The Estate of the Union Address
Last week, Trump released a bizarre, dystopian campaign video about his vision of America. It turns out that he’s released a few others that haven’t gotten as much attention, but John Oliver played a clip of one addressed to farmers. (I guess because of Iowa.) It’s really weird.
It’s not just weird as a campaign video (but watching it, it’s easy to lose track that that’s what it is – trying to convince people to vote for him), but also for the field day psychologists would have for what it says about his own relationships, which are clearly ad-libbed because no one would write this in a script.
Now, to be clear, this video about farmers and the estate tax isn’t the craziest thing Trump has said – that list is too deep and darkly twisted. But it’s on the list and among the most weird. Not only because – again, remember -- it’s a campaign video, but also for what it speaks about him and his relationship with his children psychologically – and then, to top it off, just totally weird for ending it with a sign-off that seems clueless for being totally unrelated to what he was just saying.
One thing to note, too, as that there are two cameras recording this, which we see when they cut away from talking right at the potential viewers and then go to the second one, where he is staring off into the netherworld. Oliver made the smart observation that they must have cut away when Trump got so lunatic, and one can only imagine – given what loony things they actually used -- how far down the rabbit hole he went into that material that they had to cut.
(But what’s also hilarious is realizing that they even had a camera already set up, knowing that it was likely that Trump would go off on some insane tangent and so needed another angle they could cut to when they made their edit.)
Now, there are two possibilities about what set Trump off on his tangent. The starting point might be reports about how Ivanka is trying to distance herself from her dad’s problems. And Jared has already gotten his two billion, so he can be more a free agent now. The question (without giving away is how upfront and direct he’s being. One friend believes that and thinks Trump is talking directly as a warning, of sorts. I’m more of the mind that it’s less self-aware (since self-awareness is not a Trump strong suit) and is more him doing what he so often does (perhaps brought to the surface by Ivanka and Jared, or it’s just Trump being Trump) and him projecting his own, long-held deep feelings about his family.
Whatever it is, it’s still nuts.
It’s only a minute and half, and is sort of semi-normal (consider that “normal” for Trump is monumental egotistic self-aggrandizement) until he starts talking about the estate tax.
Comments