I have blocked FOX on my cable, but I heard credible reports in other media that one FOX commentator doing a smear job on diplomats Bill Taylor and George Kent said they were “like the kids nobody played with ar recess.” I guess that’s a big insult with MAGA-hatted rubes, whose behaviour at Trump rallies indicates the Trump base is overpopulated with former schoolyard bullies.
There are an awful lot of enormously successful people in the world who were ignored at school recess. I imagine that the very characteristics that made Steve Jobs of Bill Gates such visionary geniuses as adults struck the other kids as a bit peculiar. We often read about how enormously popular actors and musicians were shunned as “fatties” or “weirdos” before they grew up and blossomed.
And then there are the enormously successful and scandal-free lives of witnesses Taylor and Kent themselves. Taylor has led what Republicans — before being infected with the morally-corrosive Trump virus — used to call “a model life:” Top-of-class art Westpoint, volunteered for front-line battlefield duty, and led a diplomatic career so distinguished that he was appointed ambassador by none other than Donald Trump.
However — let’s just for a couple of minutes play this game, and look at Trump’s people and try to imagine what some of them did at recess time.
Stephen Miller: Imagine him as a child. Would even the kindest of us — as children — felt comfortable hanging at recess with this peculiar little creature?
Eric Trump: The schoolyard is especially cruel to children who are not quite as smart as everyone else. I expect that, for Eric, recess was a daily period of “alone time.”
Sean Hannity: If I remember my childhood accurately, nobody was more mocked than the blowhard who couldn’t open his mouth without telling dim-witted, poorly constructed lies.
Rudy Guiliani: Even as a child, he was still Rudy Guiliani
And of course…
Donald Trump: who was so friendless at military boarding school that his father actually hired good-looking teen girls (from modelling agencies) to accompany the Trump family on visitors’ day and pretend to be friends of Cadet Trump.
I invite others to join in and add their own Trumpworld candidates for the “lonely at recess” list. I have left lots of fertile territory for others (Mike Pense, Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee, Rush Limbaugh, Jeff Sessions for a start)