CSotD: Dealing a Hand of 52-Pickup
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Horsey may be exaggerating the infantile tantrums of our leader, but he’s reporting Jeff Bezos’ analysis accurately. Bezos genuinely told CNBC “I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.”
Bezos went on to say “I’ve worked with all the presidents, I will work with all the presidents, you know, and I hope to do that going forward if they’ll have me, but we need our business leaders to provide input into the administration, regardless of who the president is.”
We may assume that he’s not a time traveler and meant all the recent presidents, but if he lavished millions on Barbara Bush, Hilary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, he must have neglected to make flattering movies as part of the deals.
But then none of their husbands directed NASA to lavish contracts on Bezos’ Blue Origin space company, so it evens out, somewhat.
As for Trump maturing, Norwegian cartoonist Christian Bloom portrayed him this way in a 2016 cartoon that became iconic, and only Bezos — certainly not Horsey — seems to have spotted much of a transformation in the decade since.
If anything, here’s another overseas view that suggests that Bloom had Trump’s infantile destructive tendencies right, and that he has managed to pull down his own country while threatening to destroy others.
This is, obviously, an opinion and not an objective statement of facts, but it seems a consistent opinion among foreign commentators, and it also seems somewhat justified by Dear Leader’s threat Tuesday to ‘blow up’ Oman if they don’t ‘behave’ and obey his orders regarding the Strait of Hormuz.
Mature leaders do not threaten to bomb their nation’s allies.
As for his self-proclaimed expertise in the “Art of the Deal,” Bramhall points out that he is being taken to school by Iran, which appears likely to emerge from the war with more power and autonomy than they had when it began, and fewer obligations than they faced under the international agreement that Obama signed and Trump tore up.
Belgian cartoonist DuBus mocks Trump’s repeated proclamations that “An agreement is near,” while depicting him as near enough to see the way Iran is mocking his attempts to browbeat them into submission. But, again, it’s an opinion, not a factual statement.
Presumably, if he could sense the mockery, he’d modify his approach.
In fact, as Tom Tomorrow explains, there seems to be just the opposite happening, that Trump is aided and abetted by his current staff, who cater to his whims and prop up his ego.
From inside his sheltered world, he cannot see what others are saying about him, and if the rest of the world is laughing, the sound does not penetrate the walls of the White House.
In his first administration, both Michael Wolfe and Bob Bernstein reported, his staff would sneak papers off his desk so he wouldn’t sign them, knowing he wouldn’t remember that he’d intended to, and that they had problems getting him to focus on briefings, and resorted to sticking his name into the documents to raise the chances that he’d read them.
It was reminiscent of Joe Gargery, the illiterate blacksmith of Great Expectations, who sought the letters “JO” together in newspapers and was delighted each time he saw them.
Today, following the revelations of the Jan 6 Subcommittee, there are jokes galore about Dear Leader reacting to bad news by flinging his food in fury and leaving ketchup stains on the wall. It’s only funny if you ignore his ability to do similarly pointless damage to the world, and to his own people.
The cartoons don’t draw themselves, but the president is a continual source of inspiration, and he genuinely did dismiss the rise in gas prices as “peanuts,” which is big talk from a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who has likely never been in a grocery store and almost certainly — given that he doesn’t drive — has never bought a gallon of gas.
Leona Helmsley — “The Queen of Mean” — antagonized the world by declaring “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.” She was convicted of tax evasion and served time in prison. But that was nearly 40 years ago, she wasn’t president and she hadn’t worked to secure an agreement that the IRS was forbidden to examine her financial records.
It’s good to be king.
Juxtaposition of the Day
But a king is only as good as the body that carries the crown, and Trump returned from yet another six-month check-up with the news that everything was “perfect” and few details to back up his cheery assertion.
To be sure, other presidents have glossed over health issues: FDR went to great lengths not to appear in public in his wheelchair, though everyone knew he had had polio, and while the country was similarly aware of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, the extent of his disability was largely shielded.
But certainly neither claimed to be in “perfect” health, and modern presidents have released the basics of their physical exams.
Leaving it up to speculation may not be the best policy, and we can at least hope that, had the war been over, FDR would never have run for office a fourth time, with his health at such a low point that he had little chance of living through another administration. There’s also the possibility that underplaying Wilson’s condition has left his reputation more tarnished than had he been more forthright, that he had remained more mentally capable than modern histories suggest.
But neither directly denied their physical issues, and Dear Leader’s putting make-up on his hand bruises while dismissing them as caused by “taking the big aspirin” seems both foolish and futile, and the worst thing anyone in public life can do is to make reporters curious.
Antagonizing them with insults and then making them curious is an even more dangerous move, because once they start digging, all your spin will come across as denial.
As for “The Art of the Deal,” it’s this:
Better to sit on 18 than to overplay the hand and watch it all go down.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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