The president is like the pub bore in the corner: ranting, self-absorbed and often racist. So let’s try treating him like one—and only paying attention when it matters
by Ian Dunt / January 12, 2018 / Leave a comment
Trump is like a pub bore. So let’s treat him like one. Photo: PA
I was working on a farm in Australia a few years ago, when I realised that my legs were covered in leeches. I’d been walking through this field of tall grass and by the time I came out, they were all over me.
My first instinct was squeamish disgust. Without really thinking about it, I flicked one off. That’s the wrong thing to do. It makes you bleed. If you just leave them to do their business, they’ll heal up the wound and drop off of their own accord. In the end, I had to sit down and watch these disgusting, slimy things take my blood.
It was a useful experience, in that it showed how quickly disgust can turn to tedium. By the time they were done, the horror had faded and I was completely unfussed by their presence.
And that’s where I have ended up with Donald Trump: he is a leech and my disgust has turned to boredom.
I am tired of waking up every morning and being presented with the latest demonstration of his intellectual and moral inadequacies. It’s a constant tide of filth, a daily churn of the worst aspects of the most boringly ignorant personality I’ve ever been forced to engage with. Every day he does this. Every day the signal is boosted around the world, by all of us.
It’s not even psychologically interesting, in the way that, say, someone like Katie Hopkins is. You listen to her and you can at least consider some pop-psychology theories about what happened to her at school. But Trump is just a walking id, lashing out at whatever threatens his maniacal insecurity. There is as much complexity to his motivations as there is to a dog sniffing someone’s bum.
“Poring over Trump’s vile pronouncements makes us stupider and less happy”
There is little to be learned from poring over his vile pronouncements. And worse, I suspect it is personally corrosive. It makes us stupider and less happy. Spend a chunk of your day, every day, engaging with this stuff and eventually your intellectual and emotional capacity might rot away.
Trump is just the lonely old bore in the corner of the pub, telling everyone how great he is, lying about his…
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