Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, is a Machiavelli-mouthed, fragile egomaniac who has soured the public discourse in this country with his mouth full of nasty invective, such that filthy talk is everywhere that polite talk used to prevail.
Niccolo Machiavelli was a 15th-century Italian philosopher who wrote the classic handbook for dictators and other rulers, called “The Prince.” The book contains advice which seems to be the watchword for the Trump presidency: “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
Now we all know that Trump will never be, and does not deserve to be loved in this world, so his strategy is to make everybody fear him and what he might do, beginning with his filthy mouth and boorish, raised-by-wolves manners.
He berates people with whom he disagrees (including some of this country’s closest allies and even U.S. Republican politicians) in the vilest and insulting manner. He bullies and pushes other presidents to the side so that HE can be seen in front of his peers.
The level of discourse he has spawned all through the society is beneath the gutter level. He has referred to black NFL athletes as “sons of b—–s,” and it’s gone downhill from there. An unnamed senior White House official summed up The Donald’s foreign policy doctrine, according to an Atlantic report as: “We’re America, bitch.”
And the public conversation has followed the potty-mouthed president right into the sewer. Award-winning actor Robert De Niro took it all the way to the limit during the live telecast of Broadway’s Tony Awards. “I’m going to say one thing: F— Trump. It’s no longer ‘Down with Trump,’ it’s ‘F— Trump.’ Now I’ll get to this introduction.”
And all over the internet, the language also appears to be uncensored … Trump-like.
Before Trump it would have been hard to imagine someone dressed up in a tuxedo, in front of thousands at a prestigious award event, using the “F-word” about the sitting U.S. president and then receiving a warm ovation from the crowd like De Niro did, but, here we are at that Trump-place that’s not so warm and fuzzy.
When some players from the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles announced they would not attend the customary White House visit for athletic champions, Dude cancelled the entire event, replaced it with a “patriotic” singalong at which he did not even know all the words to “God Bless America.”
Steph Curry, captain of the NBA champion Golden State Warriors, announced that his team would not accept a White House invite if one came to them. (A popular social media joke has Triple Crown-winning colt Justify rebuffing any potential invite: “If I wanted to see a horse’s ass, I would have come in second.”)
This level of toxic conversation is unprecedented in my lifetime. It comes as Trump the chicken hawk, who got a handful of deferments from the military draft during the Vietnam War, now hugs the flag and fawns over the military like he was some kind of retired Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, instead of a draft dodger he is.
“Disinviting them from the White House only proves that our president is not a true patriot, but a fragile egomaniac obsessed with crowd size and afraid of the embarrassment of throwing a party to which no one wants to attend,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney told Fox News after the Eagles cancellation.
And now, he’s gone off to Singapore to get fleeced by North Korean leader Kim Jon Un, who only needs the photo of the handshake with His Nibs in order have a victorious outcome for him—the first North Korean official to ever meet a sitting U.S. president.
But The Donald is so smug, so full of himself, that he reckons that he can “size up” the leader of a 2,000-year-old civilization which has defied U.S. power for the past 65 years, since the bloody Korean War ended in 1953: “maybe in the first minute.”
“Just my touch, my feel. That’s what — that’s what I do,” he told reporters as he was departing for Singapore. The sad truth is that even if things don’t go so swimmingly in that first 60 seconds, world peace deserves a second or third chance to make peace work.
This guy however thinks that all the presidents before him in the second half of the 20th century were weaklings. According to The Atlantic, a “senior White House official with direct access to the president and his thinking” explained: “Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.” The official said that Trump “doesn’t feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.”
He’s “ba-a-a-d.” He’s Trump. He says: “fear this!”