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
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