If you’ve been watching not just the two and a half year long meltdown, but the more recent acceleration of it on Twitter by the President of the United States, you know that he’s not a mentally healthy man. He’s lied constantly, switched to the third person to congratulate himself for imaginary victories, gone on sprees of retweeting white nationalists, called for designating anti-fascist demonstrators “terrorists,” and oh yeah, lied some more.
But at the risk of sounding like a scold, I could have told you all of this and more would happen way back when we weren’t even a year into his presidency.
That’s when a report came out that detailed exactly what Trump demands from those around him to maintain his precarious hold on the facade of power and authority he thinks he wields. Trump sees himself not just as a sort of “king” of the United States, someone with unlimited power to simply do what he wants, but also as a kind of “boss” of the country as well, making him solely responsible for whether the nation succeeds as he attempts to “run it like a business.”
Yes, we just watched him try to order American companies to change their supply chains and stop accepting shipments of a legal, FDA-approved prescription drug. Yes, we know now that he’s been telling his aides to make the border wall happen at any cost, including breaking the law in order to do it.
But all the way back in August of 2017, VICE News reported on something unusual in the Trump administration that doesn’t just explain that kind of behavior, it underscores it. It puts it in all caps, underlines, and bolds it. From that report:
Twice a day since the beginning of the Trump administration, a special folder is prepared for the president. The first document is prepared around 9:30 a.m. and the follow-up, around 4:30 p.m.
These sensitive papers, described to VICE News by three current and former White House officials, don’t contain top-secret intelligence or updates on legislative initiatives. Instead, the folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.”
“The Propaganda Document,” they called it, because the only response they ever got from the President’s office on what they were preparing was that it “needs to be more fucking positive.” So they made it more positive.
Now what we have is a child President who has been told one too many times how great he is at everything in the world, especially being President. The way Trump has been coddled since the very beginning is what led us to where we are today, and honestly, it all makes sense.
Featured image via screen capture
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