No. of Recommendations: 4
Trump has been making inappropriate comments all his miserable life. It's an ingrained part of his psyche.Ezra Klein has an article about that aspect of Trump today. He notes that Trump has an exceedingly disinhibited personality, which is both a significant weakness
and an enormous strength for him:
https://archive.ph/Oi7z6Basically, Trump says whatever he wants, whenever he wants, regardless of whether other people (or cultural mores or rules of propriety) approve. There are obviously enormous problems with this - but what Democrats often overlook is how
appealing it is:
But there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it. What if I was without fear, without doubt? And if I can’t be without fear, if I can’t be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was? Protected by somebody who was? Fought for by somebody who was?
It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him a great entertainer. It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it off. What makes Trump Trump isn’t his views on immigration, though they are part of it. It’s the manic charisma born of his disinhibition.
It is his great strength. It is also his terrible flaw.Klein goes on to point out that what kept Trump's first Administration from running off the rails into a dumpster fire of epic proportions on
most things was the fact that Trump's
staff acted as an inhibitor. Trump might be willing to say anything, without fear or doubt or even reflection - but the people around him would think about the consequences and legality of what he was saying, and so actual policy would end up being filtered even as Trump himself was not. That might not happen in a second Administration, but it was something that let Trump voters get all a lot of the stuff they liked about Trump's disinhibited personality without getting
as much of the stuff they would dislike.
