Obama and Trump

   Having done with my reading about Hitler and, for that matter, about Germany, at least for the time being, I’m back in the US and in the middle of Ben Rhodes’s book on the Obama White House. It is interesting, if not transcendently so, for two reasons. The subjective one: little is truly new to me if in no way as clear and detailed in my mind as on those pages. Call the second “objective,” because the events recounted are coherent, sensible, logical—some version of “rational.”

   Coherent (or whatever) in contrast to Washington during the presidency of Donald Trump. Does that matter? Alas, it does. If Trump’s words and deeds were genial, one might follow his jumps, in awe because surprising or in awe because truly smart. But they tend to be neither; call it muddled mediocrity. Again, alas.