The Disintegration of the American Presidency

[Newest Reality]

The president’s job is to oversee the whole of the executive branch, but under Trump the inverse is happening.

On January 13, 2020, a political scientist named Daniel Drezner tweeted a screenshot of a Washington Post article, along with a cheeky comment: “I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler.” The screenshot showed a quotation about handling the president from a former senior administration official: “He’d get spun up, and if you bought some time, you could get him calmed down, and then explain to him what his decision might do.”

Drezner’s tweet was part of a lengthy thread. A very lengthy thread. The tweet, in fact, was the 1,163rd entry in a thread that began back in April 2017, with the same comment appended to a screenshot from The Washington Post: “Trump turns on the television almost as soon as he wakes, then checks in periodically throughout the day in the small dining room off the Oval Office, and continues late into the evening when he’s back in his private residence. ‘Once he goes upstairs, there’s no managing him,’ said one adviser.” Drezner had highlighted the quotation from the adviser.

The “toddler-in-chief thread” is surely the most quixotically lengthy Twitter thread in the history of the American presidency. Every time a White House adviser or a Republican member of Congress speaks about Trump in a news story as though he or she were talking about handling a small child, Drezner tweets the relevant passage with the same sentence, adding it to the thread.

Each entry separately documents a news story in which someone—usually a member of the executive branch—talks about managing the president, not the other way around, and talks about doing so in an explicitly infantilizing fashion. The collection is now the subject of a forthcoming book.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/trump-myth-unitary-executive/605062/

[Skittles]

1. imagine if a woman or POC behaved the way Trump has

there is just no fucking way they would be ALLOWED to continue