There’s nothing stable about Donald Trump
s it too late to call?”
“No. I figured you’d need to talk. Go ahead.” “I can’t tell if he likes me or is just using me. There are a million reasons we should be together, but, sure, I know he’s a player. Destroying people after he uses them, which is his M.O., is part of what makes me want to beat him at his own game. Everybody tells me he’ll respect me more if I play hard to get. I want to keep my boundaries intact but I can no longer tell where I end and he begins.”
Are these notes excerpted from my ninth-grade journal when I had a crush on the weirdly seductive, sociopathic guy or are they a transcript of a conversation between Donald Trump and Sean Hannity after Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki?
Is it hard to decide? Review the sentence structure: You’ll find embedded clauses, proving it’s me in ninthgrade. If it were Trump, the only thing embedded would be the operatives.
Trump’s rhetoric, if we can call it that, when addressing and discussing the Russian president is straight out of young adult stories about high school breakups. Either that or it’s from “Divorce for Dummies.”
In Helsinki, Trump said. “We’ve all been foolish” and “We’re all to blame.” Sounding as if he learned to repeat these phrases phonetically during disastrous marriage counseling sessions, Trump takes zero responsibility.
He blames those outside the immediate troubled relationship for whatever has failed within it. Calling Dr. Drew!
That’s how Trump justified saying, about America and Russia, that “(We’ve) both made some mistakes.”
My Facebook friend Marybeth Valentine immediately noticed that, “This sounds like something you say to an ex-girlfriend.” Marybeth also believes a larger breakup is looming, since she thinks the GOP will “cut him loose soon after they force their choice for the Supreme Court through Congress and Trump scrawls his Sharpie across the page. After all, Grover Norquist said that’s all they needed, someone with enough functioning digits to handle a pen.”
Sherry Louise, friend, former English major, mother of three and retired Air Force captain, is worried that Trump will “break up with our country in a tweet: ‘Listen, USA, I never said we were exclusive.’ But will we have any allies left to tell us, ‘We deserve better?’”
Personally, and despite the fact that, as an ItalianFrench-Canadian mix who was raised Roman Catholic I am terribly at home feeling guilty, I do not feel “to blame” in this case, nor do I feel as “we” made “some mistakes.”
Putin and Trump are to blame and they made mistakes. Like my friend John Myer from Seattle, I don’t accept blame but “finally understand how Cassandra must have felt.”
I am more in agreement with my pal from college, Drea Thorn, who is bothered by Trump’s perpetual use of false equivalencies: “Trump is like a husband saying to his wife, ‘Sure, I was caught pants down with a prostitute, but you bought a Rolex, ordered hardback books and have weird ears.’ The situations are not analogous.”
I also agree with author and retired Marine, Ray L’Heureux, who says this follows a long history of foolishness. “There was that little skirmish in SE Asia that never had to happen, for example. And here we are today.”
Another college friend, Dave Borland’s, words are also chilling: “The right wing in America — especially the evangelical ‘Christians’ — actually admires Putin. He represents what they want Trump to be: the take-noprisoners, anti-minority, anti-gay, anti-liberal Defenderof-the-Faith in a white Christian state.” Remember being told in high school about that whole birds-of-afeather-flocking notion?
And do you also remember how in June 2013 this moist, dewy and syrupy tweet from Trump seemed hilariously adolescent: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant … if so, will he become my new best friend?” Maybe it’s not very funny to have America run by a guy who is emotionally, psychologically — or perhaps more frightening, financially, sexually, politically — in thrall to or owned by a more powerful person. In 2015 Trump referred to Putin as his “stablemate.”
I’d omit the word “stable.” Otherwise it sounds about right.
Gina Barreca is a board of trustees distinguished professor of English literature at University of Connecticut and the author of 10 books. She can be reached at www.ginabarreca.com.