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Or let's just say his uniqueness and alleged unprecedentedness for a U.S. president is exaggerated.
Lawless? What about Andrew Jackson, who ignored a Supreme Court decision and forced an entire Native American tribe on a death march.
Or George Bush, who violated U.S. law and the anti-torture treaty the U.S. was obligated to obey, and waged illegal aggressive war on Iraq?
Or Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, who flouted his oath of office by failing to faithfully execute the laws of the land and uphold the U.S. Constitution by NOT prosecuting U.S. torturers, or financiers who committed fraud.
Or how about Ronald Reagan, who violated the Boland Amendment, a U.S. law forbidding aid to the contra terrorists committing atrocities in Nicaragua?
Or how about hundreds of other examples from U.S. history?
Here's how the "liberal" and very bourgeois New Yorker magazine describes Donald Trump:
"Amazingly, it is no longer big news when the occupant of the Oval Office is shown to be callous, ignorant, nasty, and untruthful." [1]
Just like Nixon. Or Ford. Or Reagan. Or both Bushes. It's "amazing" if you just arrived here from another planet.
But only some of those adjectives apply to other presidents. We can't call Obama, Clinton, or Carter, "ignorant," for example. They knew plenty.
Trump is the same, just more so.
The real establishment problem with Trump isn't any of those negative qualities- which except for ignorance are assets in the head manager of a global empire. The beef is his refusal to respect the established norms of U.S. imperialist strategy. Attacking trading partners, undermining the NATO military "alliance," publicly insulting allied heads of state, is harmful to U.S. power, at least potentially. Trump slashes aimlessly at reality, without a strategy. His existential modus operandi, which he has brought into the White House, is to bully and bluster, alternated with blatant flattery, pushing others off-balance psychologically in order to con them or just flat-out rip them off. He's currently conducting trade "policy" with an eye to shoving one-sided trade deals down the throats of Mexico, Canada, Europe, and China. This seems to have succeeded with Mexico, and probably will with Canada, which will probably end up extorted into sacrificing its dairy farmers, who are currently protected, and maybe its commercial mass culture industry too. Europe and China will be tougher nuts to crack, but the U.S. has the upper hand with them too.
But while the New Yorker missed the mark, Trump is different in some ways.
Personality: Trump is a blatant narcissist. All presidents have narcissistic tendencies, or they wouldn't think they should be president. But Trump is clinically narcissistic. Trump also is extremely impulsive. And he habitually humiliates people- but so did Nixon, for example. Trump's difference here is one of degree, not kind.
Then there is lying. Of course all presidents lie, but Trump's lies are stupid, blatant, and insulting to our intelligence. Also much more frequent. Or maybe not much more. Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, Obama all lied a hell of a lot. But there lies could be overlooked by the establishment media, even affirmed as truths, so it was okay as far as the power structure was concerned, They were lies backed by the system, unlike most of Trump's.
Besides personality, Trump is very different in that he is in open conflict with the Deep State, the real power, the secret police agencies including parts of the military, especially the National Security Agency, (NSA), the super-surveillance of everyone and everything arm of U.S. imperialism. That is more significant than Trump's outré personality.
A big reason most of the establishment media exaggerates the uniqueness is Trump is its need to obfuscate the reality of the existence of U.S. imperialism. As always, they cover the true nature of the U.S. system of corporate oligarchy and empire with a heavy blanket of gaslighting propaganda. To perceive reality under this system is to feel like one is losing one's mind, that either one must be crazy or "everyone else" is crazy. Perceiving reality while retaining one's sanity is a struggle in a system where horrendous crimes, such as the deliberate destruction of three skyscrapers under cover of allowing two jets to crash into two of them, is carried out openly and blatantly lied about by every media source, including "alternative" ones, for years thereafter. That happened on September 11, 2001. What happened next made the motives clear: invasion of Iraq, the first of the planned invasion of seven Middle East countries to "remake" the region more to the liking of imperialists drunk on power, and the permanent erasure of the already weak personal rights against state power in the U.S. The latter is a bipartisan project, which Barack "The Drone Assassin" enthusiastically and sneakily continued, for example with the insertion into the military budget of a law empowering the Federal government to declare any U.S. citizen a "terrorist" and imprison that person indefinitely in military gulag without charges or recourse to any legal process whatsoever.
Ah, "liberalism!" In some ways indistinguishable from "conservatism." Now that's "bipartisanship"!
1] "Crazytown: A Bob Woodward Book, an Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed, and a Growing Crisis for the Trump Presidency- The Republican 'resistance' goes public (sort of), and everyone freaks out," New Yorker, September 6, 2018, third paragraph, last sentence.
Lawless? What about Andrew Jackson, who ignored a Supreme Court decision and forced an entire Native American tribe on a death march.
Or George Bush, who violated U.S. law and the anti-torture treaty the U.S. was obligated to obey, and waged illegal aggressive war on Iraq?
Or Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, who flouted his oath of office by failing to faithfully execute the laws of the land and uphold the U.S. Constitution by NOT prosecuting U.S. torturers, or financiers who committed fraud.
Or how about Ronald Reagan, who violated the Boland Amendment, a U.S. law forbidding aid to the contra terrorists committing atrocities in Nicaragua?
Or how about hundreds of other examples from U.S. history?
Here's how the "liberal" and very bourgeois New Yorker magazine describes Donald Trump:
"Amazingly, it is no longer big news when the occupant of the Oval Office is shown to be callous, ignorant, nasty, and untruthful." [1]
Just like Nixon. Or Ford. Or Reagan. Or both Bushes. It's "amazing" if you just arrived here from another planet.
But only some of those adjectives apply to other presidents. We can't call Obama, Clinton, or Carter, "ignorant," for example. They knew plenty.
Trump is the same, just more so.
The real establishment problem with Trump isn't any of those negative qualities- which except for ignorance are assets in the head manager of a global empire. The beef is his refusal to respect the established norms of U.S. imperialist strategy. Attacking trading partners, undermining the NATO military "alliance," publicly insulting allied heads of state, is harmful to U.S. power, at least potentially. Trump slashes aimlessly at reality, without a strategy. His existential modus operandi, which he has brought into the White House, is to bully and bluster, alternated with blatant flattery, pushing others off-balance psychologically in order to con them or just flat-out rip them off. He's currently conducting trade "policy" with an eye to shoving one-sided trade deals down the throats of Mexico, Canada, Europe, and China. This seems to have succeeded with Mexico, and probably will with Canada, which will probably end up extorted into sacrificing its dairy farmers, who are currently protected, and maybe its commercial mass culture industry too. Europe and China will be tougher nuts to crack, but the U.S. has the upper hand with them too.
But while the New Yorker missed the mark, Trump is different in some ways.
Personality: Trump is a blatant narcissist. All presidents have narcissistic tendencies, or they wouldn't think they should be president. But Trump is clinically narcissistic. Trump also is extremely impulsive. And he habitually humiliates people- but so did Nixon, for example. Trump's difference here is one of degree, not kind.
Then there is lying. Of course all presidents lie, but Trump's lies are stupid, blatant, and insulting to our intelligence. Also much more frequent. Or maybe not much more. Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, Obama all lied a hell of a lot. But there lies could be overlooked by the establishment media, even affirmed as truths, so it was okay as far as the power structure was concerned, They were lies backed by the system, unlike most of Trump's.
Besides personality, Trump is very different in that he is in open conflict with the Deep State, the real power, the secret police agencies including parts of the military, especially the National Security Agency, (NSA), the super-surveillance of everyone and everything arm of U.S. imperialism. That is more significant than Trump's outré personality.
A big reason most of the establishment media exaggerates the uniqueness is Trump is its need to obfuscate the reality of the existence of U.S. imperialism. As always, they cover the true nature of the U.S. system of corporate oligarchy and empire with a heavy blanket of gaslighting propaganda. To perceive reality under this system is to feel like one is losing one's mind, that either one must be crazy or "everyone else" is crazy. Perceiving reality while retaining one's sanity is a struggle in a system where horrendous crimes, such as the deliberate destruction of three skyscrapers under cover of allowing two jets to crash into two of them, is carried out openly and blatantly lied about by every media source, including "alternative" ones, for years thereafter. That happened on September 11, 2001. What happened next made the motives clear: invasion of Iraq, the first of the planned invasion of seven Middle East countries to "remake" the region more to the liking of imperialists drunk on power, and the permanent erasure of the already weak personal rights against state power in the U.S. The latter is a bipartisan project, which Barack "The Drone Assassin" enthusiastically and sneakily continued, for example with the insertion into the military budget of a law empowering the Federal government to declare any U.S. citizen a "terrorist" and imprison that person indefinitely in military gulag without charges or recourse to any legal process whatsoever.
Ah, "liberalism!" In some ways indistinguishable from "conservatism." Now that's "bipartisanship"!
1] "Crazytown: A Bob Woodward Book, an Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed, and a Growing Crisis for the Trump Presidency- The Republican 'resistance' goes public (sort of), and everyone freaks out," New Yorker, September 6, 2018, third paragraph, last sentence.
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