Hold Me Closer, Tiny Desk Man

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

So there he sat: Like a petulant, rambunctious boy very poorly-raised, excommunicated to the kiddie table by the exasperated adults trying to have a peaceful Thanksgiving dinner, a regular-sized presidential seal comically affixed to the desk as if to remind us who still more or less works in the Oval Office but only managing to make the desk seems even smaller. Behind that greatly diminished table, the Resolute Desk's Mini Me, making it look even more risibly miniature, sat a bloated tyrant in an equally tiny chair.

    It brought to mind the time over two years ago when Trump was in a first grade classroom, sitting at another tiny table, in another tiny chair and colored the American flag wrong. He hasn't gotten any better informed since then. Yesterday's shit show marked the first time Trump had deigned to talk to the press since the election. Yesterday's shit show also reminded us why.

   Specifically, it was Reuters' Jeff Mason who brought out the worst in Trump by simply asking him if he was ready to finally concede the election.  The election proved in spades that Donald Trump became what he loathes and fears the most- A loser. The legitimate mainstream media asking him if he'd concede to Joe Biden reminded him of what he truly was and always will be.

    Then the guy who spent the better part of a year calling Obama a Muslim terrorist and a native Kenyan snapped, “Don’t talk to me that way. You’re just a lightweight... I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.” As CNN's Jake Tapper drily noted, "Jeff will still be working at the White House after January 20, 2021."

    So, take heart, mainstream media, the beatings, the domestic violence, the verbal abuse, the abuser living between silence and rage will soon come to an end. In less than two months, the restraining order that 80,000,000+ voters demanded and got will take effect. Then you can rebuild your lives and careers by embarking on a relationship with the nice, kindly old man who'd been dealing with the political press since he was in his late 20s.

     Like a typical right winger, Trump is hostile toward the media. But he differs from most other right wingers in that that loathing is occasionally offset with a need, a hunger for publicity that only the mainstream media can offer. Oh, he may pretend he loves Newsmax and OANN now because they're a reliable echo chamber for his conspiracy theories and lies. But those channels are the modern day equivalent of UHF TV, cable access Fox wannabes. It's not the same and he knows it.

 

This Isn't the Story You Should Be Writing

 

    So, virtually every time Trump has dealt with the press since 2015, he's had on his jiggling, powdered puss this look of baffled fury that reporters would ask him tough questions on occasion, his Mussolini jaw provocatively jutting forward, his vagina-shaped mouth molded into a sneer, ready to lash out at anything that  he perceived as a liberal Gotcha moment.

    Trump honestly thought the political press would be unconditionally fawning of him, dutifully taking stenography. But those were the society, gossip and celebrity glitz journalists from leading newspapers and the "slicks" he was expecting and, Chanel Rion of OANN aside, that is not what he got. It wasn't until Vladimir Putin installed him in the White House that Trump was ever seriously (if only occasionally) challenged by the press. And he can't understand why they're doing so.

     This is a guy who thought of every high-stakes negotiation as a "deal" whether it be a Middle East peace plan with Palestine and Israel, a trade agreement with China or haggling with Congress. He honestly thought the presidency would be all glitter and artifice, as if he was walking around like in the good old days between (and sometimes during) marriages with a young lovely on each arm, opening a soon-to-be-failed Vegas or Atlantic City casino.

     He can't understand how he lost the election, how over 80,000,000 voters lost the plot. This isn't how the story is supposed to end. Someone or something, some right wing deus et machina, was supposed to bail him out of his latest incompetence whether it be Russian banks or mobsters, Deutsche Bank's money spigots, Daddy's fortune or the small donations from millions of marks who fell and continue to fall hook, line and sinker for his every lie.

    Someone got the ending wrong. And it wasn't him. It was democracy.

   (Oh, let's call it what it really is in his fun house mirror of a mind: Demockracy in which we are a nation not of laws but one incipiently senile old man who plainly looked at the White House as just another one of his Russian-funded properties and the presidency a birthright that should be granted to him through sheer, selfish force of will even after 80,000,000 of us or about seven New York Cities, wrested it out of his tiny hands.)

     He was supposed to live a charmed life and allowed to leave the White House only when he was damned good and ready. And to be replaced by the guy he got impeached over trying to kneecap with Ukraine's help is replacing him? The guy he called "Sleepy Joe" and accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs (We all know by now Adderall isn't one of them.)?

     He is simply mentally incapable of processing that and admitting that is precisely what happened. But what did we reasonably expect from a man who thought you could break up hurricanes by nuking them, that we could safely cure coronavirus by injecting disinfectants into our bodies and that windmills cause brain cancer?