Trump's National Prayer Breakfast rant got me to switch from CNN and MSNOW to local news. When will more people get so sick of his sick shtick they also turn him off and tune him out?

Can enough people see him for the freakish president he is?

When I turned on the TV this morning Trump was speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast. He was ranting, bragging, attacking Biden for being too out of it to even know he was president, attacking a host of other Democrats, claiming he won the previous electon, and otherwise lying his ass off.

Here’s just one snippet.

I won’t even get into how this was supposed to be a prayer breakfast and how Trump also said something to the effect of his being the best president for religion in recent history, perhaps in all of history. Otherwise, he barely touched on anything to do with religion which he knows less than squat about.

At the five minute mark or thereabouts is when Ann usually asks me to turn it off or, if I don’t, she goes into another room to look at her iPad.

I sometimes keep watching because I am waiting for him to say something I can write a Substack about. My tolerance for him is greater than hers. This morning it was even too much for me.

After seeing that both CNN and MSNBC were covering the speech, I switched to one of our local stations, the NBC affiliate KGW. They were covering the food service at the Olympics. (Click all small images if you want to enlarge them.)

That was an interesting story. It was followed by the weather. It probably isn’t interesting to those who live in other parts of the country but was to me. It turns out that we will have an unusual third day in a row of Spring-like weather.

Then there was the breaking news about a police incident in downtown Portland:

There’s was no information as to what this was about. It may have nothing to do with ICE and protestors and thus not likely to make the national news. (Update: This was what happened.)

I checked back to see what was on CNN and MSNOW and they were finally off Trump and covering topics like the abduction of Nancy Guthrie’s mother.

I am obviously not enamoured by Trump. His self-referential rants and ramblings don’t rivet me. I watch them as a clinician alert for signs of dementia and delusion, and as a Substacker - dare I call myself - “journalist.”

I am not suggesting that the fact that this morning he proved to be even too much for me means more than my being an outlier among anti-Trumpers. Maybe others like me kept watching to the bitter end switching to Fox News if CNN and MSNOW eventually cut away. I don’t know if they did.

What really will make a difference is when a significant number of Trump supporters find his shtick nothing more than a boring, not even amusing, comic routine and decide to tune him out.

Between the local news and catching up on whatever streaming video show they’re watching they have lots of choices.

If Trump gets wind of this as a trend, to him it will be like the breeze blowing across a field where a farmer just fertilized with liquid manure and the aroma wafted into your house. I know what that smells like from having lived in Michigan in the country surrounded by crop farms. Of course he’d never admit he’s smelling his own stink.

If and when polls show people are turning him off and tuning him out, instead of refining his presentations to stick to the topic and making them mercifully short, Trump will desperately do more of what he thinks he is a master of. His maniacal mind manipulating attempts will escalate. He will ramp up his rants. He will become more and more incoherent. The word salad he calls “the weave” will be seen for what it is. This is what clinician like me call loose associations. This refers to a thought disorder where a person has difficulty connecting ideas. It results in disorganized speech that can be confusing and hard to follow. This condition is often associated with mental health issues.

He’s been the center ring media circus feature. He’s Burt Lancaster's character, Mike Ribble, in the movie Trapeze performing the dangerous triple somersault, a stunt that only a few trapeze artists could accomplish.

Trump will hopefully lose his appeal and first he will be relegated to a side ring in his three ring circus. Eventually he may be moved to to the metaphorical circus cellar. This is where the then called “freaks” used to be exhibited in the basement of Madison Square Garden when the giant Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus was there. I marveled at them when my parents took me to the circus.

The term “freak” was in common usage when I was a kid growng up in the 40’s and 50’s. It was used to describe people with physical abnormalties and to insult or ridicule physically normal people. Hippies eventually proudly called themselves “freaks” and “to freak out” became an expression.

One of it’s defintions is “a very unusual and unexpected event or situation.” For example “a freak of nature.”

In this respect I think that, without disparaging those born with physical deformities, it is reasonable to call Trump a freak of a president even though he has two arms and two legs and doesn’t loook like the cartoon below.

Related from The Guardian:

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Excerpt:

Trump, of course, can be relied upon to make it feel less a church sermon than a knockabout campaign rally. “Good God!” and “Jesus Christ!” are more likely to be exclamations from horrified onlookers than earnest pronouncements from the truly faithful.

In a somewhat slurry tone, the US president, wearing dark suit and purple tie, went on a rhetorical tour of his greatest hits that had nothing to do with either prayer or breakfast. There was the swipe at “transgender insanity”, a rant against bird-killing wind farms, an account of Greenland as “the biggest piece of ice in the world” and a boast that “we have a military where they all look like Tom Cruise only bigger”.

There were insults too. Thomas Massie, the Republican representative of Kentucky, was dismissed as a “moron”, and there was the eternal dilemma of whether to call Trump’s predecessor “Sleepy Joe” or “Crooked Joe”. Trump described Barack Obama as “divisive” yet also observed: “I don’t know how a person of faith can vote for a Democrat.”

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