He cannot let it go

One of the most, and simultaneously least, amusing aspects of Donald Trump is the dawning realisation, as evidenced by his tweets and comments in the last couple of weeks, that he is – far from being an odd distant and unfamiliar character, quite the opposite. He’s all too familiar. He is, indeed, the equivalent of the person on Politics.ie who perhaps you or more likely I may well have been, say, ten years ago, more than a little bit drunk and commenting well into the early hours in hollow ‘discussions’ determined to get the last word where there was error or confusion. Or just error. As we saw it. In other words there is nothing too large or too small for him that cannot, indeed must not, be let go unresponded to.

That’s okay for us, we’re not in charge of a nuclear strike capability sufficient to scour human and much other life from the face of this planet, but he is. And still he tweets.

What’s stunning, in a way, is how thin-skinned he is. And how bathetic the range of issues that generate a response from him. Meryl Streep says some stuff at an award ceremony and up he pops. The heads of US intelligence say some other stuff. Ditto.

Is this going to continue when he becomes President? Is there anyone who can prise a smart phone from his paws?

What’s also a bit staggering is his continuing propensity to exaggerate (or to use the technical term ‘lie’). For example he’s made much of the idea that Clinton lost badly to him. For those of us who democrats, and who consider the US system horribly flawed in that respect, the reality is she – for all her failings, which were myriad, didn’t. In fact she was able to command very slightly less of the popular vote than Obama. And it ill-serves Trump to argue that line because it is so easily dismissed. But then one has the feeling that there’s a lot of chaos swirling around the higher reaches of his enterprise.

Where this ends? I don’t know. If one has an internal security level mine would be set on ‘concerned’. I don’t recall it being quite that high since 9/11. Trump is an incredibly volatile, remarkably ignorant, absurdly self-centred individual. We genuinely haven’t seen his like in our lifetimes in power in any major state I can think of (i.e. the USSR/Russia, US, Germany, UK, France). It is near impossible to predict how matters will proceed from here. That should fact alone is deeply troubling.