Opinion
Updated ,first published
Washington: It seems etymologically, metaphysically, geologically and ethically impossible that President Donald Trump could reach a new low. But he has.
Every Friday, when I’m planning my column, I find fresh evidence that the president is unfit for his office. He taunts his foes in crude, creepy ways and tries to tattoo his name on everything.
Late Thursday, a vile clip appeared on Truth Social, depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle cartoon, to the Tokens’ The Lion Sleeps Tonight. It was at the end of a video filled with baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The man who pushed the despicable “birther” conspiracy is still at it, using a racist meme from a far-right Pepe-the-Frog-loving acolyte.
Like many of Trump’s actions, it was shocking and predictable.
As The New York Times reported, Trump has a “history of making degrading remarks about people of colour, women and immigrants”, and the Obamas in particular, with “the White House, Labour Department and Homeland Security Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging” in his current term.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, offered a pathetic defence for our pathological president: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Well, Karoline, I think Americans do care that your boss is a racist and off his rocker.
“His presidency is enclosed in a bubble wrap of darkness and hatred and resentment,” said Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama’s chief of staff.
Once the White House realised the outrage was real, the post was deleted. Officials blamed a staffer, though you know Trump was in on it. On Wednesday, he said he does “retruth” conspiracy theories himself.
He went so far that even a few Republicans in Congress, looking down the barrel of the midterms, objected.
On the social platform X, Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate, called it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”.
Republican senator Katie Britt, who has been increasingly put off by some of Trump’s offensive actions, said on X, “this content was rightfully removed, should have never been posted to begin with, and is not who we are as a nation”.
Trump had a Dostoyevsky-esque moment Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, when he confessed that his ego would not let him lose the 2020 race.
“You know, they rigged the second election,” he said. “I had to win it, had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would have had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though.”
He was admitting that our ginned-up election integrity crisis was simply an exercise in bending the truth to his bottomless vanity. “His ego could not handle the fact that he lost, so he had to pretend there was a voting crisis,” David Axelrod said. “The world is still paying for that.”
(Trump also confessed to the religious gathering that he gets annoyed when Speaker Mike Johnson asks to pray before meals. Trump dryly noted, “I say, ‘Excuse me? We’re having lunch in the Oval.’”)
After obscenely slapping his name on everything from the Kennedy Centre to a gold card for rich aspiring immigrants to warships, and planning a gargantuan triumphal arch and an outsize White House ballroom as reflections of his bloated ego, Trump is now trying to strong-arm Congress into naming more things after him by holding congressionally approved funds hostage.
The administration tried extortion tactics on Chuck Schumer, threatening not to unfreeze billions for a new railroad tunnel under the Hudson River unless he helped rename Penn Station in New York and Washington Dulles International Airport after Trump.
Trump’s dragging his own name and America’s name in the muck. The word “Trump” is an epithet in many circles. But in a bizarre manifestation of insecurity, the president still wants to stamp his moniker everywhere, just as he did when he was a New York businessperson prone to bankruptcy.
Trump had another quintessential Trump moment Tuesday when he lambasted CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for not smiling as she asked him, in light of the latest release of Jeffrey Epstein filth, what he would say to the paedophile’s survivors “who feel like they haven’t gotten justice”.
He told her that it was time to move on — the latest deflection from the fact that he has never come clean about his association with the odious Epstein.
Like a shuddersome image of worms slithering from underneath a rock, a bunch of powerful and formerly respected people in America and beyond have been exposed by the Epstein files.
Many of the ultra-elite who insisted they did not know the truth about Epstein’s depravity have been unmasked as liars. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal wrote, prominent people from Noam Chomsky to Stanley Pottinger to Peter Mandelson to Michael Wolff “actively consoled him, cast him as a victim and in some cases offered advice on how to rehabilitate his image”.
And the shoes keep dropping. CNN reported on Friday that navy secretary John Phelan was listed as a passenger on Epstein’s private plane in 2006.
As the Times’ David Fahrenthold told CNN, the louche role of some tech billionaires in the Epstein scandal is particularly chilling because our lives in the coming years will be defined by these billionaires.
Once we saw the lords of the cloud as heroic — young geniuses who would improve our lives. Now, as Fahrenthold said, the personal failings, insecurities and midlife crises of these men are dictating the way they run their companies. We were, he said, “a little bit misplaced in sort of putting our hopes in these folks”.
They are not keeping hope alive.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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