Donald Trump's Hideous Tantrum
Our least presidential president crashes out on Meet the Press.
There is a particular kind of absurdist theater that happens when a man who has spent his life surrounded by people paid to nod and agree with him suddenly collides with journalism.
Under a metal roof booming from a summer storm on a Wisconsin farm, Kristen Welker conducted that experiment in real time.
The results were not a triumph of journalism so much as a clinical observation of a figure in steep decline as a President, as a leader of a party, and as a man. The tantrum was pathetic, juvenile, and politically poisonous.
By the end, the leader of the free world stormed off the set, spitting mad and ranting like an escaped mental patient trying to convince the EMTs that aliens had implanted computer chips in his rectum.
Trump screeched like a cut hog, calling Welker crooked, stupid, and finally…“darling,” and fled into the rain like a man who’d just remembered he left the stove on.
Let’s begin with the lies, because there were so many they formed a kind of weather system of their own.
Start with the one he loves most, the one he returns to like a dog to a familiar patch of political vomit: the 2020 election. Welker, doing the thing journalists are supposed to do, asked for evidence. What she got was a man insisting “there’s more evidence than ever presented,” which is a sentence that eats itself.
You, dear readers, know this a titanic mountain of Trumpian lies.
There is no evidence. There has never been evidence. Sixty-odd courts, dozens of them staffed by his own appointees, looked for it and found nothing.
But watch how he pivots, because this is the tell: cornered on 2020, he leaps immediately to California, where Republicans are “dropping fast” in a slow count because that is, factually, how California counts votes.