Last week, Donald Trump walked Chinese President Xi Jinping down the White House colonnade, showing off what he calls his Presidential Walk of Fame, a row of portraits of every man who’s held the office. They reached Trump’s two terms. “Trump, and then Trump,” he says, gesturing proudly. Then they reach the next frame, and instead of a portrait of Joe Biden, there’s a picture of an autopen. “And this is the autopen,” Trump says. “It’s Biden.”
Xi laughs. His entourage laughs along with him.
And Donald Trump, beaming, has absolutely no idea what just happened.
Trump, a bottomless pit of petty insecurities, thought he was humiliating his predecessor, Joe Biden. To Trump, that he was doing so to the leader of America’s chief rival was a bonus.
What our president didn’t realize is that he’d just turned the presidency and the United States itself into a punchline. I saw a tweet from Sarah Matthews of The Bulwark about the moment and it got me thinking that this has been happening for Trump’s entire life.
This short moment is, in fact, the whole moral arc of Donald Trump.
Even from the very beginning, Trump could never get the approval he so desperately craved. Trump grew up in Queens, an outer borough kid who spent his whole life desperate for the approval of the Manhattan elite across the river. The old money, the society pages, the people who decided who really mattered in New York.
When he finally made his fortune, he built his answer to them in gold. Lots of gold.
He splashed his name across buildings. Then across steaks, vodka, an airline, and wine. He put gold leaf on everything imaginable. Trump was so proud of himself. He thought his gilded lifestyle broadcast wealth and taste.
The people he was trying to impress thought it did the opposite. To the Manhattan elite, the gaudy towers and the shameless self-branding weren’t proof he’d arrived. They were proof he never would. The very brand that made him a household name, the one that eventually carried him to the presidency, was, to the people whose approval he wanted most, an embarrassment. He never got the invitations he was chasing.
Today, instead of Manhattan’s high society, Trump now craves the approval of the world’s strongmen.
When Xi arrived at Joint Base Andrews, Trump rolled out the red carpet, literally, and a video went viral of American service members on their hands and knees in the final moments before Xi’s plane door opened, scrubbing and smoothing that carpet while Chinese officials looked on from the doorway.
A little over a year before that, Trump gave Vladimir Putin the same treatment in Alaska, personally greeting him on the tarmac, honoring him with flyovers, rolling out a summit on American soil for a man who invaded his neighbor and has never once returned the courtesy of a real concession.
Trump believes that showering of these men with the spectacle of American power is how you earn their respect. It isn’t, and the people watching from China, Russia, and other rival nations know exactly what they’re looking at.
The Turning Point and The Verdict
In April of 2011, President Obama stood at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and spent several minutes making Donald Trump the joke of the room. In a completely fair turnabout, he mocked the birther conspiracy that made Trump a political icon on the right. Then Obama mocked Trump’s show, his taste, and even the idea of a Trump presidency.
At one point Obama put up a comical rendering of what Trump’s White House might look like if he ever got the job: a towering hotel, a casino, a golf course, and a huge gold chandelier out front. The room erupted in laughter. Trump sat there and took it, smiling through gritted teeth, while a room of elites laughed at him instead of with him.
His longtime adviser Roger Stone later said that was the night Trump decided to run for president. All it took was Trump finally feeling real humiliation.
You know the rest of the story, but one point stands out here:
As president, just this year, Trump tore down the White House’s East Wing to build himself a $300 million ballroom, plenty of gold trim included.
It is safe to say that Trump didn’t learn the lesson Obama’s joke was trying to teach him. He instead turned the punchline into gaudy reality over a decade later. And he’s proud of it. Obama mocked Trump for his tawdry self-promotion, and Trump, who went on to do everything Obama said, somehow still doesn’t get the joke.
However, one final humiliation awaits Donald Trump.
Come 2028, this country will no longer have to wake up wondering what fresh humiliation he’s about to inflict on us in front of the world. But his part in the story doesn’t end there.
History will be the ultimate judge of Donald Trump’s presidency. And history won’t care how many retweets he got or whether the morning shows called something a win. History will judge this president on the whole record and hand down a verdict that no amount of gold plating can improve.
That verdict is already clear: Donald Trump will be remembered as the worst president in American history.
That’s the final humiliation.
In the end, we can draw small comfort from that compared to the damage he has wrought on America.
But, and this is more than a small comfort to me, it’s the worst thing that could ever happen to Trump.
I just hope that his legacy is the one joke he can finally get.
— Adam
I just hope he lives long enough to see the video and pictures of all the disgraceful things he’s done be reversed- the Kennedy Center reopened, the ballroom & arch be bulldozed, the Rose Garden replanted and the Oval Office be returned to it’s former, spartan glory.
Three cheers for Adam ALWAYS telling it straight!