Sunday 7th January
‘Fire and Fury’ has just hit the headlines. It describes in pretty graphic detail (the short excerpts I have read anyway) the chaos of the current White House under Donald Trump. Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned. I have met not a single person who likes him, or who even believes he may be a good President. And even in America his fans appear to be losing faith in him. The only real concrete thing he has achieved are his huge tax cuts for the rich. This has long been a Republican dream and would probably have happened with any Republican President. For all the bluster and the midnight tweets there seem to have been very few real achievements.
The book not only details the chaos, the feuds and the lack of coherence and policy making but paints a particularly harsh, but only too believable, picture of Trump himself. He doesn’t read anything, he has a ridiculously short attention span, he goes to bed early and watches three TV screens and eats cheeseburgers. And he tweets his hatred against anyone who crosses his path.
Now, I do use Social media – Facebook mostly. But I place far more importance on the written word. A book, especially, has to be thought about and revised and planned, and generally will have well-constructed arguments. A tweet requires far less, if any, intellectual rigour. Tweets are usually reactions to news items or other comments and are composed quickly and off-the-cuff.
Well, the President says the book is all lies. A Fake Book, if you please. And so he continues to disparage in short sentences anything he disagrees with. Rather than engage with the facts he dismisses them as fake.
But the pen is far mightier than the tweet. The book will be around far longer than Donald’s tweets. It may even become a major warning of the dangers of Populism for generations to come.
How the whole ‘Donald’ saga will end is anyone’s guess. Impeachment still seems a remote possibility. He will almost certainly want to win again in 2020, but if the polls, and more importantly the damage to the Republicans in mid-term elections continue then he may be persuaded to retire through ill-health. That may be our best hope. Until then, the only real weapon we have is ridicule – the one thing his tweets simply re-inforce.