As a former theater critic, could I just cut in here and suggest that there's something wrong with those tweets this morning, something fishy and theatrical? I mean something wronger and fishier than we're accustomed to seeing from Trump. And theatrical in a different way.
Trump's tweets, since he took office, have taken two forms: the highchair variety that Stephen Colbert mocks nightly--wherein Trump is clearly speaking in his own voice and sounds like a thug or a schoolyard bully or a toddler whose diapers need changing.
Then there's a more recent mode that sounds not at all like Trump, but like someone else. That's more in keeping with the tradition of the Presidency in modern times: addressing the public with words that everyone knows a different person, a speechwriter, has provided.
In this mode, things are spelled correctly and Trump sounds vaguely sane and literate.
Suddenly, though, in the wake of this book, we get a thread that is clearly neither him nor someone tweeting presidentially. This is someone pretending to be him, trying to sound like Trump and not doing a very good job.
Some giveaways are the word "playbook" (arguably way above Trump's level of sophistication) and the grasp of history that the reference to Reagan requires; also the use of punctuation throughout the thread;
also the phrase "at that" used correctly at the end of the last stanza, as it were -- a rhetorical flourish that, alas, is again way above his own actual facility with language.
Now, set all that against the word "like" in the phrase "mental stability and being, like, really smart." That's someone trying to sound dumb.
That's a very, very sophisticated level of tweeting--almost, I want to say, a @BCDreyer level of tweeting, where you have such command of both language and a particular form that you're able to mimic the sound or voice of someone who is fundamentally inarticulate.
Who is writing this stuff, David Mamet? Who's directing it, Julie Taymor? This is new. This isn't a political script, it's a theatrical one.This is not Trump himself in his own voice or Trump allowing himself to be fig-leafed by some lesser Ted Sorensen.
Each of Trump's other modes calls up an image -- either of Trump, phone in hand, having a meltdown or an attack of ego; or of a Trump malleable enough to be willing to tweet what someone else is dictating.
So what image does this new phase call up? Because it's pretty clear that it's pure puppetry. Less clear is what it presages and whether anyone in Washington really cares. /fin
