Poker Face

I'd hate to play cards with Lesley Stahl; she has one of the great poker faces on TV. How else to explain her not laughing more in Donald Trump's puffy-eyed face at his answers during the so-called interview on 60 Minutes.

Not once did Trump give a straight answer but bobbed and weaved and shucked and jived like the jumped-up carnival barker that he is. For her part, Lesley Stahl kept on punching, but nothing she could say would deter Trump from being the fucking idiot that he is. At one point she asked him for a simple yes or no and he nodded in assent and then went off on a tangent that meant nothing to nobody but him. She actually had to laugh at some of the things he was trying to say.

But the essence of Donald Trump was captured by what he said just before a commercial break when he couldn't answer another direct question. He said, “I'm president and you're not.”

That was his nyah-nyah moment, like a fifth grader on the playground. This pre-juvenile rejoinder took the place of any rational thought or answer and was Donald Trump's idea of the presidency wrapped up in a single, stupid sentence. It was way way beneath reproachable. How do you deal with a man whose bottom line is such a paean to irrationality?

I'm almost finished Bob Woodward's book on Trump called “Fear” and it reinforces what I felt as I watched 60 Minutes – Trump is a totally self-centered maniac and easily the most dangerous person in the world.

Before the 60 Minutes debacle, Trump's week's highlight was a visit from the deranged Kardashian called Kanye West. Now Elvis was the King and, high as a jackrabbit, he could barge right in on old Dick Nixon and even come away with a Junior G-Man badge or whatever a plainly flummoxed Nixon gave him to get rid of him. Kanye had to make an appointment to see Trump with a horde of media present, too, and his crazy mixed up spiel had even Trump back on his heels. The best he could say was that Kanye's bullshit was “interesting.”

Kanye and Kim Kardashian are the Donald and Melania Trump of the shady pop culture world they dominate; both couples are shallow, vulgar, ignorant, and vapid. Contrast them to both Barack and Michelle Obama and Jay-Z and Beyonce, who are by contrast graceful, thoughtful, and serious.

But is this what America has come to – that Trumps and Kardashians can hold any kind of sway? On November 6 America will take its pulse. Are we alive and well or sickly and failing, a democracy now too rooted in silliness and selfishness and political savagery to rise to the occasion of beginning what is going to be the long and hard process of emerging from the wreckage Donald Trump and his enablers are making?