Trump the shameless braggart is nothing new

| 7:29 pm EDT September 10, 2024
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

I am writing in the wee hours of September 10th. Tonight is the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump. I’m going to stick my neck out a long way and make a firm prediction. I believe the prosecutor, Kamala Harris, will enter the debate magnificently prepared with damning facts and inculpatory quotes about the defendant and destroy Trump. She will humiliate him. She will crush him. He will try to obfuscate his shameful record with a Gish Gallop of lies and false accusations. Kamala will dismantle them one by one.

But my purpose is not to talk about Trump’s disgraceful recent record, Trump the convicted criminal, Trump the disastrous president, Trump the bigot, Trump the adjudicated rapist, Trump the grifter, Trump the traitor. My purpose is to remind everyone — and myself — of the kind of man Trump is and always has been long before he ran for president. My purpose is to remind ourselves that we had all the information we needed to know about Trump twenty-three years ago tomorrow.

Two hours after the horror, after the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed into a billowing cloud of ordure and filth, Donald Trump was interviewed over the phone by Fox News-owned WWOR TV. He wasn’t contacted by the station, he called into the station himself. As a native New Yorker Trump believed he had important news, a vital insight into the day’s events, to share with fellow New Yorkers and the rest of the world.

Trump didn’t call to commiserate with his fellow Americans, nor to share their grief and horror, nor to find a way to make sense of a senseless act of unprecedented terror. He called to tell a lie, then to brag about the lie. He called to point out that, now that the WTC had collapsed, Trump’s building at 40 Wall Street was suddenly the tallest building in lower Manhattan.

“I mean, 40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually — before the World Trade Center — was the tallest,” Trump crowed. “And then when they built the World Trade Center it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

This was what we would all come to recognise as vintage Trump. We’ve seen it time and time again. For Trump, no tragedy is too great nor occasion too solemn, too momentous, that he won’t find some way, any way, to turn the focus of conversation to himself.

Typically he finds something pointlessly trivial to brag about, like a desperately needy child. On the day of America’s monumental horror, a date which will live in infamy, Trump had to point out that his building was now taller than any other in lower Manhattan. It’s too preposterous to be believed. Yet we still have the recording of him saying it.

But, because it was a Trump boast, it also had to contain a lie. Trump’s 40 Wall Street didn’t become the tallest building that day. The nearby building 70 Pine Street is 8 metres (25 feet) taller than 40 Wall Street. But the Trump we came to know today never let the truth get in the way of a boast. Clearly this is nothing new.

Clearly, Trump’s sociopathic lack of humanity isn’t some vestige of a recent power grab, a clever exploitation of gullible people. He hasn’t been corrupted by a complicit Republican Party. He’s always been exactly this awful. He really is, and always has been, the unfeeling braggart we have come to know him to be.

There are eight million stories in the naked city of reasons Donald Trump is unfit to be president again. This has been one of them. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.

Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.