GUEST BLOG / By Frank Bruni, Columnist, The New York Times.--Just how run-down must a raging narcissist be to snooze through tributes to his own greatness?
At a cabinet meeting last week, President Trump didn’t merely close his eyes and achieve a droopy stillness universally recognized as a vertical nap. He did so during a gathering convened at least in part so he could bathe in his acolytes’ flattery.
They batted their eyes at him; his eyelids fluttered shut. He might want to think twice about letting the television cameras in next time around.
And the rest of us might want to brace ourselves for some presidential déjà vu.
He’s starting to give President Joe Biden vibes. I’m in no way suggesting any equivalence or near equivalence in their characters. Biden meant well, regarded governing as serious business and radiated decency. Trump means to be either feared or worshiped, regards governing as show business and revels in cruelty and mockery, which are flexes of his power.
But there are echoes of what bedeviled Biden in what’s bedeviling Trump.
And I’m talking about more than Trump’s arguably diminished energy and the inarguably intensifying public attention to it. I’m also talking about the economy — and Trump’s spectacular failure to allay voters’ anxieties.
The rap on Biden during the second half of his term was that he didn’t fully understand how financially stressed many Americans were and that he clung to a tone-deaf insistence that conditions were better than people’s perceptions of them.
Trump, in the first year of his current term, has attained an aloofness that Biden could only dream of. At that cabinet meeting, Trump challenged the very idea that the cost of living was on voters’ minds and waged war on a perfectly good noun, dismissing “affordability” as a Democratic hoax and hex. “They just say the word,” Trump groused. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it — affordability.”
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| Secret Service agent: "Is he asleep or did he find gum on his shoe?" |
What made his gripe doubly bizarre is that he himself has talked about affordability time and again, in his indictments of the economy under Biden and his boasts about his own economic plans and progress. He talked about it when he and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, made nice in the Oval Office just two and a half weeks ago, beaming at each other as the journalists in attendance picked their jaws up off the floor.
“Some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have,” the president told them. “A big thing on cost. The new word is ‘affordability.’ Another word, it’s just ‘groceries.’ It’s sort of an old-fashioned word, but it’s very accurate. They are coming down.”
The “coming down” part presumably refers to food prices, but with Trump’s fugitive grammar, you never know. That phrasing was uncharacteristically understated. Trump tends toward the kind of hyperbole he spewed at Laura Ingraham on Fox News last month, when he claimed that “we have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” During that interview, he also said polls showing that Americans were worried about it are fake, a deflection so similar to one that Biden made a year and a half earlier that on CNN, the anchor Abby Phillip did a side-by-side comparison of the two presidents’ remarks. She introduced it with a question: “When it comes to the economy, is Donald Trump taking messaging advice from Joe Biden?”
He’s certainly not learning lessons from Biden’s troubles. In a recent column in The Economist with the clever print headline “Say It Ain’t Joe,” James Bennet recalled the audacious flurry of executive orders Biden signed in his first 100 days, the sweep of his legislative ambition, how fervently he believed that voters had demanded nothing less and how much all of that came back to haunt him later on.
Bring to mind any other president you know?
Whether Trump gets his comeuppance remains to be seen, but his approval ratings have declined in recent months, and so, by the looks of things, has his vigor. Of course, his indefatigably adoring press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, disputes that; she said that Trump was “listening attentively” rather than dozing furtively as cabinet members extolled his and his administration’s wonders. She directed those who doubt his vim to the “epic moment” during the meeting when he attacked Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, and other Somali immigrants to America. You know, the one in which he called them “garbage.” I guess xenophobia is now a proxy for stamina.
Biden was 82 at the end of his presidency. Trump is 79 now, and he undeniably moves more fluidly, speaks more loudly and mixes it up with journalists more frequently than his predecessor did. But there are suggestions aplenty that he’s slowing down, as Katie Rogers and Dylan Freedman detailed in a recent article in The Times.
And Americans are once again on a kind of presidential fitness watch, reading the tea leaves of bruises, blotches, gaffes. Are Trump’s baffling non sequiturs, herky-jerky syntax and fantastical misrepresentations of fact just a wholly unleashed, fully emboldened version of who he has always been, or is his focus blurring? What was up with his swollen ankles and the discoloration, partly concealed by makeup, on the back of one of his hands?
And how to solve the mystery of the M.R.I. that he had at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in October? Trump’s comments about it are the stuff of a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
He has said that he gave the news media the full results of the test, a claim contradicted by the fact that we don’t even know what part of his body physicians were looking at, and when reporters asked him that, he professed ignorance. “I have no idea what they analyzed,” he told a group of them on Air Force One recently. “But whatever they analyzed, they analyzed it well, and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.”
This from a man who still routinely rants about the evasions and deceptions of “Sleepy Joe” Biden?
Wake up, Mr. [current] President. You’re not fooling anyone.
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