No one who's fascinated by American politics would have wanted to miss this week's interview with Donald Trump on Meet the Press. Fitting that description, I even watched it on live TV. It's a testament to our fragmented media environment that a program being compelling enough to watch as it broadcasts is something of a status symbol just as Trump's candidacy is a testament to how dysfunctional politics have become since the last time a Clinton, a Bush and a billionaire were all presidential candidates.
As you might imagine, Trump's responses were perversely fascinating, particularly on questions about the Iran nuclear weapons deal. On the one hand, he was far more realistic than other candidates, acknowledging that a new President can't simply "rip up" the agreement on day one of their administration. On the other, he compensated with a different sort of bluster, insisting that he could have a far better job than the "incompetent" people who negotiated the agreement and vowing that he would go through every part of the agreement - as he claimed to have done with many other bad deals he took over - presumably to find loopholes to be used to his advantage.
What fascinates me about this approach is that it calls to mind two of the only groups it's socially acceptable to mock, lawyers and federal employees. By my reckoning, the only group (of non felons, at least) that's more acceptable to mock is prostitutes. As an aside, this strikes me as even more perverse because prostitutes provide an unambiguous benefit to society in the form of blow-jobs. If we're all being honest, this in itself is sufficient reason why they shouldn't be mocked.
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