I think about this clip a lot when following the news these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9c45q5kPt0 Tom Brokaw interviewing Donald Trump for the Today Show in 1980. In striking contrast to anything currently found on Aaron Rupar's twitter feed, Trump's responses are thoughtful, deliberate, and actually answer the questions that were posed. Even his one attempt at humor was appropriate in tone and at least mildly funny. Yes, he comes off as a smarmy rich douchebag, but a reasonably intelligent and well-spoken smarmy rich douchebag.

 

So what tf happened??

 

(Warning: this gets really long)

 

A lot of people are claiming senility. That might be part of the problem now, but I remember Trump playing the victim and playing up conspiracy theories during his infidelity and divorce scandals in the early '90s, when he was still in his 40s.

 

It's easy to forget that from the mid-'70s through the mid-'80s Trump's reputation as a genius real estate investor was largely deserved. Yes, he was born on 3rd base thinking he hit a triple, and there were documented instances of racial discrimination and rumors of other shady practices, but in a strictly financial sense he was hugely successful: he correctly predicted the rebound of inner-city property values and turned his family's sizable fortune into an absolutely massive portfolio of real estate holdings. That turned him into the sort of celebrity that Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos are today, and unfortunately, it appears Trump believed his own hype.

 

When his businesses started to struggle in the late '80s and early '90s (first corporate bankruptcy in '91) it created a conflict between his idea of himself as a genius businessman and the reality that his businesses were failing. I think this caused enough cognitive dissonance that Trump began to retreat from the reality of the business world and started surrounding himself with friends and sycophants (Epstein, et al) who supported his less and less realistic view of himself. This distancing and insulation led to more misinformed business decisions and the string of failures and bankruptcies in the '90's and 2000's. Somewhere along the line it appears he decided that as long as *he* was making money he was a success even if his businesses failed, which led to a long string of failed enterprises where Trump would run the organization into the ground while siphoning money off to him and his friends. ("Running the organization into the ground while siphoning money off to him and his friends" seems awfully prescient, in retrospect...)

 

Then The Apprentice happened, and Trump discovered that playing a successful businessman on TV was in many ways better than actually being a successful businessman. He got all the attention, praise, and adulation without having to do much work or actually be successful at anything. NBC presented Donald Trump as a hugely successful genius businessman...and millions of people believed it! By this point I believe his Narcissistic Personality Disorder had fully manifested, and he became essentially addicted to the constant attention and self-promotion.

 

Now, in politics, Trump often gets credit as "a master of controlling the narrative" or "an expert at manipulating the media". These may be true, but I think the way they're presented gives Trump far too much agency. I think the only truth in Trump's universe is "I am a perfect genius, so people should pay attention to me and let me do what I want." So I don't think his lying, deflecting, and gaslighting are things he plans on doing, I think they're defense mechanisms he's built up to keep people from puncturing that worldview. Anything good said about him is automatically true, anything bad said about him is automatically fake. If someone takes attention away from him (McCain funeral, Fauci press conferences), he disparages them or makes them display fealty. If he gets caught doing something wrong (soliciting election interference, Ukraine quid pro quo), he claims it's a hoax or witch hunt. If he screws up (N Korea nuclear deal, coronavirus response) he "takes no responsibility at all". If the current news cycle reflects bad on him ('18 midterm polling, massive anti-police protests), he starts yelling about something else (migrant caravans! antifa!). If someone calls him out on a stupid opinion (very fine people on both sides, I've done more for Black Americans than any president since Lincoln) he counters with "lots of people are saying...". If he gets caught saying something provably untrue (coronavirus will disappear, injecting bleach is a good idea), it's that people didn't understand what he meant. And on, and on, and on. On the other hand, anyone who says great things about him (Eddie Gallagher, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Arpaio, the entire cast of OANN) is a True American Patriot regardless of whatever other awful shit they've done or said. 

 

TL;DR: Donald Trump is now a broken human who cannot be trusted to do anything except whatever he thinks is in his best interest at that particular instant.

 

So yeah, I just wrote a nearly-1,000 word reflection on a 4 minute puff-piece video clip from 1980. Quarantine is boring.