A leader prefers to be respected rather than feared, a tyrant wants to be feared rather than respected. In the case of Donald Trump, he is neither feared nor respected, tweets Maggie Haberman of the New York Times:
“The president scares no one in the Senate, not even the pages,” a Senator said anonymously to NYT two weeks ago. (Apparently the Senator speaking fears something, if not Trump, else why would s/he have to remain anonymous?)
Be that as it may, the national zeitgeist changed with Charlottesville. The prevailing attitude before then was one of outrage towards Donald Trump. That feeling crescendoed momentarily when Trump began waffling on whether the Nazis and the KKK were bad, or whether they were just par for the course because both sides, as we all know, “do it.” But as Trump returned and rescinded his condemnation of white supremacy and then doubled down on his original sentiment, even going so far as to say that some of the Nazis and Klansmen were “fine people,” a different wind is now prevailing in the land. People are now disgusted with Trump, quietly or loudly, but he doesn’t have the level of acceptance that he used to.
Trump famously stated that he could “shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and still get elected.” That may have been true then. It isn’t true now. When Trump melted down at his faux press conference on Tuesday at Trump Tower, with his angry gesticulations, rudely snarling, “I’m not finished fake news,” at CNN’s Jim Acosta and defending white supremacist “culture” and “history” he turned a page in this culture and in his own history. His hollow words and fallacious arguments have happened once too often and collectively people are shaking their heads in disbelief.
All around the globe, whether it is Kim Jung Un talking about “stupid Yankees,” not being worth worrying about, or talk show hosts calling for his resignation, the Trump balloon deflated this week. The news conference was the beginning of the end, because Trump’s impotent, incoherent, and even inaccurate ravings are simply not befitting a president of the United States. Every day and in every way Donald Trump manifestly proves that he is characterologically unsound and fundamentally unsuited for the office of president of the United States.
He’s no longer the outsider, coming to Washington on a populist wave to fix things. He’s the outsider who doesn’t belong — and is on his way to becoming a social pariah.
Donald Trump is a misfit and nobody is scared of him because nobody takes him seriously anymore. He has no maturity, no discipline, and even his own constituency is bailing out on him. He lost twelve points in the polls this week. He’s at 36% now, unheard of for a presidency at this stage of and the figure is going to keep dropping at regularly measured intervals until he either decides to resign on his own or his daughter and John Kelly somehow manage to convince him that it’s for his own good.
The nation and the world saw how truly pathetic the man is on Tuesday, when Donald Trump finally managed to bottom Donald Trump.