Tethered to a Raging Buffoon Called Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/opinion/trump-hitler-europe.html
Tethered to a Raging Buffoon Called Trump
By Roger Cohen
We are tethered to a buffoon. He rages and veers, spreading ugliness, like an oil slick smothering everything in its viscous mantle. Hes about to bomb Syria. Hes not about to bomb Syria. His attention span is nonexistent. He attacks the foundations of our Republic: an independent judiciary, a free press, truth itself. His cabinet looks terrorized, the way Saddam Husseins once did.
President Donald Trump is dangerous. The main things mitigating the danger are his incompetence and cowardice. We live in a time that teaches how outrage can turn to a shrug, how the unthinkable repeated over and over can induce moral numbness, how a madmans manic certainties can overwhelm reason. He is very busy; people resist; he opens another front; people shake their heads. Its hard to remember on Friday what happened on Monday. Trumps is the unbearable lightness of the charlatan.
Disorientation spreads. Trumps main war, beyond all the military bluster, is on truth. This reflects his instinct for the jugular: Once the distinction between truth and falsehood disappears, anything is possible. There are plenty of examples these days, from Moscow to Budapest, of how democracies can be manipulated to the point where they can yield only one result. This is Trumps objective, and for it he needs a weakened Justice Department, a weakened press and an American public that will believe anything. He has had setbacks but is stubborn.
In the mid-1930s, when the world was hurtling toward disaster, Robert Musil, the Austrian author of The Man Without Qualities, wrote this on the nature of civilization: That which we call culture presumably does not directly have the concept of truth as a criterion, but no culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.