Poor sad #BunkerBoy: Now Trump wants to edit real life, like an
episode of "The Apprentice"
While the country melts down, Trump tries to reshoot reality so
we won't know he's total chickens**t "Bunker Boy"
protesters started to hit the streets to denounce police
brutality, one thing was certain: The president's brainworms
would direct his energies away from doing anything useful and
toward the task of managing his ego, relying on the reality TV
tricks he mistakes for the real work of presidenting.
And so, while demonstrations began to spread and police engaged
in ruthless attacks on nonviolent protesters, Americans have
been subjected to Trump trying — feebly, but at great cost to
both taxpayers and public safety — to assuage his ego by
demanding that his real life display of weenie-ness be "fixed"
with reshoots and post-production edits.
Everything goes back to the original narcissistic injury from
the past weekend: The "Bunker Boy" meme.
On Saturday, a group of protesters managed to tear down one of
the barricades around the White House and, in response, the
lights were turned off at the White House and Trump was
reportedly hustled into an underground bunker by the Secret
Service. This was shortly after Trump had tried to play-act the
tough guy by tweeting lurid fantasies about how any protesters
who breached the White House grounds would be "greeted with the
most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen."
That the Secret Service takes precautions to protect the
president in a time of chaos is, in itself, to be expected. But
the contrast between Trump's chest-thumping and the fact that he
was cowering in the basement was objectively funny.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of people made fun of him, and he didn't
like it.
Both on social media and in protest signs, people called him
"Bunker Boy" and contrasted Trump's hiding with the behavior of
former Vice President Joe Biden, who went out in the streets to
talk to protesters instead of hiding from them.
It's no exaggeration to say that everything that Trump has done
since then has been a pathetic effort to nuh-uh the hecklers and
prove that he's no #BunkerBoy, but a big, tough guy who will
totally kick your ass without breaking a sweat. He'll shove the
White House doctor out to tell some more lies about Trump's
health, if that's what it takes.
What Trump did on Monday has been well documented. That was when
he made federal police tear-gas a crowd of peaceful protesters
so that he could stage a photo-op in which he strode across
Lafayette Square to St. John's Episcopal Church and in front of
its boarded-up doors, clutching a Bible. The decision to risk
mass injury to civilians for a moronic campaign ad has generated
a ton of outrage, but what takes the whole situation to the next
level is that Trump clearly did because he was sick of people
calling him a weenie for hiding in the bunker and thought this
photo-op would make him look tough and majestic.
He did not, of course, look tough or majestic. He stood
awkwardly in front of the church, wielding a Bible in a manner
that suggested he had heard books described but never previously
seen one. Meanwhile, the headlines and CNN chyrons informed the
public that he had literally tear-gassed a crowd in order to
walk across the square, underscoring what a massive chickens**t
he is.
Even Richard Nixon, to whom Trump likes to compares himself to,
was occasionally willing to venture out into crowds of
protesters to talk to them. Trump, however, is such a wuss that
he made his cadre of protectors tear-gas people rather than
subject himself to a crowd's insults. Far from proving he was a
tough guy, Trump's actions only led to another round of taunting
about his wimpiness.
Trump is clearly incapable of learning the central lesson from
this — which is that acting defensive always makes people
laugh at you even harder. This is demonstrated by his refusal to
let the whole thing drop. He keeps trying to defuse the "Bunker
Boy" meme and the Lafayette Square debacle, and keeps making it
worse.
On Tuesday, Trump attempted a re-do of the failed church
photo-op, dragging the sullen-looking Melania Trump with him to
the Saint John Paul II National Shrine for a public appearance
that looked like a scene from a horror film. Washington
Archbishop Wilton Gregory broke with church protocol to
criticize the visit, saying it was "baffling and reprehensible
that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so
egregiously misused and manipulated," adding that the late Pope
John Paul II would not have condoned "the use of tear gas and
other deterrents to silence, scatter or intimidate ... for a
photo opportunity in front of a place of worship and peace."
Trump was caught on tape during the visit apparently telling his
wife to "smile" (she briefly complied, but then spent the rest
of the visit looking like a hostage) and then generating images
that are terrifying, but not for the reasons the president may
have hoped.
These fumbling efforts to make "Bunker Boy" go away and frame
himself as a tough but pious American leader-man unafraid to
handle the current moment kept going on Wednesday. That was when
Trump, clearly still smarting from all the mockery, tried to
claim that he had not hunkered down in the bunker at all.
"I was there for a tiny, short little period of time," Trump
told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, claiming he was not there for
safety, but rather for an "inspection."
It just so happened, Trump claimed that security "said it would
be a good time to go down" to the bunker for the "inspecting
factor" at the very same time that protesters just so happened
to be tearing down the barricades. Interesting!
That lie is so transparent that it's remarkable that even Donald
Trump would think anyone would buy it. Then again, Trump has
spent his entire life surrounded by people who nod and smile and
agree with whatever dumb stuff he says, because they want money
or power. That's only gotten worse since he became our so-called
president.
Meanwhile, Bunker Boy is bunking up his bunker even more, so he
can hunker more better.
It's been said a million times before, but it's important to
understand how much being the host on "The Apprentice" warped
Trump's already deeply disturbed mind. Trump is an imbecile and
a failed businessman, but through the power of editing —
apparently a mind-boggling amount of editing, considering how
little they had to work with — the producers of "The
Apprentice" were able to make him look somewhere close to a
competent and credible businessman.
For a lazy narcissist like Trump, that must have been a
life-altering realization: Hollywood fakery can make even the
biggest idiot appear smart and capable. So he has spent the
entire presidency, which he thinks of more as a fake TV job than
a real one, using photo-ops, pep rallies and other stunts to try
to shape an image of himself as sharp and tough, an image that
runs totally counter to reality.
This week amply demonstrated what Trump doesn't understand: You
can't do reshoots and edits on the real world. Or as a great
president to whom Trump often laughably compares himself,
observed, you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
On "The Apprentice," failed efforts to make Trump look good were
simply deleted and reshot, until something was captured that the
tireless video editors could bang into something passable.
But Trump's bunker-hunker on Saturday, made worse by his cruel
and stupid Lafayette Square photo-op on Monday, are just out
there in the real world. There is no way to fling the footage
into the Trash folder, or to edit the crap out of it until it
sends the "right" message. Trump's continued demands that the
world act like a reality-show producer who can keep giving him
mulligans only reaffirms that he is, above all things, a
narcissistic moron.
The weirdest part about all this is that none of it makes any
difference. Trump may think his followers are bamboozled into
believing he's a great man because of his production values, but
that's really not true. They'll back him all the way because
they share his reactionary views and feel he's a useful tool to
push America into fascism, not because they mistook him for
someone who is either brave or noble.
Trump could sit on live TV, peeing his pants and whimpering that
the protesters are coming for him, and his base would stick by
him and claim to see courage in the urine puddles below his
chair, just so long as he keeps the racism and the
lib-triggering coming. They know he's a "Bunker Boy," but will
pretend they don't see it until the bitter end.
https://www.salon.com/2020/06/04/poor-sad-bunkerboy-now-trump-wants-to-edit-real-life-like-an-episode-of-the-apprentice/
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"The Allwise Creator hath been dishonored by being made the author of
fable, and the human mind degraded by believing it." -Thomas Paine