This weekend of lunacy was just another shining example of Trump's unfitness for office
On Sunday, news broke that an intruder had been shot and killed at Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump wasn’t there. He was at his gilded northern chalet.
While wintry weather blanketed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the atmosphere inside was less “let it snow,” more Overlook Hotel. Less festive cheer, more psychotic crisis.
The White House, already cavernous, creaky, and drafty, felt even more so given the gaping hole where the East Wing used to be. And Trump’s habitually gaseous state helped keep that cold breeze flowing.
The “people’s house,” as it was called before a dictator turned it into a gold-plated casino, can feel isolating on weekends. Especially because Melania wouldn’t be caught dead there at any time of year.
Add a looming State of the Union address, sagging poll numbers, mounting legal setbacks, and Trump’s deteriorating health, delusion, and dementia, and you have the makings of a Stephen King novel, filmed by Stanley Kubrick.
Any normal president would be huddled with speechwriters and strategists, pacing through SOTU drafts, testing applause lines, ensuring messaging. That’s how presidencies work.
But Trump isn’t a normal president, or a normal human being. He doesn’t do rehearsals. He prefers improvisation, impulse, the dopamine rush of a crowd laughing while he mocks a disabled person or singles out a Black attendee.
Roaming the White House hallways, left to his own devices, Trump spent the weekend giving us his best impression of Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining.
The symmetry was uncanny.
The most surreal moment was the re-emergence of a voice from the past. A caller identifying himself as “John Barron” called into C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, to rail against the Supreme Court.
To most, it sounded like a prank call. To anyone who has followed Trump since the 1980s, it sounded familiar. C-SPAN said it wasn’t Trump but in this era, when it comes to Trump, nothing is to be believed.
It was surely Trump. It had to be, at least to those of us who know the lengths Trump will go to to create a distracting media narrative by resorting to old tricks.
Trump has a long and oddly committed history of role-playing as his own publicist. In his tabloid heyday in New York, he would ring up reporters posing as “John Miller” or “John Barron,” fictional spokesmen whose sole purpose was to explain how staggeringly wealthy and romantically irresistible Donald J. Trump was.
All these years later, like Jack Torrance chatting with Lloyd the ghost bartender in an empty ballroom at the Overlook, Trump appeared to be talking to himself through the media, pacing the imaginary gilded expanse of his own soon-to-be ballroom, conjuring an advocate who reassured him in his wildest imaginations.
Now do you believe it wasn’t Trump?
The psychological hedge maze at the center of Trump’s mania is, of course, the Supreme Court. After SCOTUS bludgeoned his tariff authority on Friday, the bloodied Trump didn’t just bristle. He swung Jack Torrance’s ax.
Tariffs are Trump’s wildest obsession, his panacea for everything. His blood boiled.
In a fit of “all work and no play,” Trump swung-out on Truth Social, slicing out posts with the rhythm of someone typing the same sentence over and over, taking whacks at the justices, battering them as “fools and lap dogs.”
Instead of recalibrating, he doubled down. Gobsmackingly, most likely illegally, he raised global tariffs to 10 percent on Friday, in the wake of the ruling, then on Saturday absurdly increased them to 15 percent.
It was less about moderation and negotiation, more in the vein of, “I’m not gonna hurt ya, I’m just gonna bash your brains in.”
But this impulse to rip apart isn’t confined to trade statutes, international agreements or wayward justices. It has found a home within White House walls razed and bulldozed, like the East Wing, or spattered in gauche gold.
In the newly renovated aureate bathroom within the Lincoln Bedroom suite, one pictures Trump’s heirs, Don Jr. and Eric, playing their own version of the Grady twins, scrawling “REDRUM” on newly polished mirrors.
You can almost hear drafty corridors and vestibules echoing with whispered conspiracies while the Trump boys hover at the end of the hallway, chanting, “Come play with us. Come play with us.”
But Trump was busy with another game. Moving on from Barron and tariffs, the president wandered to the first floor and the White House Green Room.
In a move both berserk and bonkers, he announced he was sending a “great hospital boat” to Greenland. Greenland and Denmark responded that they did not need or request any such nautical mercy mission.
Classic Jack Torrance logic: if they won’t accept your offer, insist they’re too sick to know what’s good for them. Even Trump, whacked as he is, must have thought, “I must be losing my mind.”
That may be validated on Tuesday, when Trump finally escapes the White House and wobbles on wide ankles to the lectern in the Capitol, to give his SOTU speech.
He will declare the state of the union strong, the economy unparalleled, the tariffs transformative. It will go on and on and on, a loop of alternative facts, line after line, page after page, until the words lose meaning and only the churlish cadence remains:
“All work and no play makes Donny a dull boy. All work and no play makes Donny a dull boy. All work and no play makes Donny a dull boy…”
Finally, he may lean into the microphone and, with a more predatory grin than Jack Torrance could hope for, chillingly leer: “Heeeeere’s Donny.”
