Robert Preston warned of “trouble right here in River City.” Yet times may have been easier in his day. Currently, we’re facing the thorny question of human potential. In the Trump administration’s latest chapter of “Let’s Elevate American Culture,” Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director, said: “I’m not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying to suck my own cock. I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president.”
And to make things a bit more tangled, an Associated Press story described MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s dilemma in reporting Mr. Scaramucci’s language this way:
“(Maddow) said the reference to Bannon said … he 'performs an anatomically difficult but not impossible act of a kind that suggests he is more interested in serving his own self than the president.’ “
We don’t know, of course, what to make of Mr. Scaramucci’s comments, but some questions won’t go away. For instance, assuming this occurs among any of Mr. Trump’s assistants, is there a schedule of sorts in the White House; say, five or six hours for this activity and one or two hours for governing? Would yoga be a material help to these assistants?
And there are other considerations:
· When Mr. Bannon said earlier this year that “the media … still do not understand why Donald Trump is president of the United States” did he mean they don’t understand the demands — both physical and mental — that may be placed on the men who helped elect Mr. Trump?
· When the president called for the destruction of Obamacare did he depend only on his own “fucking strength” or did he feel a new sense of resolve after resting and relaxing during seven trips to Mar-a-Lago, which cost the government $6.6 million?
· When the president gave a recent speech to a Boy Scout Jamboree — a speech that was widely criticized as political — could it be that the real problem was that many of his assistants were, uh, indisposed and unable to help him organize his ideas in the most effective way?
And finally, this. Was Jonathan Swift prescient by almost 300 years when he described yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels? Could he glimpse the inner workings of the Trump White House when he said:
So that, thinking I had seen enough, full of contempt and aversion, I got up, and pursued the beaten road, hoping it might direct me (elsewhere) … ?
There are no easy answers. But as I said, “We’ve got trouble,” and it goes beyond River City.