July 13th 2020

By Thom Hartmann

With one simple understanding, everything about Trump’s life and presidency comes into focus.

Why would it be that Trump refuses to do his job, including reading intelligence reports? Why would Trump revel in lies and outrageous statements? Why would he retweet a game show hosts conspiracy theories about the coronavirus while trashing his own scientists? Why is Trump, every day, waking up and asking how he can capture the news cycle regardless of its impact on public health or democracy?

The common line through all this is that Donald Trump thinks that his job is to be a celebrity.

That has been his job since the 1970s, and it’s all he does. He hires some people to do real-estate deals, but his job is to be the celebrity. He goes on TV as a celebrity businessman. And now, as president, he again thinks that his main job is to be a celebrity.

This is really the only job he knows how to do. Get in the press, get your name on the top of the newspaper every single day, say and do outrageous things to get other people to talk about you. Celebrity.

It’s the survival strategy employed by lousy students who have become the class clown and the school’s worst bully. Trump just never outgrew it.

Donald Trump doesn’t care how many Americans die from a virus, or how many working people lose their homes and get wiped out. He doesn’t care about democracy around the world or even here in America. All he cares about is how famous he is.

When you understand that Donald Trump thinks his job is to be a celebrity, and that’s the only thing he’s competent at, then everything else falls into place.

Because he’s good at being a celebrity but lousy at being a businessman, over the last few decades he has had to throw in with organize crime, both in the United States and internationally. He’s used his real-estate empire for money laundering for oligarchs and mobsters, particularly his international properties.

Because he’s good at being a celebrity and terrible at being president, America is now facing disasters at almost every level, although Trump is successfully making sure that every day he’s on the top of the newspapers and the newscasts.

Because he’s good at being a celebrity and terrible at understanding science, over 100,000 Americans are dead and another hundred thousand will almost certainly die before the election.

As if to prove this, today Trump tweeted that the media should not want a Joe Biden presidency because that would cause things to be “boring“ which would be bad for network ratings.

America needs statesmen and stateswomen in our senior political posts, not a mobbed-up celebrity surrounded by pathetic syncopates.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.