President Trump visited Puerto Rico a couple of days ago, and he managed to offend the devastated island, praising the government, and his own, handling of the situation.
Then, to make light of a heavy situation, he began tossing paper towels to the crowd, making a game of their suffering.
Here is video of this latest episode:
By now, we should all be wary of Trump's tiresome brand of what was recently referred to as "shock politics." This guy will always be the classless, clueless, pathetic loser that he claims others to be. He does not have it in him to be better than what he is, and what he is, frankly, is the face of American decadence and excess. He is modern America's answer to the pathetic Roman emperors that we think of when we think of Rome's fall from grace. To think of some of the incredible and inspiring leaders that this country once had, not so long ago, and to think of how low the bar has been lowered, is depressing and can lead one to sink to despair.
If it were just this incident alone, the one of a "leader" throwing paper towels to Puerto Ricans who have seen their island completely devastated, of course, it might not mean that much. There is a very real tragedy that is playing out in Puerto Rico, an island that was already facing an economic crisis, and which got hit by not one, but two massive, epic level hurricanes, within days of one another. The two storms combined proved just too much, and the last one, Maria, knocked out power for 100 percent of the island - that means literally everyone on the island - and now, even weeks after the last hurricane left, there is still far less than 10 percent of the island with power.
Yet, President Trump, a man who does not deserve that title if ever there was one, has made light of all of this suffering from the beginning. He responded quickly when Texas was hit by a hurricane, and he responded very quickly when Florida was hit by a hurricane, and took the suffering there seriously. He was in Las Vegas yesterday, just three days after the most serious mass shooting in modern American history.
But he only visited Puerto Rico nearly two weeks after the last hurricane left the island devastated, and that came after he made a mockery of the very concept of working together with Puerto Ricans. He refused to lift shipping restrictions, before caving after getting considerable flack for it. Then, he got in one of his infamous public spats with the mayor of San Juan. They went back and forth, and at one point criticized her leadership from the comfortable confines of a New Jersey golf course, where he was getting in a few rounds himself - something he adamantly said he would not do while on the job as president. There are video clips and images of the mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, in waist-high water, handing out necessities to local residents, and there was Trump, handing out a golf trophy and joking lightheartedly before the cameras for all the world to see, after having criticized Cruz for her supposed lack of leadership, according to him. One has to wonder what he took such exception to about her. Was it her leadership? Was it perhaps that she is a woman, one who he referred to as "nasty" in the past? Was it that her primary tongue is not English? One cannot help but speculate, but he clearly did not want to let his grudge with her go.
Here is a video clip of Trump during this past weekend, revealing just how seriously he takes the suffering of American citizens in Puerto Rico:
Naturally, his supporters cannot get enough of that kind of stuff. That is the kind of "leadership" that they evidently feel will make America great again.
Right.
During the press conference, Trump now infamously seemed to complain about the cost of the relief effort - something that he did not do with Texas or with Florida following the hurricane disasters there.
But those were red states, and Puerto Rico is not a state, and if it were, it would not lean in favor of Republicans - especially this particular Republican president. So Trump, ever mindful of who he has to be serious and respectful towards to serve his own selfish and narrow interests, and who he can afford to be his typical, asshole self towards, decided to make a spectacle of his treatment of Puerto Ricans.
And so, at the very moment when Puerto Ricans are in their hour of need, Trump seems to complain how they threw Trump's budget out of whack, even though he quickly tried to save face and suggest that he was happy to do it to save lives.
Here is a video clip of President Trump, sitting on his fat ass with his bizarre hair and his fake tan, showing his staggering classlessness and quite blatant disregard for the suffering of his fellow Americans in Puerto Rico:
Here is a video clip of President Trump, sitting on his fat ass with his bizarre hair and his fake tan, showing his staggering classlessness and quite blatant disregard for the suffering of his fellow Americans in Puerto Rico:
Then, of course, came the tossing of the paper towels.
What an imbecile, and what an embarrassment this man is. I am more embarrassed and ashamed with each passing day that we have to refer to "President Trump" whenever we talk about news coming out of the White House. He is a blemish on the face of America, and his stain will not soon be cleansed, but will darken America's legacy for many years to come.
I would have been extremely taken aback had Trump shown basic human decency and empathy in response to the devastation in Puerto Rico, because it would have been completely out of character for him. As you accurately point out, the fact of the matter is that he simply lacks those things, and he’s well past the age where there’s any hope that might change.
ReplyDeleteI’m convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that he couldn’t possibly care less about his supporters – predominantly poor or lower middle class white folks who’ve grown increasingly disaffected and disenfranchised. But with them, he at least makes a half-assed attempt to pantomime genuine concern, maintaining a charade of being their champion. His shtick is about as heartfelt as Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” circa 1992. But since his voters clearly aren’t the sharpest pencils in the box, it works. On the other hand it’s clear that, to his mind – and I use that word in the loosest possible sense – Puerto Ricans aren’t remotely worth the effort of pretending, ostensibly for the reasons you’ve cited here.
A lot of people – and I obviously don’t mean you – seem to be under the impression that he doesn’t represent this country’s true nature, that the last election was but a calamitous anomaly that shall soon be righted. Matt Taibbi offers a very different perspective in his excellent article, “The Madness of Donald Trump”, which I heartily recommend:
“We deserve Trump, though. God, do we deserve him. We Americans have some good qualities, too, don't get me wrong. But we're also a bloodthirsty Mr. Hyde nation that subsists on massacres and slave labor and leaves victims half-alive and crawling over deserts and jungles, while we sit stuffing ourselves on couches and blathering about our ‘American exceptionalism.’ We dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win ‘hearts and minds’ that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease – including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of view, of course.
ReplyDeleteNowadays we use flying robots and missiles to kill so many civilians and women and children in places like Mosul and Raqqa and Damadola, Pakistan, in our countless ongoing undeclared wars that the incidents scarcely make the news anymore. Our next innovation is ‘automation,’ AI-powered drones that can identify and shoot targets, so human beings don't have to pull triggers and feel bad anymore. If you want to look in our rearview, it's lynchings and race war and genocide all the way back, from Hispaniola to Jolo Island in the Philippines to Mendocino County, California, where we nearly wiped out the Yuki people once upon a time.
This is who we've always been, a nation of madmen and sociopaths, for whom murder is a line item, kept hidden via a long list of semantic self-deceptions, from ‘manifest destiny’ to ‘collateral damage.’ We're used to presidents being the soul of probity, kind Dads and struggling Atlases, humbled by the terrible responsibility, proof to ourselves of our goodness. Now, the mask of respectability is gone, and we feel sorry for ourselves, because the sickness is showing.
So much of the Trump phenomenon is about history. Fueling the divide between pro- and anti-Trump camps is exactly the fact that we've never had a real reckoning with either our terrible past or our similarly bloody present. The Trump movement culturally represents an absolute denial of our sins from slavery on – hence the intense reaction to the removal of Confederate statues, the bizarre paranoia about the Washington Monument being next, and so on. But #resistance is also a denial mechanism. It makes Trump the root of all evil, and is powered by an intense desire to not have to look at the ugliness, to go back to the way things were. We see this hideous clown in the White House and feel our dignity outraged, but when you really think about it, what should America's president look like?
Trump is no malfunction. He's a perfect representation of who, as a country, we are and always have been: an insane monster. Frankly, we're lucky he's not walking around using a child's femur as a toothpick.”
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ReplyDeleteI looked at that article, and indeed, it looks very good. In fact, I will be writing an entire blog entry about it at some point over the weekend, most likely. Matt Taibbi has some excellent stuff, as I have enjoyed some of his articles in the past, as well. Thanks for pointing it out to me!
ReplyDelete