May 2018 Archives

Dear America,

It's been awhile since I've written to you, America, and the reason is that everything seems to be a function of the Trump presidency in one way or another, and there are only so many pejoratives in my vocabulary.  Yet, no matter how much I write about Trump's deficiencies, I always sign off unsatisfied.  I have commented on his lack of intelligence, but that really doesn't cover it, does it.  I have written about his lack of depth, his arrogance, his vacuous-ness, his lack of compassion or empathy, his egocentricity, and on and on, but none of them seem to cover it all.  But yesterday I was reading something about Brooklyn, NY and how it has been "gentrified," and then I saw Trump's letter to Kim Jong-un and it hit me.  The problem with the Trump presidency is that it has been "jejufied."  That's an improvised word that was used in some government documents relative to rejuvenating cities and neighborhoods in particular.  I think I saw it for the first time in a critical essay written about government jargon, the point being that government bureaucrats often strive to complicate the simple and mundane as if doing so can make it profound, and thus make them profound thinkers.  And since we are talking about government when we talk about Donald Trump these days, a little jargon might serve.  Donald Trump is jejune, and he has jejufied the presidency.  That's the real problem.

Our president is a perpetual sophomore.  If you read his letter to Kim you were exposed to its sophomoric tone--its assertions seemingly intended to be morally instructive while evincing an air of irrefutability to be specific.  When Trump characterized the tone of the North Korean governments public pronouncements as hostile--essentially provocative--as a justification for withdrawing from the talks that he himself helped to schedule, he wasn't making an argument that something said was provocative; he was positing that claim as a fact.  I, for one, never heard any provocative remarks on the news, but maybe there were some that I missed; however, the only bellicose remarks that reached me were Trump's in the form, once again, of "my button is bigger than yours, so watch out."  And then there was the general tone of the letter Trump wrote to Kim.  He has the vocabulary of a sophomore as well as the syntactical instincts of one.  Donald Trump is a playground bully, and though he has learned to be what in his perception seems to be "presidential," he remains the apotheosis of the worst elements of the American image abroad: crass, unsophisticated, tasteless, conceited and culturally arrogant.

None of that is really of monumental concern in isolation from its historical impact.  So what if our president is a dolt.  It isn't the first time we have had a dolt in the White House...not even the first time this century, and its only eighteen-and-a-half years old.  But when a man carrying something as universally lethal as what they call the "nuclear football"--the brief case chained to the arm of a secret service agent who's never more than a few feet from the president containing the launch codes for our nuclear arsenal of long range missiles--is that childish and petulant, there is real danger there.   Then put him in the same room with another kindergartener gesturing at his own nuclear football as if to say, go ahead, I dare you, and you've got a Molotov cocktail lacking nothing but a match.    So, though "jejune" is a harmless quality in most contexts--a synonym for nothing more ominous than unappealing juvenility--in international politics...in nuclear diplomacy, it is menacing, so it's noteworthy for more than its application to any one individual, thought Donald Trump is probably the poster-boy for it on the world scene today.

It's not so much that our president is incapable of writing anything more profound than what he released to the world on his thoughts, or even that his thoughts themselves were so lacking in profundity, that bothers me.  It's that he thinks his thoughts are profound, and thus weighty with merit.  Donald Trump is jejune; to put it another way, our president is an insolent child.  In that context, jejune is much more than a benign descriptor of your adolescent son and his friends.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Unfortunately, all that Rudy Giuliani's untoward statement to Sean Hannity yesterday proves is that Rudy is an idiot.  He's been in public life for decades, and he has been in front of television cameras and radio microphones every chance he has gotten over those many years, but he doesn't seem to have learned yet not to say something that can be used against him or those whose interests he shares in a sound bite.  What the major media news showed America was Giuliani putting the lie to Trump's claim that he didn't pay attorney Michael Cohen back for the $130,000 he spent to silence Stormy Daniels.  But the nightly news hosts cut the statement off right there, leaving the impression that Trump did indeed pay Cohen back, which was not the essence of Giuliani's remarks.  What the former mayor of New York said was that Trump paid Cohen a retainer of $35,000 a month for an unspecified period either before the payment to Daniels or after, or perhaps both, to do the things that are reflected by the denomination affixed to Cohen by the media long before Giuliani got here: fixer.  It's all a dust up, that's all.  It doesn't establish that Trump knew about the payoff in advance, nor does it establish that he authorized it or ordered it.  Cohen, on the other hand, is likely to take that metaphorical bullet he said he would to protect Trump, but that's another story.

My guess is that Trump likes Giuliani because they are birds of a feather.  James Comey said in his recent book that the most dangerous place to be in the justice department was between Rudy and a microphone, which was proven on the Sean Hannity show.  But despite the fact that Giuliani gave his enemies some ammunition, or at least some blanks to shoot at him, Trump has already excused, and apparently forgiven Giuliani's contra-tempt the way he would a prodigal Donald Jr. for his wandering eye.  Oh well, he seems to have thought, that's what guys like us do in our bigger than life....er...lives.  The boy's gonna make mistakes, but that's how he'll learn.  Unfortunately, neither Junior nor Rudy Giuliani, just days short of his 74th birthday, seems in the learning mode.  And while there may still be a chance for Donald, Jr., Rudy is getting a little old for stripe changing.  He thinks he's a tiger and that's what he wants to be.  He'll never admit to himself or anyone else that in the end, he's only a house cat.   

Still, when the dust settles this can't be good for Donald Trump.  For one thing, most of America won't get past the sound bite, so even his supporters will be admitting to themselves that their paragon of iconoclasm is really only a liar and a fraud.  Those of us who are of his generation and who are from New York City or its environs already know that, but it's news to the part of the electorate that voted for him...or at least it's something they can't ignore.  And after all, it is something of a lead for the Mueller team in that it provides a lever with which to hoist Michael Cohen onto either his own or Donald Trump's petard.  If Cohen doesn't want to go to prison but is willing to settle for just being disbarred, his best interest is served by helping Mueller's people connect every dot he's been near to, and that could be bad news for Donald Trump.  In fact, I would go so far as to say this.  If reality exists, it includes some Trump malfeasance during the election or thereafter.  And if there was malfeasance, Cohen was probably aware of it if he didn't even "fix" it afterward.

So, Donald Trump may be willing to overlook Rudy Giuliani's inexcusable attempt to get into the lime light his boss hogs at all junctures, but it may well cost them both in the end.  Trump may wind up being undone thanks in part to Giuliani's egotistical quest for connection to a notorious New Yorker, and Rudy, who is all but retired otherwise, might be out of a high profile job again.

Either way, or both, it's a case of just deserts. 

Your friend,

Mike