For those of us who thought that Trump might “clean up his act” once he was president now know: What we saw is what we got. Trump is a boor. Always been one, always will be one.
When he was a businessman in New York, he could trample on others, throw tantrums, sue people, stiff contractors and insult employees.
Now, the whole world is listening to every word that comes out of his mouth. And it’s not pretty. Trump speaks like a fourth grader, and he rambles. Listen carefully and you will notice that he says everything two or three times to fill dead air. A point that could be made with five well-chosen words expands into ten paragraphs of drivel. Only when he reads off paper or a teleprompter does he utter sentences, but they are stiff and wooden. He is not even a good reader, or his speech writers are bad writers so his words don’t ring real.
Here is the problem, though. As a CEO, if you can’t speak, or can’t control what you say, you’re being punished by your business and your customers. When you’re the president of a nation, you have the smartest people in the country paying attention to what you do and say, and the very sharpest foreign leaders and diplomats are at your table or next to you at the lectern.
These people can tell immediately when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Trump’s statements about NATO funding today were utterly ridiculous and simply exposed him as a fool. Every world leader knows that now. And worse, everyone who works for Trump, either his direct reports in the White House or Cabinet, or the people in the EPA, in NASA, in the CIA, FBI and the NSA – all highly intelligent, expertly educated, highly credentialed professionals – all cringe every time our Embarrassment-in-Chief opens his mouth or posts on Twitter.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
— attributed to Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and many others.
I know what Angela Merkel is thinking now, and it’s not just because I speak German.
I agree Norbert. Once again, I felt embarrassment for our nation when I heard 45 speak during his meeting with Merkel. In electing a President, I always intuitively believed one of over arching goals was that we try to select the best and brightest. Some of us see that it went very wrong this time. Some of us magically believe that this buffoon somehow has the “where with all” to conduct a nation with intelligence and integrity. He clearly doesn’t. I watched and listened to his remarks during that meeting and thought that it reminded me of a 6th grader reading a paper before the class. He is a shallow, pompous, more money than brains, bigoted racist, with a penchant for absorbing misinformation, then further misunderstanding that, then broadcasting his warped view and then lying to defend it. Just Ludicrous! and still his supporters are buying it. He is stumbling very badly, somehow his pace in adapting to his new role is going painfully slow. We expect more and we are not unreasonable to do so.
Yes. It is mindboggling that he still has supporters. How can that even be?
Oh Lard, how much longer? He certainly cannot NOT know what a joke he is.
But he is just the puppet sent out to unwittingly play fool while his flying Dementors wreck havoc with every decency, protection in law, the checks and balances of the Constitution, the media, and facts themselves with the flick of their bony fingers.
Leonard Cohen called his last album: You Want it Darker…
Was this what we subconsciously wanted to wake us up from entertaining ourselves to death?