Nearly every day, the president tweets several outrageous statements that would have been considered wildly unpresidential until Donald Trump demonstrated otherwise. The content changes somewhat, but their form does not. There’s venom. There’s a vindictive kind of humor, along with insecurity, resentment, and a craving for attention and approval. Enemies are mocked and attacked and sometimes given nicknames. Once or twice every couple of weeks, he announces some unorthodox policy he claims to be enacting, but it usually comes to nothing because no one in the administration or executive branch had been informed and no one follows up, or because the president reverses course for no clear reason and claims to want the opposite. The waves rise, crest, and crash, followed by the next swell, and then the next.
The president goes on an international trip. He tweets from the plane. He makes a fool of himself. He insults some of our allies and kisses up to some of our international opponents or rivals (Putin, Kim Jong Un). The allies flatter him to his face as a way of mollifying him but make fun of him behind his back while doing their best to sidestep him on setting priorities and making policy.
Most liberal pundits write the same column over and over again, spicing up the same old arguments and assertions with whatever details have popped up in the past few days. Center-right Never Trump columnists do exactly the same thing. “Here is the latest evidence that Trump is corrupt/ignorant/racist/unfit,” week after week, month after month, with only the tiniest variations. Yet Trump remains president through it all. He does what he does, and the critics say what they say, and nothing changes.
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