At first I was wondering: Why is Donald Trump sending out all those stupid tweets about “voter fraud”?
I’m sure he’s been briefed, so it’s clear he has access to the same data that everyone else has — probably more. Surely, therefore, he knows none of that is real.
At first I kept thinking “OK then, what’s Trump up to? He must know that everybody knows he’s just making this stuff up.” I was looking for some sort of plan, a coherent strategy.
But then I realized that no, there is no plan. He just makes stuff up because he can. It’s like we’ve handed a loaded gun to a little kid. A very, very big gun.
Technically, the man in that tower is 70 years old. But I think we need to start dealing with something more deeply true: In any meaningful sense, the person we’re dealing with is a 12 year old kid.
Baldly lying, and making others repeat those lies, is a show of dominance practiced by autocrats throughout history. Dark days indeed.
Because Trump’s behavior is so bizarre, it’s not clear what is actually going on. But it’s an interesting question: Which would be worse, the bullying strongman or the idiot child?
The former can erode our liberties, but only so quickly. The U.S. government is designed in a way that it cannot be destroyed by a bad actor in only a few years.
On the other hand, the idiot child can cause far greater damage. A badly conceived war, or a wild overresponse to a terrorist attack, can cause irreparable harm not merely to our own country, but to much of the rest of the world as well.
So part of me sort of hopes he really is merely an overreaching autocrat, rather than the crazed idiot he appears to be at the moment.