Soup of the Day

Today, Trump most strenuously denied that he had had a series of mini-strokes, and got a doctor to back him up on that, and I am personally not the one to claim otherwise, because for one thing, I can't retrace the scoop that Michael Schmidt choose to put in a book about the president's abrupt trip to Walter Reed from last year, and for another, I choose to grant the occupant of the White House some measure of privacy regarding what might actually just be a minor health kerfuffle that is merely embarrassing.

I mean, like, let's say he got himself caught in his zipper? Or had a perfectly normal bagel-cutting mishap? Is that actually necessarily for everyone's public consumption?



So, he sometimes needs two hands to drink his water, he slurs his words, he clearly favors one foot over the other when walking, kicking it out like he even has drop-foot from exceptional inactivity, has apparent balance-issues, is leery of stairs and ramps, can't operate an umbrella and seems to have a very convenient memory. Here's the problem I have with the depiction of him as impaired based on these things--he is watched more closely than any person who has ever lived. If I were watched so closely, you would see a cavalcade of egregious klutziness and gimpiness, because I am quite simply middle-aged and human, slightly arthritic and a bit fat. And Trump is old enough to be my dad and knows people are watching him, making any tendency towards awkwardness that much worse.

Also he's had the chronic poor memory and confabulation thing going on since he was quite young and vital.

Nah, I am going to pass on the ableism. The man wears lifts and if he never had bone spurs before, he's got reason to have them now. As a woman of a certain age, I can attest that high heels will screw your feet the hell up. Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

But I will grant he seems dumb as all hell when he holds forth on the subject of malcontents lobbing canned goods like the terrorists they are. Beware the "bag of soup, for my family." 

Well, that was how England lost an empire, wasn't it? If it wasn't Irish stew lobbed with deadly precision by people who knew to never waste food, then wasn't it mulligatawny breaking the wheels of empire? (There is reason to believe that tinned food both helped to make and break the dominion upon which the sun once never set, but there is reason to be skeptical that it came to a brothy finish.)

I am not sure exactly were this odd digression on deadly food warfare came from, although some ideas spring to mind. It almost seems like a retcon to justify law enforcement shutting down and pillaging the food distribution centers and medic stations activists are using as a part of the demonstration, notwithstanding that in a universe with high unemployment, people actually would want to use nonperishable food items as food first and foremost because their families literally do have to eat.

Which brings to mind for me another way in which Trump is displaying a mental shortcoming vis a vis the present moment and the duration of the protests: economic anxiety.  While it is abundantly clear that the 2016 election results were delivered to us due to race concerns rather than economic anxiety, now that the pandemic has wrought its damage to the economy, is it not entirely more likely that Trump's pitiful handling of both COVID-19 and the economy, and the disparate effects it has on especially communities of color, adding fuel to the fire with respects to the racial inequalities experienced under our injustice system?

Trump isn't impaired by biology, but by the economics of privilege that he has experienced his whole stupid life.  He is simply unaware how anything works. It is manifest every time he opens up his twisty fishy foolish purse-lipped mouth. Regardless of what he says on the TelePrompter that he badly reads, or the weird things he ruminates on when he's shooting from his hips.