Yesterday, July 8, 2015, MSNBC aired a half hour interview with Donald Trump.  Conducted in the public space of New York's Trump Tower, the setting resembled a shopping mall.  The reporter, Katy Tur, somehow managed to sit across from a human barrage of self-inflating words that made me, sitting at a remove before the TV set, wince occasionally from the effect of hearing this man blare his ego non-stop.  While Trump did listen to her questions--the only times his mouth wasn't open--he otherwise kept up a relentless flow of self-aggrandizement fit to come out of the mouths of some psychiatric ward patients. 
     He is, according to himself, Mr. Success.  He will "win the Latino vote."  Hillary Clinton was "the worst Secretary of State in this country's history."  With that statement, Trump implies he's read about and is thoroughly familiar with the biographies of the other sixty-seven people who've served as Secretary of State.  I don't believe--and I know I'm making a subjective judgment against him--that Trump knows even jackshit about the accomplishments of any of the Secretaries of State, including Clinton.
     His ignorance-based knowledge doesn't matter to him or those who support him as a political candidate: he speaks, it's true.  Trump, like Chris Christie and other egomaniacs, "tells it like it is."  He's omniscient, like a philosopher king.  He claims he knows best about what to do with the U.S. military.  He would destroy the oil fields run by ISIS.  He dismissed with contempt Katy Tur's follow-up question about civilian casualties resulting from such bombing.  Civilian casualties have nothing to do with oil drilling, apparently.  The very idea of civilians killed by mass bombing doesn't register in his mind as a real thing, even if those opposed to U.S. war policies point to collateral damage as a key factor in the opposition to American actions in the Middle East and elsewhere.
     As he pointed out in his campaign announcement speech, the one he paid actors to attend, he doesn't give a shit about the environment, and blowing up oil producing areas with the resulting pollution means nothing to him: he lives, let's realize, a life characterized by helicopter travel from tower to tower.  While his fellow competitors for the Republican nomination, Jeb Bush for instance, travel and speak at events--campaigning--Trump hasn't gotten out there, yet.  He sits in his tower with the interior like a shopping mall, allowing journalists to come to him.  He responds to his detractors through the tweet medium, or calls Fox News and rants to pliable Murdoch employees like Tucker Carlson and Steve Doocy.  Thus far, he's been willingly stuck inside his golden bubble, his primary power the celebrity he's fashioned for himself with the help of sensationalistic news media. 
     Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC insists Trump's candidacy is a joke, that "the Donald" knows it's a joke, a publicity-generating maneuver he's gotten used to doing every few years.  Trump himself in his interview with Katy Tur dismissed the negative reactions and boycotts resulting from his, to use a kind word, erroneous, or to use harsher words, fucking crazy, statements about Mexicans being "sent" by the Mexican government to America.
     "They're criminals, they're rapists, some of them, I'm sure, are good people."
     Univision, the Spanish language TV network that broadcasts in the U.S. and shows the Miss Universe contest, a Trump-owned production, has refused to show that beauty pageant.  Macy's, Nascar, ESPN, among many others, have disassociated themselves from Trump World.  NBC Universal, which broadcasts his reality show The Apprentice, also dumped him.  Trump, who's lost money from the boycotts, insists he didn't want to do that show anymore so NBC got upset with him.
     Imagine Trump not wanting to continue with a show dominated by his most-handsome-primate-in-the-universe face, casually dismissing that prominent TV source of his publicity.  I don't buy it, anymore than I think Trump's strategy in getting elected President includes stupidly losing millions of dollars offending Latinos, and anyone else with a heart.
     Not talked about enough in the news media is the early stage these candidates are in.  The election doesn't happen for another sixteen months!  I reserve judgment on who the Democratic and Republican nominees will be.  Who among the current candidates will burn out by the end of this year?  By the end of the summer?  The Citizens United decision makes possible elastic long-term campaigns funded by enormous amounts of secret money.  That it's secret means it comes from wealthy people, but who among the candidates can last another year?  How much do people get turned off when they see what the Clinton campaign did in New Hampshire last weekend?  With a mobile rope cordon, they separated the press from the candidate as she strode majestically, wearing one of her usual United Federation of Planets ambassador's costumes, oblivious to the impotent reporters' questions.  Is this behavior not an indication of what she'll be like if she's president?  Trump, too, gives us every needed clue to help us understand what kind of president he'd be: a blowhard lacking the ability to be diplomatic, convinced always of his own greatness, filled with violent power fantasies of deportation and mass bombing, of coercion, and above all, supremely confident in his own abilities, especially those he's never developed.  This personality description
could also fit Caligula.
     Trump's interview with Katy Tur was described by Tur's MSNBC colleagues as "very entertaining," smile smile.
     Is this what we want in a leader?  Robin Williams was a far greater and more admirable entertainer than Trump, but I would never have voted for him to hold an elected office.  Being entertaining (said often of Chris Christie, too) is a useless criterion for becoming president.  The state of the news, though, in these years, requires entertainment, for that gathers attention, increases profits, and weaves harmoniously, as was discovered in Rome's gladiatorial games, with real carnage.  Today's presidential candidates, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, provide the pre-game show before one of them will become the winning gladiator.

                                                                                Vic Neptune