Peevish President Trump stomps Planet Earth
We’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to see the president of the United States step up to the lectern to confidently tell us how he will combat the existential threat to the planet — be it aliens, asteroids, tidal waves, volcanoes, killer sharks, killer robots or a 500-billion-ton comet the size of New York City.
So it was quite stunning to see the president of the United States step up to the lectern to declare himself the existential threat to the planet.
And with a calming band playing us to our doom, just like on the Titanic.
You know you’re in trouble when beclouded Beijing replaces you as a leader on climate change.
As his biographer Tim O’Brien recalled on ABC’s “This Week,” Trump once pointed out a dozen 6-foot-high speakers by the pool at Mar-a-Lago blasting classic rock and said: “You know, when I moved here to Palm Beach, nobody wanted me around. And I love cranking this music as loud as I can because it bugs the heck out of all of these so-and-sos and I love it.”
It is a familiar pattern. “He wanted to get out of Queens to come to Manhattan,” O’Brien said. “He wanted to be accepted by the real estate class in Manhattan, but then he thumbed his nose at them.” He wanted to run for president as a Republican and get the GOP establishment’s approval, but then he thumbed his nose at it.
The same with The New York Times, seeking favor and then dubbing us “failing.” And now it’s the turn of our aghast European allies.
The more he is labeled a boor and a brute by his critics at home and abroad, the more Trump digs in.
As Mark Landler and Michael Shear reported in The Times, Gary Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, had told reporters in Sicily that Trump might be coming around. “His views are evolving” on climate change, Cohn said. “He came here to get smarter.”
That smarted and made Trump want to blast classic rock.
Then the president read an interview with Emmanuel Macron, bragging about how he had prepared to give Trump an Iron Man grip because it was “a moment of truth” showing that he “won’t make small concessions, even symbolic ones.”
As reported in The Washington Post on Thursday: “Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman 31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said. A few days later, Trump got his revenge. He proclaimed from the Rose Garden, ‘I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.’”
Macron understands the signs and symbols of power.
Trump is the president with a background in entertainment, but the 39-yearold French president is the one who has mastered theatrics, from the splendor of “Ode to Joy” playing at the Louvre on election night, to his televised exhortation Thursday in English: “Make our planet great again.”
As the Times’ Adam Nossiter wrote, Macron has a “deeply held belief that France in some sense has been missing its king since the execution of Louis XVI on Jan. 21, 1793.” And he has consciously cultivated a regal air as he champions “radical centrism,” globalization and protecting the environment.
Trump, on the other hand, has rattled the world with his crude manner, cruel policies, chaotic management style, authoritarian love-ins and antediluvian attitudes.
For once, the French have a right to be condescending toward the United States.