When this essay first appeared it’s headline offered Trump as a political Svengali, an evil creature of his own making. But the editors of this magazine have toned down the political hysterics, in the interest of political verisimilitude?
‘The Apprentice’ starring Trump lasted fourteen seasons. A concept by Television Garbage Man, Mark Burnett. This ‘Reality Television’ established in the public mind Trump as a decisive leader,via his tag-line ‘You’re Fired’ . Trump was sold like toilet paper and hemorrhoid creme, that is the function of Television.

The rest of Andy’s  essay is devoted to the jejune political/historical  speculations, of a self-infatuated scribbler, whose ‘credibility , for those with a long enough political memory, is  expressed only in the negative! The last two paragraphs are indicative of the return of that Svengali, once subject to the erasure of editors, looking to secure their respectable bourgeois political respectability! Nor can Andy resist the mention of another Svengali Putin! Hysterical Melodrama is Andy’s specialty, its as if Aaron Spelling , that other Television Garbage Man, who relied on scripts, were still here among the living! The beauty is that Andy writes his own scripts!

He will do anything, we have to understand, to protect his psychic attachment to his own self-interest. Anything. I’ll repeat what I believe: He will not leave his office if he narrowly loses in 2020. He’ll fight — and rally his supporters to fight with him. He’s not Nixon. He’s Erdoğan. When, since becoming president, has Trump conceded anything?

A tyrant’s path to power is not a straight line, it’s dynamic. Each concession is instantly banked, past vices are turned into virtues, and then the ante is upped once again. The threat rises exponentially with time. If we can’t see this in front of our own eyes, and impeach this man now, even if he will not be convicted, we are flirting with the very stability of our political system. It is not impregnable. Why is Putin the only person who seems to grasp this?

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/andrew-sullivan-donald-trump-and-the-art-of-the-lie.html

Political Observer