Donald Beckett and Samuel Trump

Seeing the President as a little, small Samuel Beckett, without Beckett's cultural elan, his skill as a writer and artist, sans Beckett's cultural erudition or hard earned compassion, seeing the President's language as it is--a series of sudden, non-contemplative reactions, often plagued by missspellings, but harnessing the constraints of a 140 character limit--may help us understand the President, not so much by what he's saying or why he's saying it, but by how he's saying it, typing on his phone what he says in such a hurry. 

Beckett said many things that sting. "When you listen to yourself, it is not literature you hear," is one of them, a clear, straightforward declarative sentence, well under 140 characters. Beckett, an Irishman, wrote on a typewriter mostly in French, his second language, thinking clearly and cautiously about what he wrote, knowing as he wrote that a distrust of language is an equally powerful communicative tool.

Seeing the President as little, as small as his language is small, may help us to understand who he is and what he means to do. Changing his name to Donald Beckett takes a little of the sting out of the President too, imagining him as a writer who distrusts language enough to compress it, without thinking about what he's written as real language, or by thinking that language has any real power at all.