Trump the Psyop in Chief

From my archived blog (January 2019) at donaldjeffries.wordpress.com

Note: This is another in a continuing series of previously published articles. This was the beginning of my Trumpenstein Project hypothesis, although I didn’t call it that yet. Please subscribe to my regular Substack here: donaldjeffries.substack.com

One of Donald Trump’s most recent tweets has finally convinced me that he is literally an actor, strutting across the world stage. While Trump has displayed an incomprehensibly inarticulate nature, and an abysmal lack of spelling ability, this latest tweet is just too over the top. Hamberders? Are we actually to believe that the President of the United States, a billionaire in the corporate world, one who attended Fordham University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance, is not able to spell “hamburger” correctly?

Trump’s latest egregious spelling error occurred during a tweet celebrating yet another cartoonish escapade, where a “fast food buffet” was served to the NCAA football champion Clemson players. Trump, always in character, made certain to boast that he personally paid for this low-cost feast. And exaggerate the number of “hamberders” that were bought. Was it 300? Or 1000?

It was natural for Donald Trump to choose fast food. According to what we’re told, he eats almost nothing except McDonalds’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and KFC. And washes this garbage down with an alleged twelve Diet Cokes every day. This would be a suicidal diet for anyone, let alone an overweight seventy two year old.

The leader of the free world has topped George Dubya Bush, the great “decider,” in terms of grammatical gaffes. Trump has bragged about having the “best words.” Trump once tweeted out a confusing mess that included “covfefe,” which appeared to be an attempt at spelling “coverage.” During a May 2017 press release about Trump’s trip to Israel, his office mimicked his style, with misspellings that should have seemingly been caught by any educated staffer.

Trump misspelled the first name of his ambassadorial nominee Jon Huntsman. He used “council” in a sentence that should have read “White House counsel.” A week later, the president misused the word again, and this time misspelled it as “councel.” In a December 2016 snipe at China, he accused them of “an unpresidented act.” He once tweeted, “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones…”

Trump’s official inauguration poster contained the comical  ungrammatical sentence: “No dream is too big, no challenge is to great.” Trump’s crack White House staff once managed to misspell “attaker” more than twenty times in a list of supposedly under reported terrorist attacks. The White House also misspelled Theresa May’s first name as “Teresa” in the schedule for her early 2017 visit. Teresa May, coincidentally or not, is the name of a British porn star.

Trump struggled to spell the word “hereby,” misspelling it as both “hear by” and “hearby” in two different tweets. The two laughably sandwiched a call for education reform. This brought to mind one of Dubya Bush’s most hilariously ungrammatical comments that included, “Is our children learning.” An angry Trump lashed out at the media about “thr” coverage that “gas been so false and angry..” Simple typos, but clearly neither Trump nor anyone else in the White House proofreads his tweets.

The transcript of Trump’s phone call with the leader of Colombia misspelled the country as “Columbia.”  Shortly after taking the oath of office, Donald Trump set the tone clearly, when he tweeted about being “honered to serve you.” Trump has misspelled “separation.” While doling out his typical praise on the military, Trump referred to the Marine Corps as “Marine Core.” Trump has, probably intentionally, misspelled the odious Rep. Adam Schiff’s name as Adam “Schitt.” Also probably intentionally, he has spelled Obama’s first name as “Barrack.” He has even spelled his wife’s name as “Melanie” on Twitter. Well, Obama did refer to his wife as “Michael,” opening up a whole different can of conspiratorial worms.

Donald Trump’s routine misspellings, and construction of such ungrammatical sentences on Twitter, would shame your barely literate typical American teenager. Spelling “wait” as “waite?” “Smocking gun?” Predictably, Trump’s hard-core defenders maintain that his grammatical errors are done purposefully, part of the whole “he’s playing 8,000D chess” theory. Certainly, his gaffes often bring extra attention to whatever point he’s trying to make. Is Trump really a 159 IQ genius, playing to his base by trying to appear to be as “real” as they are?

Or is Donald Trump a crisis actor par excellence, summoned by forces above us all to ride in recklessly on an off-white horse, to bull rush his way through a cultural china shop?  To parrot catch phrases like “America first” and “lock her up,” which appealed to millions of disaffected voters most impacted by unbridled immigration, disastrous trade policies, and corporate greed? Is his tough talking, unapologetic style scripted to evoke a bygone era when men were men, women were women, and there were no other genders?

Trump’s recent choice of William Barr as his new Attorney General is not remotely believable as anything other than theater. We are told by no less than Lindsay Graham that Barr has been “best friends” with Robert Mueller for decades. The same Mueller that is pushing every imaginary Russian button he can invent, in order to appease all the Trump-haters out there. Why would a politician pick his supposed enemy’s “best friend” as his choice to monitor that enemy’s persecution of him? Of all Trump’s inexplicable, Never Trumper-style picks, this one was the most difficult to defend.

The Donald Trump phenomenon has succeeded in resurrecting the inane American two-party system. Thanks exclusively to his brash personality, the American electorate is pretty much split down the middle, with half-crazed Trump Derangement Syndrome haters on one side, and unreasoning “follow the plan” fans on the other side. Americans have always foolishly followed this no-choice “two party” system, and the putrid candidates it produces. But at least there were more independents before Trump. Now, one must either be “fer” or “agin” our larger than life president.

Those who irrationally hate this comic caricature in the White House, do so because he’s a “racist,” a “sexist,” and because he’s been lampooned so mercilessly by the cultural icons they admire. Those who irrationally defend him do so because he throws them a few sound bites of red meat, usually on Twitter, from some dark corner of the White House. No one talks about auditing the Fed, or bringing all the troops home, or rebuilding our collapsing infrastructure, or that promised vaccine commission chaired by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The fake unemployment stats Trump accurately called out during his campaign are now gospel, and reveal what a marvelous job he’s doing.

Trump has done some good things, and said many more good things. Getting us out of the TPP was good. The tariffs are good. Withdrawing troops from Syria, or anywhere else, was good. The summit with Putin was good. The deal with North Korea was good. If Trump acted on only a fraction of his rhetoric, this country might actually be salvageable. But instead, he regularly back tracks, and flip flops, and appoints one horrific neocon swamp creature after another to his cabinet.

The only explanation for all this nonstop drama is that Donald Trump is not a befuddled, but well-meaning businessman, unexpectedly thrust into the presidency. No one could achieve the success he has achieved, and be such an inarticulate speaker and writer. If he had any intention of “draining the swamp,” at some point he would have named someone outside the swamp to help him do that.

Donald Trump represents the Truman Show writ large. A well-paid actor, playing the part of the ultimate WWE-style villain, to anger or enthrall all the other poor players out there upon the stage.