Narcissistic Donald Trump talks incoherent and violent rubbish
Pretty soon someone in Britain will declare for Donald Trump. Among the talking heads and commentators someone will emerge prepared to say that the golf-obsessed poltroon should be the next President of the United States. This autumn there will be money to be made (not a lot, but some) being a Trump supporter in the British media. TV and radio thrives on arguments, and producers will be hungry for someone to defend the Republican nominee. But as Alex Massie put it on Twitter: “Imagine being that person…”
And even as I write those words – Republican nominee – I still struggle to process the reality that the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan has ended up with Trump as its candidate for the highest office in the free world.
Listen to Trump talk. It is such obviously incoherent rubbish. It is embarrassing to watch an allegedly grown man witter on, getting sidetracked, praising himself, shouting, running around in rhetorical circles and threatening violence so often that he must have profound psychological issues related to an inability to take criticism.
On the Morning Joe show on MSNBC the panellists were similarly flummoxed by his latest outbursts. They simply ran footage of Trump’s reaction to watching the Democrats’ convention on television. Here is Trump:
“You know what, I wanted to, I wanted to hit some of the speakers so hard. I was all set, and then I got a call from a highly respected Governor ‘how’s it going Donald?’ I said ‘well, its going well, but they’re really saying bad things about me’. I was going to hit them to hard. I was going to hit one guy in particular a very little guy, I was going to hit this guy so hard his head would spin he wouldn’t know what happened, and he came out of nowhere ‘they make deals with me, will you help me with this, would you make this deal and solve the problem’. I solved the problem I did a great job. I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard their heads would spin, they’d never recover.”
Again, it’s embarrassing. Presidents and leaders don’t talk like that. But Trump wasn’t done:
“I said ‘I’m going to hit this one, hit that one’ and they said, Donald, don’t bother, nobody cares. There’s only one person you need to go after, and that’s crooked Hillary Clinton. I said to them yeah, but, they said some terrible things and I don’t like it, and they have an audience, and I don’t like it, and they tell lies, and I don’t like it. I wanna, I have to. Don’t punch down, use the expression, don’t punch down. Now, I don’t know if he’s right, but I promised to say that De Blasio is the worst Mayor in the country.”
As Joe Scarborough said after the clips had run: what is so extraordinary is the way in which for Trump everything is about Trump and his feuds and dislikes, rather than about the voters worrying about jobs or education. Trump is a narcissist with a bad temper. Surely Americans aren’t going to let this man get his hands on nuclear weapons? Surely not?