He raged for nearly 90 minutes in Dallas a week and a half ago. For Twitter all you need is a keypad and a spleen.īut Trump seems even more splenetic of late. Formally written letters follow rules and demand etiquette. It’s a format so abridged and casual that botched grammar isn’t necessarily equated with stupidity it could simply be the consequence of haste or convenience. You can feel the spittle several time zones away.Īnd Twitter suits him not just because of its immediacy and reach. On Twitter in particular, Trump doesn’t exclaim he expectorates. No snob would thrash and flail his way through sentences the way he does. No snob would be so lavish with schoolyard slurs. No snob would spell so sloppily or use capital letters with such abandon. They help prevent him from being tagged as one of the elitists he rails against. They’re a semantic complement to his flouting of tradition and junking of norms. And while his verbal errors and infelicities are largely accidental, they’re hardly incidental. That’s principally because he mis communicates like no president before him. It has been the case from the start that Trump communicates like no president before him. I can’t believe that.” Trust me, President Trump. “Can you believe we’ve been doing this for three years? Can you believe it? I’ve been a politician for three years. We are finally again, and we’ve been doing it now for almost three years.” Doing what? Again how? This wasn’t a speech it was a puzzle. He added: “The do-nothing Democrats have betrayed our country, and that great betrayal is over. It doesn’t play well because it was perfect.” Give the president a thesaurus and a therapist, though not necessarily in that order. How about this guy? He makes up my conversation, which was perfect. “Crazy Nancy,” he said at a recent rally in Dallas, where his epic self-pity and all-consuming grudges took center stage. Trump is petrified as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff close in. They’re merely nervous when my dog approaches. The screeching of the raccoons in Central Park is more coherent and less feral. But then Trump seems to have placed his dictionary on the same unreachable shelf where his conscience gathers dust.Īs the impeachment inquiry intensifies and the evidence against him accumulates, his vocabulary becomes more perverse - in its estrangement from reality, in its desperation, in its broken-record repetitiveness, in its sheer clumsiness. “Perfect” is not an insistence that a foreign government smear a political rival when you’re just emerging from a two-year investigation into whether you had another foreign government do precisely that. “Perfect” is Frank Sinatra singing “ Summer Wind.” “Perfect” is Nadia Comaneci on the uneven bars at the 1976 Olympics. Too harsh? I direct you to “perfect.” That is how, over and over, he has characterized his telephone conversation with the president of Ukraine, and seldom has a term existed in such tension with truth.
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