Trump, the improv president

One thing you have to say for Donald Trump—he’s spontaneous. He’s a far cry from the standard carefully scripted politician. You often hear from his supporters that “he tells it like it is.” Well, no, actually, he hardly ever tells it like it is. He almost invariably tells it like it isn’t. But he does it in a refreshingly carefree, spontaneous, unrehearsed sort of way, often on Twitter, and he mixes his messages with such wild randomness, accusing Barack Obama of tapping his phones one tweet and mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Apprentice ratings the next, it’s pretty obvious you’re getting the raw, uncensored version of what’s going on in his astonishingly childish mind. That uncalculated, spontaneous “Here I am, what you see is what you get, take me or leave me” quality, in such sharp contrast to the standard politician’s prepackaging on such predictable display with Hillary Clinton, accounts for much of the charm he worked on the people who voted for him. It’s refreshing and entertaining and dangerous.

What we see and what we have gotten with Donald Trump is a grown man with the emotions of a ten-year-old, the interests of a bored housewife and the moral compass of a carnival barker. This is a man who took to Twitter eight times over the span of a month in 2012 to weigh in on the subject of Kristin Stewart’s love life. There’s an almost endearingly unpretentious quality to that behavior. It shows that in one sense at least he is in fact a man of the people. He doesn’t just feed the common low-brow American obsession with the personal foibles of celebrities, he shares it. Lots of us have flipped through People or Us at the dentist’s office and glanced at the gossip, but who actually goes to the trouble of tweeting about it? What a regular irregular guy.

Part of the problem with Donald Trump’s spontaneity is that he is now in a position to initiate a nuclear war. That is not something that should be done spontaneously. Trump is still the featured attraction on a reality show. Only now the reality is that a profoundly disturbed, emotionally retarded egomaniac is the most powerful person on the planet and capable of destroying it. His presidency is a freak show. It’s a thrill-a-minute roller coaster ride. It’s funny and dramatic and great entertainment unless perhaps you’re a member of a minority group fearing for your life amid the racist hatred his ascent has unleashed in our country, or a child of undocumented immigrants fearing deportation, or perhaps a rancher in Kansas whose cattle just got incinerated in a giant wildfire while the climate denier you voted for was busy trying to gut the EPA.

Just exactly what price the rest of us pay to watch Trump’s tour de farce as a President Geek figuratively biting off the heads of live chickens remains to be seen. For now, for most of us, it seems like a morbidly fascinating comic horror show, and forty years from now those of us who last that long may look back on it fondly for its sheer entertainment value. But the power of the presidency is no joke. Putting it in the hands of a spontaneous buffoon may prove to have been the opening act of a solemn and in retrospect depressingly predictable tragedy.