Adnan R. Khan: As Trump's poll numbers plummet, a desperate U.S. president reveals his true colours, and finds theatrics can only take him so far
In 1997, Mark Singer, a staff writer atmagazine specializing in profiles, was tasked with what many today would chalk up as a literary suicide mission: Follow Donald Trump and find out what makes him tick.
Singer, not known to shy away from challenges, embarked on weeks of research, shadowing Trump in what ultimately reads like an otherworldly jaunt through the crass Wonderland that is Trumpworld, complete with mobsters, Hollywood stars and shady businesspeople. But in other ways, something has changed. The “artfully calculating” Trump of 1997 has gone missing, replaced by a clumsy, sometimes pitiful novice who can’t seem to formulate any cohesive strategy.
Whatever it might be, what we’re seeing now is not the same fit and agile Trump who is pictured in the 1997profile. We’re seeing past that glittery veneer at an angry man-child, the inevitable outcome of an upbringing poisoned by privilege and racism. The more he fails— against the pandemic, against America’s racial reckoning, against the polls—the more desperate he appears to become, and the more transparent.
“Donald Trump knows that so long as he never corrects himself or acknowledges error, journalists will quote what he says,” Johnston told me recently. “That’s why George Lakoff, the cognitive research professor at UC Berkeley argues journalists who cover Trump should use what he calls a truth sandwich.
Increasingly, a cornered Trump is turning to those people most like him, a segment of the American population lashing out at the prospect of losing its privileged position, of having to compete on an equal footing with immigrants and people of colour, with homosexuals, queers and the gender fluid. The dream for most of us—a world where the colour of your skin or the clothes you wear has nothing to do with your life prospects—is a nightmare for them.
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