I genuinely think this is Trump's ignorance, ramped up by his narcissism: he genuinely thinks this is how the presidency is supposed to work (that the President is literally in charge of the country like a CEO), has thought this for a long time, and was confused his first term was "sabotaged."
He's just an asshole. That's what assholes do.
It's more than he is just an asshole. He's an asshole that has no idea how gov't works, and he wants gov't to work just like his businesses.
Exactly. Lyndon Johnson was an asshole, but he was an asshole who cared about poor people and minorities, so (acknowledging he unforgivably fucked up Vietnam) he used his asshole powers to push Congress into enacting voting reform, civil rights legislation, etc.
There's a whole category of, "Yes, but he's OUR asshole," where somebody is for instance the People's Asshole and bless him, separate from "And he's a stupid asshole"; Trump is the latter, though his supporters erroneously think he's the former.
Excellent points - and LBJ is a totally underrated president.
And Trump doesn’t even know how a true CEO, who is responsible to a board of director and shareholders, works. Trump has been the dictator of a family business, beholden to no one, and wants to run the country the same way
Needs to be said louder for the people in back!
Agreed. But I prefer that my presidents NOT be ignorant about how the presidency (and the world) work.
Helpful perspective, thanks.
It's baffling how little coverage there is of this. He doesn't understand how anything works, most of his actions are based on complete fantasy and rather than challenge it's validated. We're living in the emperor has no clothes.
In Trump's 1st term he had Republicans in place that had some gov't experience. But midway through they started getting canned because they wouldn't treat him like a boss CEO.
That's hardly a defense of or excuse for DJT: the guys who wrote the Constitution implicitly assumed nobody would ever put a goddamn moron in the Executive Branch and designed a system of checks and balances as failsafes in case it somehow happened anyway.
This may also explain his contempt for all other Presidents, he thinks they were all weak and doing it wrong.
He's a megalomaniac, and the most dangerous man in America.
He has the mentality of a toddler.
CEOs don’t even work that way except on TV or in small, private, multi-generational family-owned businesses like Trump’s.
An excellent point.
They made a good point on the latest Pod Save the World that rings true along these lines: he regularly holds these sessions where his cabinet sucks up to him and world leaders keep doing the same, and he’s such a narcissist he seems to just believe all of it instead of understanding it as flattery
It’s not like he was ever going to be humble but when you’re just stewing in constant praise it just exacerbates the problem, which is why he’s talking more and more like an authoritarian. As far as he knows he saved a dead country and everybody loves him except some tiny sliver of libs
Except, and this is crucial: Nobody else has that privilege. He is the only legitimate president. Not Biden, not Obama, not even Bush. Just him and Washington and Lincoln, and he has his doubts about the other two.