Here’s What I Think

Back in the 1980’s, I spent a lot of time with my friends watching the Eddie Murphy concert film Delirious. It is just about the raunchiest thing I’ll ever see in my life, but it is sooooooooo funny.  At the time the movie was made and released, Jesse Jackson was running in Democratic Party primaries in 1984 and 1988. In the middle of the movie, Murphy told a quick joke about a white Southerner who voted for Jackson as a joke only to wake up the next morning to find out, in Murphy’s words, that “he fuckin’ won.”

I bring this up now because looking at the drip, drip of information coming out from the various probes of the 2016 election, I am left with the feeling that Trump’s problem was that he never thought he was going to win the thing. He surrounded himself with amateurs who didn’t have the first clue about how to run campaigns, let alone comply with campaign laws. In fact, for much of the primary he basically had almost no real campaign structure in place. And then when he won, they were simply not ready for the transition from campaign to governing.

I remember during the campaign that it seemed like Trump kept ratcheting up the crazy. Every week he would say something or do something or tweet something that was so far out of bounds, so far outside the norm of what a serious candidate does during an election, that it just seemed clear to me that he didn’t really want to win. He was trying to lose, but making a game of it while doing so. A game that only he understood and that only he enjoyed. Well, the crazies who he surrounded himself with enjoyed it to.

Let’s not forget his famous statement that he could kill somebody in broad daylight and still not lose a vote.

And the things he has done and said since he was elected have only continued the crazy. It’s as though he got this plaything he never thought he would get — the Christmas present every kid asks for but never gets because it is so out-of-reach — he simply knows no other way than to just wallow in that same game he was playing before the election.

What’s happening now is that all of the things he did during that year and a half before the election are now coming back to bite him. He didn’t think he was going to win! He didn’t think any of this would matter. But then he won and ever since — to keep this shiny plaything — he has had to build a tower of lies and deception around himself.

The only other alternative is that he really was trying to win, this really is who he is, and … that’s just too depressing a thought.