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Trump is an incompetent, ignorant, lying blowhard. He is also vain, resentful, and filled with hate. Put those characteristics together and you end up with a guy who is constantly humiliating himself and is in a constant rage spiral because people notice that he is humiliating himself. And when he is in a rage spiral, he looks for other people to blame.
Or to put it another way, the story of Trump’s presidency is the story of the most powerful man on earth bellowing and whining and spewing gouts of punitive bile because of unbelievably petty shit. From the moment when he forced his underlings to lie about the size of the crowds at his first inauguration to his crass posts celebrating the death of former special counsel Robert Mueller, there is no slight that Trump can’t turn into a forever grievance and no failure he can’t try to pin on someone else.
It’s like Caligula trying to make his horse a consul, except the horse is Trump’s own wounded ego, and it claims not just one seat, but absolutely all of them.
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Trump hit a new pinnacle of absurd spite last week with not one but two preposterous misuses of government power and prestige. First, the Trump DOJ indicted an Olympic athlete for noticing that Trump’s reflecting pool renovations were a bust. And second, the Trump administration deleted thousands of pages about energy conservation because they made right-wing critics of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani look like dopes.
Both of these sound like ridiculous jokes. And they are ridiculous jokes. The problem is that these ridiculous jokes are now our country. We are living under the personalist dictatorship of a hateful clown obsessed with the news cycle and owning the libs. And unfortunately, since he has the whole federal government at his back, his ridiculous tantrums can in fact ruin people’s lives, and worse.
Trump vs. algae
As has been widely reported for weeks, Trump has managed to turn the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into an algae-filled blight.
The pool is huge and maintaining it is complicated; it has long had problems with algae. Trump’s plan to renovate it before the 250th anniversary celebrations was not in itself a ridiculous decision.
But, of course, Trump, being Trump, went about the renovations in the most corrupt manner possible. He gave a $1.7 million no-bid contract for water purification to a Republican donor who also has a property near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
