Americas Whiniest Victim (der drumpfenfuhrer, of course) [Charles M. Blow]
America’s Whiniest ‘Victim’
[Charles M. Blow]
President Donald Trump boarding Air Force One on Friday, heading to a vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. Credit Al Drago for The New York Times
Donald Trump is the reigning king of American victimhood. He is unceasingly pained, injured, aggrieved. The primaries were unfair. The debates were unfair. The general election was unfair. “No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly,” he laments.
People refuse to reach past his flaws — which are legion! — and pat him on the back. People refuse to praise his minimal effort and minimal efficacy. They refuse to ignore that the legend he created about himself is a lie. People’s insistence on truth and honest appraisal is so annoying. It’s all so terribly unfair.
It is in this near perfect state of perpetual aggrievement that Trump gives voice to a faction of America that also feels aggrieved. Trump won because he whines. He whines in a way that makes the weak feel less vulnerable and more vicious. He makes feeling sorry for himself feel like fighting back. In this way he was a perfect reflection of the new Whiny Right. Trump is its instrument, articulation, embodiment. He’s not so much representative of it but of an idea — the waning power of whiteness, privilege, patriarchy, access, and the cultural and economic surety that accrues to the possessors of such. Trump represents their emerging status of victims-in-their-own-minds.
The way they see it, they are victims of coastal and urban liberals and the elite institutions — economic, education and entertainment — clustered there. They are victims of an economy evolving in ways, both technical and geographic, that cuts them out or leaves them behind. They are victims of immigration and shifting American demographics. They are victims of shifting, cultural mores. They are victims of Washington.No one speaks to these insecurities like the human manifestation of insecurity himself: Donald Trump. Donald Trump is their death rattle: That unsettling sound a body makes when death nears.
But, Trump’s whining is not some clever Machiavellian tactic, precisely tuned for these times. Trump’s whining is genuine. He pretends to be ferocious, but is actually embarrassingly fragile. His bravado is all illusion. The lion is a coward. And, he licks his wounds until they are raw. Now, pour into this hollow man Steve Bannon’s toxic, apocalyptic nationalism and his professed mission — “deconstruction of the administrative state” — and you get a perfect storm of extreme orthodoxy and extreme insecurity.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/opinion/donald-trump-unfair.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Indeed, Drumpf is all about projection.
R&
