Trump Claims He Is a Macho Man

Susan Glasser has a great essay in today's online New Yorker. Here essential point is that, despite his frequent claims of how tough and macho he is, President Trump is a weak person unwilling or unable to do the hard work of leading and governing. The whole thing is worth reading. Here is an excerpt:

Trump ... [has] monopolized our public stage for the last five years. His desire to be the omnipresent macho man of our public life obscures his very real impotence in the face of indisputable events, like the killing of an innocent black man—or the outbreak of a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic. Now seems to be a rare instance when the hard cold unpleasant facts of what is happening in America have intruded in a most unwelcome way on the Trump Presidency. He is lagging in the polls five months before the Presidential election and, despite trying desperately for the last two and a half months, he has not succeeded in distracting Americans from the awful new normal imposed on our society by the coronavirus and his Administration’s botched handling of it.

We don’t know yet how the last few days will reshape Trump or his Presidency. Is this the beginning of a long, hot summer of discord in our cities that will cause a white American backlash of the sort that Trump has long encouraged and embraced? In the past, Trump has shamelessly stoked racial discord and divisiveness for political gain. He is expert at blame-shifting and dog-whistling. In his tweets on Sunday afternoon, he was already conjuring the spirit of Richard Nixon in 1968 to call for “law and order” as another long night of mayhem looms. He may briefly hunker down in his White House bunker, but he has never done so for long. If this crisis is like any of the many others in his life, Trump will talk and tweet and tweet and talk no matter how many Americans wish he would just shut up. Irrefutable events, however, are piling up on the Trump Presidency, and, although it is only May, 2020 has already given us an impeachment trial, a deadly plague, and the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression. We can now add the worst riots in a generation to this election year’s grim bid for the history books. Will that finally be enough to silence Donald Trump?