Pierce: The President* Is a Burned-Out Magician
The President* Is a Burned-Out Magician
By the time he hit the middle-school history textbook section of Thursday night’s extended violation of both pandemic safety protocols and federal law, Trump could barely stand up for falling down.
By Charles P. Pierce
Aug 28, 2020
And, at the ragged and unmasked end of it, he was an old and burned-out magician who’d long ago hocked his cabinet and now was eating his own rabbits for food....
(If he’d ever had the aesthetic sense god gave a goat, I would have wondered if his exhausted affect was a result of his being confronted with some of the worst writing ever handed to a politician. There were crows cawing on the South Lawn of the White House Friday morning that were more uplifting than this.)...
Back when I was a sports columnist for a daily newspaper, I would have to write a column off the Boston Marathon every year. This ensured that I was always around at the finish when the noble souls who’d been on the road for four or five hours would stumble triumphantly down Boylston Street and collapse over the finish line. Except for the part about being noble, that’s what the president looked like at the end of his 66-minute address. For the most part, someone managed to keep him chained to the teleprompter, which must have taken all the strength he could muster. The crowd, ummasked, much of it, did the best it could to pep him up, chanting and cheering...and, very likely, spreading the virus. But he still sounded as though every word weighed 50 pounds.
By now, the staggering cargo of lies and misinformation has been ground into a fine powder by dozens of people tasked with that thankless job. (My contribution? This line—"Our country wasn’t built by cancel culture, speech codes, and crushing conformity."—would come as some surprise to Mary Dyer, Benjamin Bache, the members of several Congresses, millions of Native Americans, and too many Black Americans to count. Thank you.) But it was his exhausted aspect that most interested me. Is it possible that the burden of being a monstrous fraud his whole life has become too much for a septuagenerian to bear? The newspapers are filled these days with his own family members giving him up. If he wins re-election, he will be stuck in a job he hates until he’s 78 years old. That has to look like a long, dark road ending in a darker place.
I have no illusions—or sympathy. Perhaps, once he’s out doing rallies again, unfettered by prepared texts, he’ll draw strength from his adoring crowds. He has to get re-elected to keep himself and a lot of other people safe from hungry prosecutors. Whoever is running him, here and abroad, likely still has plans for this country. And his base of support remains solid, even though everything on top of it is wavering and tottering. But, on Thursday night, none of that mattered. He ran down a calendar of American greatness like a man asking the attendant for more pudding. Being president kept him up way past lights out.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33832983/president-trump-republican-convention-speech/
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