U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 179

Much of the Republican Party now spends much of its time and political capital protecting America’s Top Boy, President Donald Trump. While he is, in most respects, a perfectly apt representative of his class and generation, much of our president’s conduct could be fairly described as “adolescent”: the way he sulks and rages when he doesn’t get his way; the visceral pleasure he takes in mocking the vulnerable or disadvantaged; his solipsism and conviction that no one can teach him anything he doesn’t already know. Some of this just bears grim testimony to the stunted emotional capacity of any rich celebrity (neuroscientists and psychologists have identified numerous ways in which power and status warp the brain), and the rest is presumably the result of a degenerating mind replicating the limitations of a still-developing one.

Teenage Pricks

Trumpism’s brand of boy power