You thought he was nuts: Update

pic.twitter.com/0a25gApyJ6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2018

In comments to the post the other day, we got into the question of the president's new Twitter thing, where they post short videos of him yelling for a camera in the Rose Garden (the most recent example above), who was doing it and what it was about. It turns out, Olivia Nuzzi reports at New York, this is a knowable thing:

On August 18, he yelled about manufacturing and, later that day, he yelled about meeting with foreign leaders. On August 22, he yelled about the stock market. And on August 24, he yelled about the economy. The resulting video clips, which range from 23 to 60 seconds in length, are like stream-of-consciousness infomercials for the flimsy concept of #AIGGADW (America Is Getting Great Again, Don’t Worry). With his hands conducting dramatically at his sides, he began the first episode like this: “Made in America is back! Now, some people would say ‘Made in the USA’ —I personally don’t care. The fact is, we’re back.”

According to — I swear to God — five current and former officials from both Donald Trump’s White House and campaign as well as one former official from the Trump Organization, the purpose of this on-camera exercise is simple: It makes him feel (and, he believes, look) good. It’s also a reminder of a freer time in his life, on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, when he first perfected the cockeyed art of digital media virality with an off-the-cuff series of videos called From the Desk of Donald J. Trump and Ask the Donald.

My bold.


It's Bill Shine, the former Fox News honcho who was forced out of the network at the beginning of May under the cloud of coverup accusations in four different sexual harassment cases and joined the White House (naturally!) a couple of months later, as deputy director of communications, who's responsible for this, apparently, putting his professional expertise to work in making the president feel good by making him feel he's on TV, being authoritative, in a sympathetic warm outdoor lighting scheme.

Can't refrain from mentioning Shine's charming wife Darla, who is reported to have

posted many racist comments on social media, defending the flag of the Confederate States of America and complained that she would be called a racist if she used the word "nigger".^[33] She also claimed 1 in 10 black boys have autism, and shared a pro-Russian news story.^[34]

Trump does not look good in these videos, in my opinion. Since he's an awkward old man incongruously dressed in his signature dark suit and overlong red tie standing on a lawn and waving his arms, he looks like somebody saying "Get off my lawn" when the words coming out of his mouth are in fact descriptions of how wonderful he is as a steward of the economy. Why, you want to ask, would you be angry about that?

The big thing is, though, another case of Trump being the emperor, and the inversion of democracy implicit in his style of governing. Instead of trying to satisfy the mob, he's always waiting for the mob to satisfy him, as it does in the population subsamples he meets in the stadiums, and frustrated that they don't (another disastrous poll just arrived, from IBD/TIPP, putting his job approval rate at 36% to 56% disapprove, alongside the similarly surprising ones from Reuters/IPSOS, USA Today, and ABC/Wapo), and sees everybody's job in government as helping out in this task, from the attorney general, who pissed him off by ostensibly doing everything he can to implement the president's terrible policy ideas but refusing to call off the special counsel or Special Councel (just because the dumb old law says he should) to the Houses of Congress, who are apparently threatening to get in the way of his work at torturing Justin Trudeau (just because the pesky Constitution says they can).

Editorial practice: He revised this one three minutes after issuing it, changing "decade" to "decades" and making the whole thing one character too long; fixed that by abbreviating "with"; and took advantage of the extra space to add an additional dot at the end. Is he starting to read what he writes, or is this a sign of Shine's more sophisticated involvement?