I would prefer if responses didn’t get into tributes to, or debates on the quality of, a movie, but I keep coming up against Aaron Sorkin’s political romantic comedy, THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, and in particular President Shepard’s genial response to someone stammering an apology for a name-calling rant the President walked in on: “Is it your impression that I’m upset? Seldom is the day that I’m not burned in effigy.”

I think also of Barack Obama, who had to be personally steamed by the depths of the racist abuse and conspiracy nonsense flung his way over and above any criticisms that made sense, rarely losing his public equanimity.

Now I think of Donald Trump, who we have been told is now screaming behind locked doors, of protestors: “DON’T THEY KNOW I’M PRESIDENT?”

The man who refused to acknowledge that Obama was an American citizen, who daily distorted his record, who screamed epithets about him from the lectern, who showered his GOP primary opponents with abuse of the most rancid sort, who led his convention audiences in chanting mean-spirited slogans…that man somehow entered office harboring the belief that once he occupied the White House himself, all criticism would stop, that everybody would love him.

Obama, whether you loved him or hated him, was an adult. He knew that there was no way, as a Democratic President as one painted as “liberal” – though in most ways he wasn’t – he would be slammed on a daily basis. Bill Clinton, whether you loved him or hated him, was also an adult. He endured actual efforts to destroy him, for years at a time, and rarely let them see him sweat. George W. Bush sometimes showed the strain, but rarely the anger; and whether you loved them or hated them, the same could be said of his father, and publicly at least Ronald Reagan, and before him Jimmy Carter.

There are good Presidents among them, and a couple of great ones, and as it happens a couple of disastrous ones. We can for the moment put aside our disagreements on who belongs in what categories. But one thing they all had in common, at the bare minimum, was a basic understanding of the game, the awareness that at rock bottom, even if they were superb, about half the nation would vocally hate them.

Hence the spooky calm of the fictional President Shepard. He knew it came with the job.

By contrast we once had Richard Nixon, whose mental state harbored a deep well of twitchy paranoia, who was always about the people plotting against him. He was a man who despised being touched, who having achieved the highest office in the land was still a lonely little resentful man, obsessed with those who were against him, those who failed to love him.

Donald Trump is, it turns out, Nixon times twenty. High office holds no joys for him. It doesn’t provide the universal acclaim he somehow pictured despite all historical precedent. It doesn’t give him the validation he somehow expected, the validation that has always arrived in small amounts but that has never been enough to fill his bottomless hunger for it.

He is a man who enters a party who doesn’t understand why half the people he meets scowl in disgust, and doesn’t understand that he’s soiled his pants.  He reacts childishly, with anger. He starts throwing tantrums. He’s supposed to have more! Finally, he’s supposed to be loved!

This unloved and unlovable man, who from all accounts has lived his life without friends, who only has business partners, this man who can buy the attentions of the world’s most beautiful women but must know he would not have them if he earned air-traffic controller money, is at the center of the world and he’s upset to find out that he’s still all alone.

Still!

And now, to discover that the job is no fun?

This is a dangerous time for the world, because it is not yet decided what happens when the awful truth kicks in. I personally think it a possibility that he will decide the Presidency is no fun after all, and that he will either actually resign in a huff, or that he will retreat further and further into his funk, until he reaches full disengagement: that is, if he doesn’t explode completely and do something (even more) stupid.

But in the meantime, this is where we are.

He is the man in the TWILIGHT ZONE episode whose afterlife consists of getting everything he ever wanted, and discovers that it’s hell.

Our hell is that we’re in there with him.

Tags: Aaron Sorkin, Assholes, Barack Obama, Democrats, Donald Trump, Jimmy Carter, Republicans, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, The American President, The Twilight Zone | Category Commentary, Life Wisdom, Politics, Uncategorized