Why Trump Turned Gooey -- Digby

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/11/22/why-trump-turned-gooey/

Rick Perlstein shared a piece on Facebook noting:

Check out this brilliant guy’s entire Facebook page (Part 2). Best I can tell from the information provided he… is someone who works at Goodwill in Holland, Michigan. Elite institutions fail us. Ordinary people will save us.

He’s right about this guy’s writing. It’s excellent. And his analysis of the Mamdani-Trump meeting is spot on:

Thirty Minutes in the Lion’s Den: The Interview Trump Thought He Controlled

by Bruce Fanger

White Rose USA — November

There’s a strange thing that happens when you watch the full thirty-minute interview instead of the clipped version the internet tosses around. The edges soften. The masks slip. And you start to see the actual geometry of the interaction — where power sits, where insecurity leaks, where the tone changes, where the truth speaks by accident. The viral clip makes it look like a moment. The full meeting reveals a dynamic.

This wasn’t a showdown. It wasn’t a humiliation. It wasn’t a triumph for either man. It was something far more revealing: a case study in how a bully behaves when he can’t rely on fear, and how a principled politician behaves when he refuses the role of the victim.

. . . (Much more in this quote)

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