Newsweek cover destroys Trump

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Newsweek’s cover this week probably won’t be hanging in Mar-a-Lago any time soon. And I checked, it’s real.

Newsweek depicts Trump as a “lazy boy” sitting in his Lazy Boy lounger, watching TV, chowing down on Cheetos, hamburgers, Diet Coke and pizza.

The captioning notes that during Trump’s six months in office, he’s spent 40 days golfing and gotten zero pieces of legislation passed.

But the most devastating part was the caption below the main photo: “Donal Trump is bored and tired. Imagine how bad he’d feel is he did any work.”

newsweek Trump cover

There’s also an associated article by Alexander Nazaryan:

Were he to reach the White House, Trump said, he wouldn’t make the same mistake for which he’d been lambasting Obama since 2011. “I’m going to be working for you,” he told supporters in August 2016. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”

Now that he’s president, Trump frequently departs the White House and spends the weekend golfing at either his South Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, or his country club in the New Jersey suburb of Bedminster. The promise he’d made a year before was discarded so quickly, you have to wonder if he even remembers making it. Politico did the legwork: George W. Bush didn’t golf for the first five months of his presidency, while Obama stayed away from his beloved links for four months following his inauguration. Trump held out for all of two weeks. He has visited a golf club 40 times since taking office in January, according to the self-explanatory site Trump Golf Count, which estimates the forays have cost American taxpayers $55 million. Another Trump tracker, this one by The New York Times, finds that his visits to Trump-branded properties total 56 days, nearly a third of his time in office….

[H]e is playing golf and tweeting anti-CNN wrestling memes. When the weekend concludes, Trump returns to the D.C. swamp with all the enthusiasm of an office lackey slouching toward his cubicle on Monday morning.

You have to read the entire piece, it’s masterful. I’ll share just one more snippet:

Two days before the presidential inauguration, Trump tweeted a picture of himself seated at a desk, pen hovering above a stack of papers. On his face was the faraway look of a great man lost in deep thought: Pericles pondering the Athenian dead, Churchill surveying a blitzkrieged London. The accompanying text revealed that the president-elect was composing his inaugural address at the Mar-a-Lago resort, which he’d already rebranded “the Winter White House.”

The tweet was supposed to show leadership at work, but it instead revealed the lengths to which Trump will go to foster the image of diligent leadership. It didn’t take a team of CIA digital forensicists to figure out that the Spanish tile wall behind Trump in the photograph matched the one in the reception area at Mar-a-Lago. A photograph soon surfaced of a young woman at the very same desk, looking like she was ready to confirm your dinner reservation. Further scrutiny—that is, clicking a magnifying glass icon to zoom in—revealed that the papers on the desk were seemingly blank, while the writing instrument in Trump’s hand appeared to be a Sharpie, not especially useful for writing out a lengthy speech. Wanting to look like a head of state, Trump instead ended up looking like a concierge-in-training.

Okay, just one more — it’s a long piece:

The most impressive quality of Trump’s myth is not just that it strays from reality but how thoroughly, even aggressively, it contravenes easily confirmable fact. When he was king, he was the King of Debt, and he may still owe as much as $1.8 billion to creditors. His casinos closed. His airline went bust. But even as he accrued failures, lawsuits and debts, Trump managed to turn “Trump” into a synonym for success. The letters were made of plastic, but they were dipped in gold.

This is a point I’ve been raising for a while. Trump sure doesn’t act like a successful business. He acts like a paranoid nut who is totally overwhelmed by his job. He’s a terrible manager — how many people will he fire before he admits that maybe the problem is coming from inside the house — doesn’t seem very bright, and, as Nazaryan notes, lacks even the most basic interest in his new, and rather important, job.

How did this guy make any money? He didn’t. He’s the king of bankruptcies.

Okay, showing one more:

Unable to take credit for his own achievements, Trump has laid claim to those of his predecessor. Obama took office during the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and rising. Eight years later, as he prepared to leave the White House, it was 4.7 percent, a nine-year low. And yet Trump cites “absolutely tremendous economic progress,” as if he were the one who pulled the nation out of the foreclosure crisis. He brags about having quelled the flow of immigrants entering the United States illegally, but it was under Obama that illegal immigration fell to a 44-year nadir. Trump has, however, managed to keep out tourists. America has become so great, international travelers aren’t coming like they used to.

It’s a brutal piece. Read it.

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