A hat tip to Ken W, in Michigan I think, who told me to look up this reference. The author, a Brit to be sure, is so spot on that I felt compelled to share the short article. And to those who know me, a Canuck through and through, will know that many Canadians will share this view. There are many Americans that likely share this view too.
From The HOBBLEDEHOY
Someone on Quora asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:
A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. …
God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump. …
I encourage you to read the remainder of this short article. There is a Star Wars comparison that is so graphic and so amusing. I hope you get some much needed levity from it. I also should say that this article was written 08 March 2019 so does not include any of Trump’s COVID-19 fiascos which would only make things worse.
17 Responses to “From Across the Pond — A Brit writer describes Trump”
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I like this well written and defining piece, and the author.
Everything in the article, is the perfect description of dt.
There’s a smugness of dt in that picture too.
Loved reading this though.
Thanks, Lynn for a spot on post!!
Glad you enjoyed it Pat!
Can you imagine how it would read if it were done in March 2020 with Trump’s pathetic response to COVID underway? He is a joke extraordinaire!
This article is spot on about His Orangeness, except that there is nothing funny about his incompetence, his cruelty, his capriciousness, or his delusions. He has no concept of leadership, responsibility, ethics or honesty. He is as out of touch with reality as any patient in a mental health facility. He belongs in a rubber room, not the Oval Office. Fiends like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini and Franco at least knew what the hell they were doing. Trump doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, which makes him even more dangerous. Vote Blue No Matter Who, top to bottom – even if the Democrat candidate is a stinkaroo, because at least he/she is not a Republican!
You’re quite correct Freya when you say “…there is nothing funny about his incompetence, his cruelty, his capriciousness, or his delusions.”
What Trump unleashes on the people of the US is mindboggling in its depravity.
I had actually seen it, but thanks for refreshing my memory – it has been a long time and it’s well worth re-reading – and trying not to forget so much of it.
I did not recall having ever read it before but I am sure I won’t now. It is so accurate. I wonder if he’ll try to sue the author or me for republishing it! If he were to try that, I have one response which is quite visual — the middle finger salute!
I had seen it too, but this brilliant article certainly warrants reading again, and again, so thanks for posting it, Lynn. Those Brits have a way with words, don’t they? I find it fascinating how they can analyse someone and tear them completely apart while never straying from the polite palaver of a gentleman.
Yes indeed. Who was it who defined a gentleman as one “who never unintentionally offends”? (It sounds like Oscar Wilde)
Spot on, Joanne. It is Oscar Wilde.
Thanks Lona! Love that phrase “polite palaver of a gentleman”. Such makes me happy to have Brit roots (mixed with French and German of course!).
Have seen this before, loved it, shared it with two Brit friends, who also loved it. This is what the world, not just the Brits think of the putz!
Here is an Irishman’s Point of view, from Late April:
Subject: IRISH TIMES ARTICLE, by Fintan O’Toole; 4/24(or25)20This is very disturbing but worth a read and so much is so true! Subject: IRISH TIMES ARTICLEDate: April 26, 2020 at 3:31:07 PM PDTTHE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE US, NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT. Fintan O’Toole: Irish Times 25/04/2020US president Donald Trump has claimed he was being sarcastic and testing the media when he raised the idea that injecting disinfectant or irradiating the body with ultraviolet light might kill coronavirus.Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted … like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – willfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.Abject surrenderWhat used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.There is, as the demonstrations in US cities show, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fueled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.Fertile groundBut this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is reveling in it. He is in his element.As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
This “Irish Times” article was recently featured in “The Week” magazine.
I particularly enjoyed this sentence:
I am pleased that you and your Brit friends enjoyed this very apt description of Trump. Although I must say that “putz” is very understated.
I remember you putting out the Irish piece earlier. The word “pity” is not one that anyne would wish but is very appropriate for the US under Trump.
Great article.
Wow. this author really knows tRump to the T.
He should of never been put in the leadership role that he is in. He’s done nothing that falls under the title/description of a leader.
He’s a heartless destructive bully.
Thanks Lynn
Thanks Colleen. And to think that Trump thinks he is deserving of a Nobel prize. Not in a million years!
Very good, Lona.
We laugh with people with the qualities Brits admire. We laugh AT Trump*!
I’m glad you liked it TC. I figured all here would but it is Trump’s ‘fan base’ that really need to read it and take it to heart.
To paraphrase a saying, “You’re only as good as your current pResident.”