What the President Doesn't Get About Dogs (NYT)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/opinion/trump-dogs-wolff-book.html
What the President Doesn’t Get About Dogs
Jennifer Weiner | JAN. 8, 2018

Among the revelations that have rained down in the wake of Michael Wolff’s White House tell-all “Fire and Fury” — the claims and counterclaims, the excerpts and the tweets, the book’s vicious portrayal of a clueless, childlike president whose courtiers are forced to produce daily episodes of Short Attention Span Theater — surely the saddest is this: The president of the United States, leader of the free world and famously the first pet-less commander in chief since Thomas Jefferson, does not understand how dogs work.

This became clear during a particularly frothy late-night tweet storm, in which President Trump, in a pretzel-twist of rage over the perfidy of Mr. Wolff and the president’s former adviser and campaign strategist Steve Bannon, wrote: “Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!”

There is a lot going on in this tweet. But it was one pungent phrase — “dumped like a dog” — that stuck in Dog World’s craw like a sideways Snausage. “What does being ‘dumped like a dog’ entail, precisely? Asking for a concerned friend (or friends, actually),” tweeted the Newsweek senior political writer Celeste Katz, posting her query above a shot of her dachshunds. The popular account @weratedogs summed it up by asking, simply: “do you … do you know what a dog is?”

This is not the first time Mr. Trump has employed canine similes to describe an especially odious opponent, an enemy who has been not just vanquished but humiliated to the point that his very humanity is in doubt.