Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
[O]n Dec. 16, President Obama held an urgent press conference to address the evidence of Russian “tampering by internet” with our country’s recent election.
Listening to Obama’s responses to the questions of reporters, some of which extended intricately to two and three parts, I was struck by the consecutiveness and deliberateness and thoughtfulness of his replies. You could sense him thinking on his feet — thinking twice, perhaps — to answer the questions put to him and to watch out for his administration’s back.
The news conference lasted a long hour-and-a-half (I’m not a pro and didn’t sit through all of it), and in the course of it you would get the impression that Obama really pays attention and knows his stuff, including present details and cumulative history. And that he had both mind and language plentiful enough to address the complex questions that the assembled reporters — potentially dangerous people — put to him. His remarks struck me as being both careful and extraordinarily frank, and they went deeper than does most presidential gab.
Obama’s virtuosic performance over, I had this stray thought — a fantasy, really: What would Donald Trump have made of any five-minute segment of Obama’s performance in the press conference if he took the trouble to listen carefully in the spirit of “Who is this guy, this strange performer?” and “What’s he got that I don’t have … and maybe should have?”
Is Trump, who brands himself triumphantly and luminously as D*O*N*A*L*D* T*R*U*M*P* every hour of the day and into the night, able to appreciate another way of “rocking” as president? Beside the great charm that Obama owns, there is his professorial depth of knowledge, something Trump is barred from acquiring by reason of his jumpy temperament and limited literacy and curiosity.
Or would Trump, by temperament alone, be incapable of grasping and appreciating the complexities, modest though they are and such as they are, of Obama’s recent on-air ruminations? Can Trump, the man of one-liners and impulse and invective, appreciate from any angle the ways of thoughtfulness and study that Obama, more than almost any other modern president, epitomizes (with many, many bad decisions and compromises nevertheless resulting)? Can Trump, trained through life as a real estate speculator, gambling den operator and TV entertainer, and vaunting his trademark tints of gold in his hair and in his bathroom fixtures, walk for five minutes alongside the thoughts of someone like Obama, and both grasp them and appreciate them as perhaps useful aids in the formation of policy? The Obama who thinks and speaks with at least the complexity and gravity of a bright young college professor in the first decade of his tenure?
Or is that the trouble — that Obama represents a domestic caste that is perhaps hateful in the eyes of Trump and many of his followers: the caste of people who “think too much” and come up with answers that are too long-winded and complex for snappy comprehension? … When, as Trump appears to believe in his unthinking heart, the world is composed simply of Me (himself) and Us (his ecstatic followers) and Them (the hostile blob who are “all the rest”).
Or is that the trouble — that Obama represents a domestic caste that is perhaps hateful in the eyes of Trump and many of his followers: the caste of people who “think too much” and come up with answers that are too long-winded and complex for snappy comprehension?
So there would be the rub, I would guess, the giant boggle in Trump’s mind, if by some enchantment he settled down for those five stipulated minutes to listen, to really listen to Obama’s responses at the press conference.
And if Trump did listen, even for that little time, here’s what I think his reaction would be.
“That guy Obama and his kind? Too much thinking! Too much fancy language! Too much of that airy-fairy stuff — ‘history’ and ‘precedents’ and ‘consequences.’ And too much ‘consideration of others,’ and, my God, consideration of their considerations, too, of us and what we’re doing to them.”
All of that consideration, to Trump … just so much crap?
When, as he knows, the best mindfulness, the best way to zip out his inspired policy zingers, is to combine his God-given hubris, and the patchwork of rag-tag and razzmatazz information that one owns anyhow, effortlessly, just by being Donald Trump: lapped around with gold and consorting with beautiful women … and tapping into the internet at odd moments for the latest one-line blurbs and headlines. What Donald Trump knows in his heart — right there, in his heart — somehow must be universally and commandingly true.
He has convictions like that.
“Trust me!” was a favorite phrase of Mr. Trump in the election campaign; that phrase topped in frequency, in those heady, tell-all days of the campaign, by another favorite line of his, “It’s a disaster!” — sung out in his comic Brooklyn accent.
