American presidents have varied significantly in experience, aptitude, intelligence, empathy, and character. Much can and has been written on any or all of these important qualities as they pertain to the leader of the free world.
But Donald Trump, who has shown the world over and over that his one guiding light is self-aggrandizement, has finally found a way to become one of the most memorable presidents in the nation’s history. He is our very first brat president.
Trump is the first president who needs a spanking. Seriously, a good old-fashioned trip to the woodshed. The first who needs to be sent to bed without his supper. The first who needs to be grounded for his bad behavior.
Trump is seemingly always in the middle of some tantrum. Almost always, it is because he isn’t getting his way. Almost always, it is because he isn’t being properly worshipped to his liking.
Just now, he’s having a tantrum because enemies of “we the people” are refusing to put his name on The Kennedy Center. For the moment, in an apparent fit of pique, it has been shut down, fenced up, barricaded. Trump is threatening to demolish it unless his name is added, just as he demolished the East Wing of the White House, the Rose Garden, the economy, and our relationships with allies around the world.
Befitting a narcissist, Trump likes seeing his name on everything. Buildings, monuments, currency, all manner of merchandise, you name it. Or rather, he will name it. After himself.
As a corollary, if he isn’t naming things after himself, he’s claiming them for “his” country. Thus, the Gulf of Mexico becomes the Gulf of America. Lake Ontario becomes Lake America. Because he says so. Like God, he names things.
Like God, he has made his people in his own image, the MAGA masses who have in turn made every particle of themselves a tribute to Trump, from flags, bumper sticks, hats, and T shirts to the sad and willful distortions of reality required to align with whatever madness the new day may bring.
If you are reading this now and still identify as MAGA or MAGA-adjacent, you must surely know how frustrated the rest of us are with you by now. After a decade of this literal nonsense, I reckon most folks have settled into a way of getting along with family and friends that likely requires them to “take off” their opinions and perhaps even their values like a pair of shoes when they come in the house.
We rope off the things that cannot be talked about and proceed accordingly. Looks like we’re heading for a great leaf season, and aren’t these yams amazing? New recipe?
When what we really want to say is this: How do you do it, day after day, cheering on the most terrible human being to ever inhabit the White House? How can you co-sign this behavior and, you know, still face the mirror every morning?
For years, the right wing has blamed mainstream media for distorting reality — and mainstream media does indeed have much to answer for, especially since the advent of the Internet — while at the same time developing its own media that has constructed an alternate reality for its viewers, one that is most remarkable for its willingness not only to distort the truth, but to omit it altogether when it does not align with its agenda, which is basically that all liberal ideas are not just wrong, but evil, and that by extension, liberal people are not just wrong, but evil.
Millions of people of been pickling their own brains in this brine for decades now. It has severely damaged their ability to square the reality shaped for them there with the one they encounter every day through their own experience. Quite often, they do not believe their own eyes and ears.
That is why Trump remains popular among that demographic despite his objectively abysmal job performance and behavior that would be roundly and savagely criticized if he were anyone else. The mailman. A bank teller. A Democrat.
He routinely demeans members of the media who ask even the most benign questions. Hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t post some absurd tirade on social media or use AI to imagine and then pose himself as the hypermasculine protagonist in any number of historical or superhero scenarios.
Most tellingly, Trump is the first American president to dispense with even a pretense of attempting to unite the country. He is the first to openly declare that people who disagree with him are traitors, enemies of America, “very bad people,” ad nauseam.
Trump’s behavior has been rationalized and excused in the name of “getting results,” but when the results are a string of broken promises, a deeply divided and dispirited country, and an economy and culture that are flailing in every imaginable metric, what else is there than mere performative gestures?
And then another tantrum when he doesn’t get his way. And another tantrum after that. If he can’t have his name on the building, by God he’ll tear it down. That’s an apt metaphor for his entire presidency.
Trump is the first American president in need of a spanking. In November, he’s going to get one.
(Chris Cox lives in Haywood County and is a columnist, essayist, humorist, and recovering misanthrope. He is the author of three books, including the brand new, “We Didn’t Miss a Thing.” Previous books include “Waking Up in a Cornfield” and “The Way We Say Goodbye.” You can follow his writing on substack.)