TDS Watch: Trump's McDonald's Order Shows That He Can't Be Trusted With Global Crises
facepalm
Decisions to live this way would seem to offer insight into Trump’s ability to assess risk. In light of a nuclear standoff with North Korea, rapidly warming oceans, and a looming tax bill that would leave millions more Americans without health insurance, his approach to self-maintenance is not reassuring.
posted by Winston Smith at
4:12 PM
7 Comments:
This is more than just facepalm-worthy. There is a clear cultural divide right now along education, and oddly one of the most clear signifiers of this is food (you would think it would be literacy or numeracy, but the educated in America aren't actually exemplars of either). Basically having a broad palette is a huge signifier of elite status, and non-elites know that too. The flip side is being a McDonald's customer is a huge signifier of being a part of the financially-strained working class, who have no time for quinoa. Chris Arnaud's spiels about front row kids is a great ethnography of this (And why the hell do we need ethnographies of our own culture in the first place? How can elites be so ignorant of their own country?).
These sort of small details is how a billionaire like Trump could seem infinitely more relatable to rural, working folks than virtually any Democrat or establishment Republican. And of course with this sort of article, and CNN's two scoops fainting episode, the elites in the media and Washington decide to just lean into that hard lesson and keep accentuating the cultural divide. It doesn't help that they are so damn idiotic about it (let's just say the bayesian update you should apply to a person's policy preferences given that they order McDonald's is...small).
Frankly, they deserve Trump. They deserve to be Trumped good and hard.
All this is like criticizing the string quartet's choice of tempo in their performance of 'Amazing Grace' as the Titanic goes down. I'm sure someone like Jack Goldsmith more or less agrees with many of your criticisms of the 'liberal media' and the 'coastal elites'. But we wouldn't know, because he seems to think think the country's facing more urgent problems right now. Like the dismantling of core political institutions in real time.
I'm not seeing a lot of inconsistency in these positions, DJ. Both sides suck. It seems largely discretionary to me which side one bitches about most. And I agree that the crappy left deserves Trump.
I mean...I don't think *we* deserve him...we're just collateral damage...but *they* deserve him.
Besides, what's to be said about Trump? He sucks. There's nothing to understand. There's no nuance. There are no depths. His suckage is right on the surface. There nothing to make any clearer than it already is. The left...their suckage has *depth*...
Dude did save the Department of Education, too...gotta give him that.
What's to be said about Trump? Well, let's just take today. On the advice of his know-nothing son-in-law, Trump has announced his support for moving the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. This is a massively destabilizing move that threatens serious unrest in the region.
So that's today. There's also the destruction of the State Department, poisoning the wells of public discourse, gratuitously undermining confidence, very possibly irreversibly, in all sorts of public and private institutions... lying... criminality... corruption... inciting violence...
I just don't get the insouciance. The fact that you derive satisfaction from the left 'deserving' Trump suggests to me that you don't appreciate the magnitude of the problem. It's a bit like applauding Hiroshima because someone you really, really disliked lived there.
It's not a question of the shallowness or depth of the suckage. Not that the crappy left sucks in a more interesting way than Trump in any case. But never mind that. It's about the survival of the republic.
I used to think that George W. Bush was a disaster. I had no idea. This isn't like having a crappy president who's depressing to think about. This is freaking apocalyptic.
If you think this is dismissable as 'TDS' then I suspect the idea of TDS is helping to allow you not to think about an important dimension of the situation.
It's not apocalyptic.
It's not apocalyptic by any stretch of the imagination.
It's *nothing* like Bush. Bush was the figurehead of a group that only failed to steal an American presidential election because at the last minute it turned out that they had, to everyone's surprise, including theirs, actually won it. This moral equivalent of theft of the Presidency was aided by his conservative buds on SCOTUS who wrote the most transparently shitty decision since...I dunno...Plessy?
Schenck? Fucking Dred Scott? He then ignored warnings about 9/11. He then let Osama bin Laden get away when he was cornered at Tora Bora because he had already started a troop build-up because he was already planning to use 9/11--nine fucking eleven--which he was milking for all it was worth...as a pretext for a war he wanted to fight for independent reasons. Which war he then lied us into. Which war cost nearly 5,000 coalition lives (not to mention the maimings...don't forget the maimings...) and somewhere between 100K and 600K Iraqi deaths, depending on how you count them...and then there's Afghanistan...100K civilians deaths, 2,300 American deaths, 20k wounded...
Bush bad, Trump apocalyptic?
That makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever man. And this kind of absurd comparison is one of the kinds of things that makes it hard for me to maintain my overt anti-Trump passion.
I can't stand the guy. But unless he starts a fucking nuclear war or destroys the economy, he has no chance whatsoever of matching Bush.
And, in case you didn't notice that was THE ATLANTIC...formerly respectable publication...arguing that Trump can't handle the DPRK because he eats too many Big Macs...so...yeah...given that I have good reason to distrust most of what the media says about the guy...I've adopted a somewhat more sanguine attitude about him.
Oh yeah, remember how he was COMPLETELY busted TOTALLY red-handed (as it were) 100% in bed with Russia...again....a few days ago?
So you'll forgive me if I'm not panicked that Jack Goldsmith knows somebody at Justice who's picking glumly at his salad because he's sad about Trump.
We'll see.
On the other hand, the stronger the argument that Bush was terrible, the less-relevant the Bush-Trump comparison is. Bush is just setting the bar really, really low. Much lower than you seem to appreciate right now in your anti-Trump...I dunno...funk or tizzy or whatever.
None of that changes the fact that Trump seems very, very bad.
I'm just more and more open to the suggestion that people like you and me fail to appreciate how thoroughly we are locked into left-of-center groupthink. I'm just less sure now that a chaotic Trump shakeup is apolcalyptically worse than soberly traveling another mile down the left-of-center business-as-usual path.
Still, I think the guy is odious and has more than a few screws loose and might be a serial assaulter of women and could kill us all.
I don't have an opinion about the Jerusalem thing. I don't understand the Israel situation at all.
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