Yesterday morning I woke up and read condemnations of Florida on social media. (Note to half of the rest of the country: Half of us here are as disappointed as you are.) Then at noon I watched the press conference from the White House. You can’t label it a presidential press conference, as there was nothing presidential about it; it was more like non-body-contact wrestling. Even people who thought CNN’s Jim Acosta was out of line in lecturing Trump – normally in press conferences members of the press ask questions – must have found the performance of the man at the lectern distasteful. It was not just his rudeness, his pettiness, his disdain for the people seated in front him, but his incessantly self-congratulatory tone. People who won on Tuesday did so because they embraced him and those who lost lost because they didn’t. Asked what he’s doing to heal the divide in the country he went on and on about his economic successes (without mentioning, of course, that he’s the beneficiary of his predecessor in the White House). And I wondered if, when you have a president who is not presidential – who is in fact the opposite of presidential: small, mean, unfocused, self-centered – does this filter down and create law enforcement officers who are not law-abiding and respected CEOs who shortchange their customers?
