21-11-20, 18:55
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#47
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Join Date: Feb 2011
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re: World's Comical Opinion of TRUMP, PUTIN & BORIS
TRUMPS' monumental sulk: president retreats from public eye as Covid ravages US
There was one thing that even Donald Trump’s harshest critics were never able to accuse him of: invisibility.
The outgoing US president held endless campaign rallies, verbally sparred with reporters on the way to his helicopter and spent so long on the phone to Fox News shows that even pliable hosts had to gently but firmly hang up. He was the master of saturating every news cycle with his voice and image.
Yet two weeks after his defeat by Joe Biden in the election, Trump has effectively gone missing in action. Day after day passes without a public sighting. He does not hold press conferences any more. He has even stopped calling into conservative media.
For critics, it is evidence of a monumental sulk as Trump contemplates his imminent loss of power and exit from the White House. In their view, it is also a staggering abrogation of responsibility as the coronavirus pandemic surges to new highs, infecting more than 158,000 Americans – and killing in excess of 1,100 – every day.
Amid the deafening silence, Trump’s only “proof of life” since Biden’s victory has been a handful of public events at the White House and a military cemetery, weekend outings to his golf course in Virginia and a barrage of tweets airing grievances and pushing baseless conspiracy theories that the election was stolen from him.
“I don’t think we’ve had a president since Richard Nixon who is as far in the bunker and detached from the country as Donald Trump is right now,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.
“Donald Trump has not only suffered a catastrophic political defeat, he’s clearly also suffering from a deep emotional break. This behavior is even more erratic than usual and he has retreated.
He has put himself in a form of psychological isolation. His emotional state is clearly abysmal. In the popular lexicon, he’s lost it.”
Trump’s hermit-like status has proved irresistible to comedians, historians and overseas commentators. He has been compared to a tyrant in a fragile democracy holed up in a presidential palace and plotting either an internal coup or a sudden escape across the border.
Late-night TV host Stephen Colbert observed: “Well, history famously holds happy endings for autocrats who lose and then retreat to their bunker.”
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