Writing in The Guardian this Monday, Francine Prose contends that over the past few weeks, "the increasingly strange, intentionally provocative, inappropriate and frankly delusional tweets and pronouncements" coming from President Trump's Twitter account "have once again caused us to reflect on the president’s inner life."
Prose points to the 75-year-old protester Martin Gugino who was shoved to the ground by Buffalo police officers -- who Trump attempted to smear as an "antifa" foot soldier. "Does the courtly, somewhat hesitant Gugino really look to anyone like a dangerous thug?" Prose asks. "How could someone have watched that video and floated the idea that the attack on Gugino, still hospitalized with a brain injury, 'could be a set-up?'"
It's one of two things, Prose says: Either Trump truly believes that Gugino is a member of antifa and has the inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, or he thinks "everyone is lying."
"It’s remarkable, how much one can get used to, with a president who has made over 18,000 false or misleading claims since taking office," Prose writes. "But all that seems more disturbing now, not only because the tweets and speculations have gotten more aggressive and outlandish, but because the upheavals in our country, the crises we face – the continuing Covid-19 pandemic, the tanking economy, the unrest inspired by the early stages of a necessary reckoning with racism – have made us wish, more than ever, for a leader who shows some honesty, common sense, or who just (we’re setting the bar quite low here) behaves like a responsible adult."
Read the full op-ed over at The Guardian.
