A Dog Caught a Car and Became President

Dogs chase cars all the time. I suspect it makes them feel tough and important–look at me chasing you off my turf–as they chase car after car. They never actually catch one, of course. What would they do with it if they caught it? They’d find out very quickly that they didn’t really want to catch it, they just wanted to look tough enough to do it.

But in November of 2016, a dog finally caught a car and he is now sitting in the Oval Office.

Anyone willing to see past their own nose can tell that Donald Trump is completely uncomfortable and totally in over his head as President. It has been suspected and whispered about for a year now that he really didn’t want to win the election–that he was just setting himself up for a fame and power grab that the attention of the campaign would bring him. Now, journalist Michael Wolff has blown the lid off the not-so-well-kept secret with a new book called Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Excerpts from the book were published in New York Magazine last week and that story landed like a bombshell. You can read that piece here.

In addition to the confirmation that, right up until the 11th hour of election night, nobody in the Trump campaign expected to win, nor did they want to win, it is frightening to realize that a man who was running not to win, but to increase his celebrity, actually managed to ascend to the White House. It’s startling to read the account of how, when he realized he might actually win, Trump’s mood changed and he became terrified behind the scenes. It’s more sickening still to see how quickly he morphed from a man caught in his own trap to a man who’d almost immediately conned himself into believing he was up for the challenge. Here is a short excerpt from Wolff’s book that reveals that disturbing transformation.

“Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.”

There is a whole lot of delusional thinking revealed in that excerpt and it makes me shiver with dread, particularly in the wake of some of the president’s recent tweets regarding Kim Jong-un and nuclear war “buttons.”  I’m incredibly uncomfortable with the notion that a man who is that mentally unstable has access to weapons of world-wide devastation.

The book goes on to detail behind the scenes information that confirms many of our worst fears about Donald Trump. The delusion definitely didn’t stop with the surprise election night win. Example after example paints a portrait of a dangerously clueless president with a power-hungry advisory staff pulling most of the strings behind the scenes.

None of these details really come a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, but to see them all laid out in the manner Michael Wolff has presented them–backed, apparently, by hours and hours of audio tape to prove it–makes it that much more real–and disturbing.

A friend of mine provided me with a great analogy. He likened the Wolff book to the video tape of Baltimore Ravens player, Ray Rice cold-cocking his girlfriend and dragging her limp body out of the elevator into the hallway. All the other evidence said he was guilty, but the video was damning and he likely faced far more swift and severe judgement because of the video tape than he would have otherwise.

One could also draw a correlation with the Watergate tapes. When those were released it was a whole new ball game.

If a significant percentage of what is in Michael Wolff’s book holds up to the closer scrutiny that is certain to come, we could be looking at a game changing situation.

Time will tell, but this whole story just got a whole lot more intense.