I’ve got a busy day ahead, so we’ll make this fast.
I want to make two quick points about this New York Times article: How Trump Reshaped the Presidency in Over 11,000 Tweets.
1. Back when I was in journalism classes, everyone was very excited about the advances in the internet that would allow interesting, dynamic layouts and graphics for articles. We could make text fade in, fade out, slide around. We could add all kinds of nifty charts and graphics that would pop up, slide out of the way, blahblahblah.
Now, these many years later, I vehemently loath all that shit. Just put the text on the page and get out of my way. Like, yes, include a chart or a photo if it’s germane to the article, but if it floats, slides, fades, wraps, blinks, colors itself, or whatever, just make it go away for the love of little dogs with heart-shaped spots, please stop making me play visual dodge ball with your article.
I would pay extremely good money to get my hands of the stats for these “dynamic” articles, because I bet all that garbage isn’t keeping readers on the page.
2. Donald Trump is probably legally blind most of the time. From the article:
Once Mr. Trump arrives in the West Wing — usually after 10 a.m. — Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Mr. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him say, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.
Instead, the president dictates tweets to Mr. Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Mr. Trump calls out “Scavino!” Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Mr. Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)
I know how this works. I have extremely bad vision. Without glasses or contacts, my world is a pastel-colored blur. I couldn’t get through my day without glasses or contacts. I wouldn’t be able to read a single thing, I wouldn’t be able to see where I was going, I wouldn’t be able to recognize most people until they spoke – and even then, it might be dicey if I didn’t know them well.
This is how the president spends his day.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with being blind. Lots of people are and they do just fine. There’s nothing wrong with having terrible vision. That’s why we invented contacts and glasses. But the president of the United States is stumbling through his entire day blind as a goddamn bat because he’s too vain to wear his glasses. How many mistakes does he make in a day because of this?
This is like the least important problem with Trump as president, probably, but I’m pointing it out because it’s just so very Trump. He’s stumbling around blind and incompetent and it’s no one’s fault but his own, and he’s just bullshitting his way through it, and that is this con artist’s whole frickin’ life.
Image credit: Donald Trump, by Gage Skidmore.
Notes & Thoughts 