Our President's Emotional Bait and Switch - By Andrew Sullivan
March 3, 2017
8:48 a.m.
After the terror, the smile. It suddenly beams, and the voice calms. You feel the warmth again and are momentarily overcome with gratitude and relief. Suddenly, all the man’s malice and rage and narcissism disappear and the world turns suddenly normal. And you thrill to that normality. It’s what you’ve craved for so long, and been denied for so long. You forgive. You hope. You wonder if all the fear and dread you felt only a few moments ago were just in your imagination.
Any victim of an abusive spouse knows this dynamic. And now America is getting used to it. The Donald Trump who put on his grown-up voice last Tuesday night, and fit into a reassuringly familiar ritual of civic democracy, was the very same Donald Trump who had spent much of his first month in office in a series of unprecedented dyspeptic fits against the media, NATO allies, illegal aliens, Meryl Streep … well, you know the list by now. For the first time in public, he spoke in his “indoor voice.” He occasionally smiled, even as he can’t quite rid himself of the Mussolini back-step whenever he earns his craved applause. He used a teleprompter. And of course the media swooned. Who wouldn’t at this point? It’s somewhat unfair to lambaste them for their instant acknowledgment of the speech’s success. It was a success — an emotional blast of pseudo-normality for a serial abuser of liberal democratic norms.
It was an irresistible moment when the foreboding and fear suddenly became sunlit uplands in a near parody of political happy talk: “Dying industries will come roaring back to life. Heroic veterans will get the care they so desperately need. … Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, airports, and railways gleaming across our beautiful land.”
“Beautiful.” He loves that word. You always know when Trump is putting on the charm — because he randomly attaches it to anything. And it’s all a complete fantasy, of course — a campaign speech without the snarl or chants, a rapture with absolutely no explanation of how this new beautiful world will be paid for, or legislated. But it works because it’s such a dramatic switch, and for a moment, even Jake Tapper’s amygdala seemed flooded with relief.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/andrew-sullivan-our-presidents-emotional-bait-and-switch.html
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