Unit2Sucks;842865050 said:
I don't understand the point of sending a message to Mueller. It wouldn't cause him to stand down. If Trump wanted to send that message he would pardon his son right now. This was just a kickback to one of his early supporters and someone who Trump thinks is far more popular than he actually is. Not unlike Trump views himself actually.
Bingo. There is no calculation to anything Trump does. He is pardoning Arpaio because Arpaio supported him, therefore he is a "good guy." It goes no further than that.
I read this article recently, which does a pretty good job of explaining why Trump does whatever he does:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-president-of-blank-sucking-nullity-roth
Quote:
It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb **** he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him—old, uninformed, amorphously if deeply aggrieved.
There’s a reason for this. Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life. He has no friends and no real allies; his inner circle is divided between ostensibly scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless ones, all of whom hold him in low regard and see him as a potential means to their individuated ends. There is no help on the way; his outer orbit is a rotation of replacement-level rage-grandpas and defective, perpetually clammy operators.
Read everything Trump does through the lens of malignant narcissism and it always makes more sense.