Islam Times - Trump 'buffoonery' suited for show business not government

Islam Times - Donald Trump is a “paradigm of age” whose "buffoonery and clownishness" work best only in show business not government, says American analyst Dr. Kevin Barrett.

Barrett made the remarks over Trump’s declining popularity which has made him the least popular US president after a full year in office.

A new ABC News/ Washington Post poll published Sunday showed that only just 36 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance, while 58 percent disapproved.

The US public is evenly divided on whether or not Trump is mentally stable, with 48 percent saying his is, and 47 percent saying he’s not.

Barrett said the fact that only about half of Americans had doubt about Trump’s mental stability “raises the question of the mental stability of the other half who don’t question it.”

Citing the incendiary book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Barrett said even Trump and his team did not expect him to win.

“He was planning to launch a big media project which he probably would have been much better at because his clownishness and buffoonery and endless narcissistic unpredictability works pretty well in show business,” he said.

What led to his election, however, was the fact that the US society is a “quintessential Society of the Spectacle.” The problem, according to Barrett, is that people are more interested in what Trump has to offer as a “paradigm of age.”

“People are more interested these days in staring and gaping at a spectacle that really is less and less easy to tell apart from reality than in actually trying to find out the truth of what is going on,” he explained.

“So in that sense Trump is a paradigm of the age and his is providing a very ultimately amusing and terrifying spectacle as the supposed leader of the supposed free world,” Barrett further argued.