The Only True Thing About Trump: Nothing In The World Will Ever Cause Him To Change

"Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." (George Orwell, 1984)

Donald Trump cannot tell time.

Or Trump has no concept of time. The past and the future don't really exist for Trump. He lives only in the present and cares only how he is doing or how he is perceived at this moment.

That's a point David Roth, a former editor at Deadspin, makes in his latest essay. I've missed reading his thoughts on Trump since that website was taken over and destroyed (his Deadspin articles are here.), so I'm happy whenever a new piece pops up.

Roth writes that acting presidential:

is not something that comes naturally to Trump, both because he can't quite feel any of the concern he's supposed to presidentially evince and because his all-devouring narcissism guarantees he'll always be more put out by the obligation to try than he would be troubled by whatever thing he might otherwise be supposed to care about. Trump's careening and chaotic approach to the world has not been tempered or focused or in any way changed as a result of him assuming the highest office in the land. If there is any true and essential thing about Trump beyond his reflexive cruelty and wild avarice, it is that there is nothing in the world, government epidemiologists very much included, that could or would ever cause him to change. To change, or grow, or even learn something new would to some extent be an admission of defeat for someone who lives so deliriously, delusionally in the moment.

Trump's bizarre, blustering approach during the first months of the coronavirus crisis was not so much tactical as it was instinctual—the decision to bloviate and lie and pick weird fights all day long in hopes of Making the Numbers Go Up—and to do that every single day, was less a decision than it was simply Trump doing the only thing he knows how to do. In the same way, his unwillingness to direct ventilators or personal protective equipment toward states that don't yet need them reflects his lifelong incapacity to understand the relationship between things done today and things that happen tomorrow. He has always lived in a sort of weightless suspension between his last lie and his next one. He's focused on nothing more than whatever is in front of him at that moment, inhabiting no identifiable reality but the one blurring in front of his nose. Trump understands the scope of his job, and it seems likely that this is what appeals to him about it. But it's fundamentally not in him to grasp the scale of it.

"The grim-faced president who appeared in the White House briefing room for more than two hours beside charts showing death projections of hellacious proportions was coming to grips with a reality he had long refused to accept," Peter Baker wrote in the Times on Wednesday. As it happened, Trump's sobriety didn't even get all the way through the press conference, which saw him pointing to the specious miracle cures that have beguiled him over the weeks since he grudgingly admitted that Covid-19 was not under control. "I knew everything," Trump responded when asked if he knew how bad the situation could become back when he was still claiming there would soon be zero cases of the virus in the U.S. "I knew it could be horrible. And I knew it could be maybe good."

It is not news, at this point, that Trump is fundamentally incapable of doing any of the important and urgent things required of him as president in this moment. Baker, in the allusive and opaque house style of Times political reportage, doesn't quite suggest that Trump has developed that capacity. Instead, he does what the political press has done with Trump from the first moments he came onto the political scene—they described not what he does, but how he appears. "Experts have been warning of a possibility like this for weeks," Baker allowed. "But more than ever before, Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge them."

It's hard to imagine any person less well suited to a long, multifront campaign like this than a man incapable of comprehending the idea of "two weeks from now." But in some sense, the idea of a "new" Trump isn't wrong. He is new every morning, awakening into the same sour dream; the future and the past are both gaudy, gilded blanks. When Trump speculated, weeks into the pandemic, that the virus might "vanish like a miracle"—or when he boosts some unproven gimmick cure, or when he attempts to strong-arm a rampaging pandemic into an end-date with his signature hardball deal-smithing, or when he accuses governors seeking respirators in anticipation of a coming surge of political calculation or corruption—he is revealing the only plan he has ever really had, which comes from the only person he trusts, which is that tomorrow might somehow just be different. People are dying behind this faith today, but it goes without saying that none of their names will be etched into eternity. He can really only remember one name, and eternity is just some other time.