Re: Dump
Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 10:03 am
Alec Baldwin: Trump Is Like 'Blind, Drunk Guy at Controls of a Train'
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/fea ... mp-w509845
It's been one year since Donald Trump was elected president, and Alec Baldwin – who has rankled the commander in chief with a purposely hideous SNL impression that Trump says "stinks" – cannot contain himself when it comes to the topic of the president. "The thing that has been so mystifying to me and so frustrating to me is that Trump has learned nothing over the past year," Baldwin tells Rolling Stone. "He has changed not at all while he has had this important job, and it's a job that presents you with an opportunity to see the world through the most rarified window. I thought that the job would change him, and I am overwhelmed by how he has not changed at all."
He illustrates this in a new Trump parody book with a terrifically Trumpian title, You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President, which he co-wrote with journalist, novelist and radio host Kurt Andersen. The book presents a fictionalized (and hilarious) account of Trump's sexism, racism and, of course, solipsism since he entered the Oval Office in chapters like "The Bad Polls Are Probably Mostly or Completely Fake," "Is Jared a Fredo?" and "It Finally Felt Real, Like in a Movie." Throughout, photos of Baldwin-as-Trump illustrate the president getting spray-tanned, riding around Mar-a-Lago in Golf Cart One and sitting on the toilet, phone in hand. It's a look at the things that could very well make the president tick.
To write it, Andersen says he tapped into the "raging insecurity" that dictates Trump's psyche. Since he was writing a book, he ascribed a story arc to Trump but agrees with Baldwin that he doesn't feel that the president has changed since entering office. But one of the biggest challenges was tapping into Trump's thought process. "It was like learning to speak a foreign language," Andersen says. "Here are the adverbs he uses; here are the negative adjectives he uses; here are the positive ones and so on. "Then it was just a matter of capturing how this guy would think realistically. It is meant to e funny and over the top and all of that, but I plunged myself in and, as a result, if you talk to my wife, for three months I was a jerk. I channeled him a little too well sometimes."
Ultimately, Andersen found himself "Trumpifying" his own sentences to get it to sound right. "Just because he is so deeply ignorant doesn't necessarily mean he has a low IQ," he says, reacting to Trump's many claims about his own intelligence. "I would be surprised if he had a high IQ. But when I was writing, again and again, I would write a sentence or construction of a thought and it was too clear and the sentence was too smart frankly, so I had to Trumpify it and shave off some IQ points. I think his kind of animal genius is what made him realize the moment would come he would not be laughed off the stage if he ran for president. I think he has genius instincts, but give him the SAT and I think he gets below 600."
That said, Baldwin has his own theories about the frame of mind that informs Trump's actions, and why the president has such a thin skin when it comes to parodies like Baldwin's impression or, ostensibly, You Can't Spell America Without Me.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/fea ... mp-w509845
It's been one year since Donald Trump was elected president, and Alec Baldwin – who has rankled the commander in chief with a purposely hideous SNL impression that Trump says "stinks" – cannot contain himself when it comes to the topic of the president. "The thing that has been so mystifying to me and so frustrating to me is that Trump has learned nothing over the past year," Baldwin tells Rolling Stone. "He has changed not at all while he has had this important job, and it's a job that presents you with an opportunity to see the world through the most rarified window. I thought that the job would change him, and I am overwhelmed by how he has not changed at all."
He illustrates this in a new Trump parody book with a terrifically Trumpian title, You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President, which he co-wrote with journalist, novelist and radio host Kurt Andersen. The book presents a fictionalized (and hilarious) account of Trump's sexism, racism and, of course, solipsism since he entered the Oval Office in chapters like "The Bad Polls Are Probably Mostly or Completely Fake," "Is Jared a Fredo?" and "It Finally Felt Real, Like in a Movie." Throughout, photos of Baldwin-as-Trump illustrate the president getting spray-tanned, riding around Mar-a-Lago in Golf Cart One and sitting on the toilet, phone in hand. It's a look at the things that could very well make the president tick.
To write it, Andersen says he tapped into the "raging insecurity" that dictates Trump's psyche. Since he was writing a book, he ascribed a story arc to Trump but agrees with Baldwin that he doesn't feel that the president has changed since entering office. But one of the biggest challenges was tapping into Trump's thought process. "It was like learning to speak a foreign language," Andersen says. "Here are the adverbs he uses; here are the negative adjectives he uses; here are the positive ones and so on. "Then it was just a matter of capturing how this guy would think realistically. It is meant to e funny and over the top and all of that, but I plunged myself in and, as a result, if you talk to my wife, for three months I was a jerk. I channeled him a little too well sometimes."
Ultimately, Andersen found himself "Trumpifying" his own sentences to get it to sound right. "Just because he is so deeply ignorant doesn't necessarily mean he has a low IQ," he says, reacting to Trump's many claims about his own intelligence. "I would be surprised if he had a high IQ. But when I was writing, again and again, I would write a sentence or construction of a thought and it was too clear and the sentence was too smart frankly, so I had to Trumpify it and shave off some IQ points. I think his kind of animal genius is what made him realize the moment would come he would not be laughed off the stage if he ran for president. I think he has genius instincts, but give him the SAT and I think he gets below 600."
That said, Baldwin has his own theories about the frame of mind that informs Trump's actions, and why the president has such a thin skin when it comes to parodies like Baldwin's impression or, ostensibly, You Can't Spell America Without Me.
