One of the most interesting articles I read in 2023 was Mark Danner's "The Grievance Artist" in the Nov. 2 New York Review of Books, a review of several books by Trump insiders.
nybooks.com/articles/2023/11/02/the-grievance-artist-trump-mark-danner/
The following quote is from former senior official in the Department of Homeland Security Miles Taylor, from his book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump:
word came down from the White HouseâŚto stop providing the president with lengthy documents. If there was a staple in it, the briefing paper was probably too long and needed to be cut. Fifteen-page updates on complex issues were chopped down to one. Bold fonts. Simple words.
BIGÂ pictures. Know your audience, they say, and the âaudience of oneâ (as we called the president) had the temperament of a child, albeit a child with a finger lingering over the nuclear button.
Contrast that with reports of Obama and Clinton, both apparently vigorous and omnivorous readers.
It's no surprise then that a mind like Trump's, averse to reading and reflection, would wind up so often helplessly flailing when his impulsive fantasies met roadblocks. Here's a more extensive quote from the article:
"How to explain that the border and its influx of undocumented immigrants is a bitingly complex problem, springing from global economic realities and the impositions of American and international law and the bitter bottlenecks of domestic politics, to someone who simply is unable to absorb it? Who seems able to listen only to himself? Taylor describes these encounters vividly:
The president went back to his greatest hitsââa big, big border wall!â âcut off the cash!â âscrew the Mexicans!ââand we sat there listening to the diatribe that had begun to sound like a Broadway sing-a-long from hell. We left without any clear directionâŚ.
Two days later, on March 19, he did the song and dance for us again. The Oval Office meeting was supposed to be about combating opioid addictionâŚ[but] Trump steered the briefing to his favorite subject. He ran through his list of cruelly imaginative immigration policies once more.
Between meetings, Taylor and administration colleagues compare notes about the âpretty crazy shitâ Trump had just spouted, speculating darkly on the presidentâs mental health. But he always manages to top the last performance, as in this phone call Taylor sat in on with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen:
âKiiiirstjen,â he said in his distinctive New York accent. âI canât believe what I am seeing at the border.â The presidentâŚwanted to talk about creative optionsâŚ.
He had an idea: âa big, deep moat.â
She muted the line. âDid he just say what I think he said?â
âI want you to figure out how deep you can dig it, okay Kirstjen?â Trump proposed filling the moat with âsnakes and alligatorsâ to eat people alive if they fell into it. âHow much would this cost, honey?â
She unmuted. âWeâll look into it, Mr. President.â He kept pressing the point until she assured him again weâd get back to the White House.
He wasnât joking, and we werenât laughing anymore. The call derailed the morning as DHS cobbled together a back-of-the-envelope estimate for digging a border-long ditch and filling it with snakes and alligators.
A moat with snakes and alligators along a nearly 2,000 mile long border. It sounds like the addled machinations of a tyrannical fairy tale King in the throes of madness.
Needless to say, the people who need to hear about these offstage Trumpian dramas the most never will, ensconced as so many of them are in cultish information bubbles. Worse, even if they did hear, it probably wouldn't matter.
Consider by contrast to Trump's ravings the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE). Here's from the fourth book of his Meditations, with this writing chosen almost at random:
X. These two rules, thou must have always in a readiness. First, do nothing at all, but what reason proceeding from that regal and supreme part, shall for the good and benefit of men, suggest unto thee. And secondly, if any man that is present shall be able to rectify thee or to turn thee from some erroneous persuasion, that thou be always ready to change thy mind, and this change to proceed, not from any respect of any pleasure or credit thereon depending, but always from some probable apparent ground of justice, or of some public good thereby to be furthered; or from some other such inducement.
Downward and upward the ages.
