Thursday, May 25, 2017

Trump's Big CON: Our President Queeg

"Back in 1951, Herman Wouk published the definitive book about the Trump administration. He set it in the 1940s, during the war in the Pacific, aboard a destroyer-minesweeper skippered by a paranoid man with a compulsion to blame others for his mistakes. . .

We have many such similarities with Trump. Maybe the most psychologically egregious occurred right after the inauguration when he sent out Sean Spicer to lie about the size of the crowd. This was seemingly a small matter, but the inability to distinguish between the trivial and the consequential is, we now know, a Trump character malfunction.

In Queeg’s case, the telling incident has to do with some missing strawberries. The captain orders an investigation and has the ship laboriously searched for a nonexistent duplicate refrigerator key. 'They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the ward room icebox did exist,' Queeg says when he takes the stand at the court-martial of his mutinous officers.

But the actual mutiny is yet to come. It occurs when the Caine gets engulfed by a typhoon. Queeg seems unsure how to handle the boat in the storm. He does not come around into the wind, and the ship starts to founder. It is then that his officers take over — mutiny. They had already researched Article 184: 'It is conceivable that most unusual and extraordinary circumstances may arise in which the relief from duty of a commanding officer by a subordinate becomes necessary.'"

Read the Washington Post, The definitive book about the Trump administration was written in 1951.