Ugly blow for Donald Trump
Just when you thought we finally found something worse than Vogon poetry, the blog “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” is now officially defunct. It has been ignominiously (and quietly) deleted from the website donaldjtrump.com with no prospects of ever resurrecting it. The blog will not be missed.
Trump aide Jason Miller informed Sky News affiliate CNBC that the page “will not be returning.” Mr. Miller made a baffling addition to his announcement when he said, “it was just auxiliary to the broader efforts we have and are working on.” Mr. Miller refused to elaborate on just what those “broader efforts” might entail, or how the existence of a blog might somehow be mutually exclusive to them. Mr. Miller unhelpfully concluded that he was “hoping to have more information on the broader efforts soon, but I do not have a precise awareness of timing.” I’m going to hazard a guess and say “two weeks.”
Broader efforts. Now I don’t know about you, brothers and sisters, but that sounds like what my great aunt Kitty sometimes referred to as bullshit. I envy you if you’ve managed to block it out, but I still remember a White House that could be depended on to provide inordinate quantities of bovine excreta. It wasn’t only that the White House lied so often, they also did it badly, as if they were weary from the effort or had too much contempt for the American people or because they were stupid or all three.
But in the absence of a plausible official explanation, I think Trump deleted it out of fury. Narcissists, especially malignant narcissists, frequently suffer rages when things don’t go their own way. I can easily imagine Trump flying into a rage because he knew not many people were reading his blog. He knew, in short, that his ratings were poor. His ego couldn’t handle it so he flew into a rage and deleted the blog. Broader issues need not play a role.
I know just what those rages look like, too. A significant member of my family who was also a malignant narcissist once destroyed an entire cupboard full of plates and cups by smashing them on a linoleum countertop in my home, all because they couldn’t get their own way. Such demonstrations of unbridled human hate and immaturity are terrible to witness. Trump is notorious for such frightening rages and they not infrequently turn destructive.
Obviously I have no way of knowing for sure if that was what happened to Trump’s blog. But because I have been lied to so many times by the Trump organization I feel entirely justified in making up my own narrative, and I am free to be as irresponsibly inventive as I please. When it comes to evil people, the injustice of attributing corrupt motives to them is no injustice at all.
If you think that Trump’s broader efforts might include his being miraculously “reinstated” as president of the United States in August, you are probably still waiting for Mexico to pay for the wall. There exists no plausible legal mechanism for Trump to become president again, and overthrowing the most powerful government on earth is a quest for fantasists — and especially fantasists who are malignant narcissists.
In 11 days (as I write this) Donald Trump will be 75 years old. His best chance to become president of the United States is in the past, in 2016 when he slipped into the scene and took full advantage of the worst pandemic in American history, the pandemic called ignorance. Fortunately many of us have since become inoculated against Trumpian ignorance, and while it’s true we haven’t quite achieved herd immunity, a new generation of Americans are growing up with a more natural immunity. I believe the days of Trump are finally at an end, and the death of his blog symbolizes one of its final shuddering gasps. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.