Magazine
Normalizing Trump
Donald Trump has been restrained. He is just finding his mojo. Hold on to your seatbelts folks!
We are entering the second year of the Trump presidency and the world has not come to an end. Yet.
No, really.
We all (even Trump) were spooked by his election victory and critics warned of the apocalyptic times to come, before he was even inaugurated.
The world held together.
But just you wait, let him actually take charge, was the refrain.
Or even before that, the world was careening out of control with Brexit. Or after.
The assault on immigrants.
The lying. The constant lying. Lying for sport.
Withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate agreement.
His cabinet picks. Jeff Sessions? Michael Flynn? Really?
The firing of FBI Director James Comey.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian interventions in the 2016 U.S. elections.
The saber rattling over Iran and North Korea, the schoolyard taunts directed at world leaders.
The affairs with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. That Billy Bush tape, so yesterday.
Trade wars. You still with me? Am I missing something, many things?
We will skip the lesser stuff. Self-serving and possibly unconstitutional business dealings.
The shameless golf outings. The firing of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State and hiring of John Bolton as National Security Advisor.
No, the wheels haven’t come off.
Yet.
For all his bluster, pomposity ignorance, irrational twittering, juvenile taunts and narcissism, to all of which the world has been witness, folks Trump has actually been restrained.
Partly because he was still awed by the presidency into which he had been unwittingly and unexpectedly thrust. Partly because his staff found ways to distract the orangutan.
But now, we are told, Trump has developed a new-found confidence in his own instincts. He no longer feels inhibited, intimidated or constrained by policy and subject experts, who push back against his impetuousness and intemperate impulses.
We are entering a new era of the real Trump, unbridled and unleashed in his full glory.
Globalists. They are out. Tillerson, economic advisor Gary Cohn. Out! National Security Advisor HR McMaster. Get him out! Get him out!
It is only a matter of time before other so-called adults in the room, Chief of Staff John Kelly,Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, even Attorney General Jeff Sessions are canned. Fired!
Sessions, the man whose nomination as U.S. District Court judge was repudiated by the U.S. Senate in 1986 because of flirtations with racism, seems positively a choir boy now. Even Democrats are rushing to embrace him.
So far we have come already. And we haven’t even started.
His war cabinet stands marshalled. There is still the military parade in the wings.
Hold on to your seatbelts folks. The engines have only been idling thus far. The real ride begins now!