The other morning I was on a Madison Avenue bus going up to New York Film Festival screenings at Lincoln Center. The bus ride, which should take about 50 minutes tops, turned into an hour 45-minute nightmare. Trapped because I use a walker (I couldn’t just get off the bus and blithely walk across Central Park to Lincoln Center), I sat there seething and contemplating finding a way to give up the screening and return home. I am used to morning gridlock and cacophony on the Avenues, but this time the cause was Trump’s escort heading to the UN to address the General Assembly and hold bilateral meetings with world leaders. So my usual anger at being stuck in traffic turned into rage that it was Trump who was the supposed cause of it.
Obviously, it takes little to arouse my anger toward that corrupt, brutally insensitive narcissist, who, when he wants to seem earnest, merely softens his voice and goes on lying in his usual, simplistic manner. For him, lying is like breathing — it’s instinctive and devoid of shame or guilt.
When he addressed the UN later that Tuesday, he was already under attack for his infamous phone call with the leader of the Ukraine. The address was a roaring defense of nationalism and American sovereignty even as he tried to rally a multinational response to Iran’s escalating aggression. The first minutes of his speech were marred when he was met by laughter at his expense. The embarrassing exchange came when Trump boasted that his administration had accomplished more over two years than “almost any administration” in American history, eliciting audible laughter in the chamber hall. Trump loves listing fabricated accomplishments. But his claim to have done more in less than two years than most of the 44 previous administrations defied any bounds of hubris.
I could go on, but I quickly become emotionally exhausted from analyzing a man who has turned the Republican Party into a collective of self-interested ventriloquist dummies, and who is too much in my conversation and reflection. So I turned my consciousness to the film I arrived late to, and that offered an alternative vision of the world, but no more hopeful one than living under Trump. And though there is hope with the new revelations about the whistleblower, at 80, my dreams of a more equitable and decent future may have withered.
