I watched the news snippet about Trump’s visit to President Obama today, a segment with the two men in the Oval Office after their private meeting of about an hour and a half, and something jumped out at me:
As he sat there listening to the President speak, then made his own remarks, Trump seemed subdued, flattened, weighted down, even. To my eyes and ears, at least, gone was the cocky bravado, the arrogant insouciance of Trump the Winnah!!!!
Indeed, as he ended with speaking of seeking counsel — counsel! — from Obama, it hit me: Trump looked like a man who is beginning to realize he’s made a terrible mistake.
One wonders what Obama said to him about the burdens and constrictions of the Presidency, how trammeled its seeming powers are in reality, how soul-crushing the daily grind is, how impossible to satisfy the kaleidoscopic jumble of competing demands, how thoroughly it consumes one’s life and obliterates one’s privacy. One wonders what pants-shitting dilemmas Obama outlined for him, yawning chasms of potential catastrophes he’ll have to negotiate, with no straightforward pathways to even modest success.
I daresay, given his apparent ignorance of the very office he’s pursued and won, Trump likely never did have more than the vaguest notion of what being President would be like; just a hazy impression of power and glory. Well, now he’s beginning to find out what the job actually involves, what’s turned President Obama’s hair so very gray, so very quickly. I suspect, given what I saw today, the taste of victory is turning a bit ashen in his mouth.
Or at least that’s how it seemed to me. I could of course be totally wrong. But I wonder….
