of protecting himself against further incrimination or addressing the new picture proof that he was hoarding classified materials at his Florida home, Trump simply cannot move past the messy floor papers.
I wouldn’t really say that “Trump was utterly convinced that the path of Hurricane Dorian would extend to Alabama” – he’d heard it and repeated it, and once voiced he could never admit he was incorrect so had to go to the mat, including defacing the map. Whether he was “convinced” is not really relevant to how Trump’s brain works. He said it, it was wrong, he had to stick with it.
How they use props demonstrates the character of a politician. Can you imagine Biden doing a photo-op where he’s faking it by signing a blank piece of paper? Or claiming that a stack of papers represents real legislation if it’s also blank? It’s the difference between a con man and someone who can be relied on to tell the truth.
Sure all politicians use props. But the blank pages, the empty “weights”, the grandiosely tsarist way he’d show off signed legislation…it’s all so cartoonishly fake and self-promoting as to be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous. This is a very, very damaged person.
The best photo along these lines was taken at the beginning of his term, when a spokeswoman held a news conference behind tables stacked with what were supposed to be financial documents, indicating to what lengths Trump fake-went to put distance between himself and his financial interests.
Being a con man who fakes stuff is one thing. Being a baby who doesn’t really understand how to fake stuff, then throwing tantrums because the photo doesn’t represent the “arrangment” he would do—and in doing so admitting repeatedly that he had the stuff that they said he had after swearing he’d given it all back—is at a level that no other adult human will ever be.
That he isn’t able to comprehend this, at this point in his slide into oblivion, is just amazing every day. Embarrassing for the human race, but amazing.
