What Everyone Wants to Know About Donald Trump but Is Afraid to Ask

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Let me begin by saying that this idea is not original with me.

It was Jeff Tiedrich, one of my Substack superheroes, who, back in March 2020, proposed that a Lifetime Pulitzer be awarded to the first reporter to raise his or her hand and, preferably in an inside voice, ask President Donald J. Trump, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

the first reporter to stand up and ask "what the fuck is wrong with you" should get a lifetime Pulitzer

— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) March 31, 2020

That was, it should be noted, before COVID-19 exploded (but after Trump said he didn’t want a COVID-stricken cruise ship to dock in California because he “liked the numbers [of COVID sick and dead] being where they are”), before January 6, before “Quiet, piggy,” and arguably before it was clear to every non-MAGA cult member of the White House press pool that something was indeed very, very wrong with the man standing or sitting before them.

I’m not talking about sleepiness, slurring, an ever-looser speechifying “weave,” or anything else related to physical or mental health per se, although those are certainly issues of concern in one wielding such power and in command of a nuclear arsenal. 

I’m talking about common decency, respect, decorum — the fundamental baseline attribute referred to in Bernard Malamud’s story “Idiots First” as knowing “what it means human.”

As a WhoWhatWhy reader, you don’t need me to draw you diagrams. You’ve seen with your own eyes, heard with your own ears, and read, I’m guessing, hundreds of accounts of Trump’s vicious malevolence in service to his own deeply buried but unspeakably virulent inferiority complex.

But let’s go to the tape and perform a little thought experiment. 

A few weeks ago, in a press availability in the Oval Office, Trump was asked a straightforward question about the fate of his $1.8 billion “Weaponization Fund,” which had encountered stiff opposition from members of both parties in Congress and in the courts, and outrage from all but the most Trump-friendly media.

White House Press Pool Reporter: Can you explain why you decided to drop the anti-weaponization fund?

Trump: So, I love it. I think it’s so important. People were — this is a victim right here [points to side of Resolute Desk, off-camera], but not only a victim, he was also a student of it. What happened to great people, great American people, the way they were victimized, the way they were savaged. You have suicides. They killed themselves. Uh, they went bankrupt. They were weaponized by the Biden administration, by a bunch of thugs, including Obama people. And like nobody’s probably ever been, I mean I can think of maybe two instances in this country where they’ve had it to somewhere that extent, I’m not even sure if it was so much. They were put in jail for long periods of time, they were accused of things that never happened, they had prosecutors that were radical lunatics, and their lives were destroyed. And frankly uh, we had a lawsuit that — against us on the you know, on the uh weaponization, where the judge, a radical left judge, ruled against it. And we’ll see how all that works out, but a radical left judge ruled against it. But these people, their lives have been destroyed. Their families have been destroyed. Many of them. Not just — I’m not just talking about a few people. Many of them. Uh, I’m one of them. I — look I — they raided my house, Mar-a-Lago. That never happened, nobody had ever thought of anything like that. It turned out that it was a total fake. Everything about it was fake and corrupt, we have all the information. You know, the good advantage to sitting here is we can get information that you wouldn’t get by so what we have and what we are going to be showing over the coming weeks and months you’re not even gonna believe — some of you will believe, like CNN will believe it cuz they knew what was going on they’re crooked as hell. Yeah, CNN’s a very corrupt organization. But uh, with a corrupt reporter [points at Kaitlan Collins] standing right there never smiles she never says — she’s a young beautiful woman never smiles, I never see a smile on her face, I see her standing there [does “accordion” thing with hands] with hatred in her eyes like she has hatred because we have borders because we have a strong military because we cut our taxes because we do things that everybody wanted and then we win our election in a massive landslide [Trump won 49.8 percent of the vote], we won 87 percent of the counties in this country. Nobody’s ever heard of a thing like that. And that’s because we’re doing the right job. And we took a detour down to Iran because we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon under any circumstances, we can’t let that happen. So the reporter should be happy, they shouldn’t be unhappy, they should be very happy. Cuz you know what we’re doing? We’re saving our country. [Points toward press pool reporter]

Another White House Press Pool Reporter: Yes, Mr. President, two questions — one on Iran and then one on your birthday.

No one in the White House press pool said boo, no one so much as cleared their throat, no one stood up for their outrageously maligned colleague. Things just proceeded normally; next question.

The Seventh Seal

Now for the thought experiment (but first, please note, I typed all that out directly from the video, verbatim, using punctuation to the best of my ability to indicate delivery; there are no paragraphs because there were no paragraphs, no pauses in this weave).

What if someone in the perennially superhumanly decorous gaggle of assembled journalistic professionals — taking in that whole spew, and arriving at the italicized personal, misogynistic, poisonous, revolting remarks about their colleague Collins — had finally snapped, gone for that promised Lifetime Pulitzer, and asked the question that had to be banging its drum in the heads of most of them: “Mr. President, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

I mean after the stunned silence (in the heavens for the space of half an hour), what then? 

Human nature being what it is, my best guess for the most likely scenario would be a round of applause. 

Because once the ice is broken — once some preternaturally brave, or furious, soul picks up the tattered flag, stares into the cannons, and screams “Charge!!” — it is in our nature to follow. Assuming we are comparably appalled, which I think is a fair assumption here.

And then? I don’t know. One would have to ask Joseph McCarthy’s ghost, a man who was unhorsed and left for politically (and soon corporeally) dead by a single such question, albeit minus the “fuck.”

Look, you might observe that the whole situation would be surreal, and I won’t argue with you. But I would ask, in return, how we should describe the situation as it is, without that question being asked, without the fourth wall being broken, with decorum painfully maintained in the face of the unredeemably vile? 

Is it not also surreal? Are we not all cast as zombies in thrall to an absurdly noxious script, bad beyond what once would have been our wildest imaginings?

It’s not like the scene with Collins in the Oval Office that day was some kind of one-off. It’s routine, over and over again. It’s so frequent — the words, the behavior, the abuse — that it’s expected. It’s a shtick. It’s boring, numbing — in the way watching too many trainwrecks in one day might become boring and numbing. 

Two days later, it was Kristen Welker’s turn. Stumped when asked, during the course of NBC’s Meet the Press interview, to produce a shred of actual evidence in support of his claim that California’s primary election was “rigged,” Trump tried this instead:

Trump: They’re [the entire TV news industry] crooked. Just like you’re crooked. Your press is crooked. And Meet the Press is crooked.

Welker: To be fair, I’m not crooked.

Trump: Really? Well you play right into their hands then. You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. Your one-sided crooked network. Alright, let’s call it quits cause I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time. [Here, Welker tries to coax Trump into continuing and Trump complains about sitting in the rain, even though they’re under a roof.] You ought to straighten out your press because, you know what, a country can never be great with a dishonest press.

Welker: Mr. President, we traveled all — listen, we traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview. [Trump gets up, steps on his microphone, pats Welker on her shoulder, and walks off the set.]

Notably, both Collins (on The View, no less) and Welker received mostly praise for their stoical professionalism in the face of Trump’s abuse. Indeed Welker, whom Trump called the following day to more or less make nice, waved off the episode as just “part of covering Trump.” Much the way an abused spouse might wave off an episode as just part of being married. 

The press is, by now, fully inured to being Trump’s punching bag. It is unlikely that anyone will ever ask him the question that must surely be in just about everyone’s mind. 

No one has the personal courage to — just once, as Joseph Welch finally did with McCarthy — stop being “professional” and dare to be human.

The fourth wall will hold. The sick play will proceed as scripted. Tiedrich’s Pulitzer will go unclaimed.

And, of course, the question itself would be rhetorical because no one would ever expect Trump to know the answer. It would be like asking The Mikado’s little tom-tit, 

“Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing ‘Willow, titwillow, titwillow’?”
“Is it weakness of intellect, birdie?” I cried,
“Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?”

No, no one will ask, and we may never know, what the fuck is wrong with Donald Trump.

But given what we’ve quietly accepted and let him do to us, a better question might be, “What the fuck is wrong with us?”