Chucking paper towels to the peasants with the Donald.
Wow! Does Jonathan Chait writing in NY Magazine ever nail Trump’s response to the catastrophe in Puerto Rico to the wall for all to see. It’s an amazing piece, Chait was able to get inside Trump’s twisted mind and expose his lack of empathy for the 3.5 million Americans that are suffering and dying needlessly because of his cruelty.
Combine the cruelty with sheer incompetence and dereliction of duty and we witness what is likely to be one of the worst humanitarian disasters in this nation’s history.
This does not need to happen, the military can get the job done and the GOP knows it. Do they really want to be complicit in a crime against humanity? This has the feel of genocide. I could rant forever, but here is an excerpt of Chait’s piece.
Puerto Rico’s disaster has made Trump think about the role of the state in furnishing basic survival goods. He quickly adopted positions far to the right of even the most hardened libertarian ideologue. Trump assailed “ingrates” who “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.” How could people possibly take personal responsibility when they lack access to electricity, drinking water, and even their own money? He mused that Puerto Rico is “throwing our budget out of whack,” a strange complaint from a man who frequently calls for the “the biggest tax cut we’ve ever had.”
The Trump who complained about lazy Puerto Ricans who needed to pick themselves up by their bootstraps rather than drain the Treasury was the familiar race-baiter. But there was also another dynamic on display: Trump’s habit of personalizing every case to an almost pathological degree. What set off the president was less the formal position of Puerto Rican politicians and their constituents (that they needed help to recover from a natural catastrophe) than the fact that they complained about it.
Trump views his powers as president in near-absolute terms. “I will give you everything,” he promised during the campaign. “I will give you what you’ve been looking for 50 years. I’m the only one.” In this sense, Trump occupies the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from the small-government conservatism of his party. He imagines himself as a monarch, dispensing favors to grateful subjects and punishing the ungrateful. He has promised to give the people “everything,” but if he sees them expecting to be given “everything,” he will rage at them.
When Puerto Rican officials grasped the dynamic, and dutifully praised their commander-in-chief for his attentive and not-at-all-incompetent handling of the disaster, it set the stage for Trump to flip from scornful race-baiting autarch to generous favor-dispensing autarch. The scene of the president tossing out paper towels to his citizens like they were contest winners recalled Immortan Joe favoring his subjects by turning on the water spigot.
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