Seventy prominent Republicans call for an “immediate shift of all available RNC resources [away from Trump and] to vulnerable Senate and House races [in order to] prevent the GOP from drowning with a Trump-emblazoned anchor around its neck.”
Trump sounds like a 12-year-old — a willful and abusive braggart. He is remarkably ignorant and uneducated about the world that we face and the means we may use to defend ourselves.
“On other campaigns, we would have to scrounge for crumbs,” says a senior Clinton adviser. “Here, it’s a fire hose. [Trump] can set himself on fire at breakfast, kill a nun at lunch and waterboard a puppy in the afternoon. And that doesn’t even get us to prime time.”
Of all the denunciations of Donald Trump, UD finds most eloquent Senator Susan Collins’ set of reflections on his cruelty.
UD likes in particular one phrase Collins uses — his constant stream of cruel comments — because it is rather poetic and also quite simple. It assumes – correctly – that Collins does not need to define cruelty; it takes for granted the fact that all of us recognize cruelty when it occurs – in speech, in action – because we are all vulnerable human beings who have ourselves, in the course of our lives, suffered cruelty. We know intimately, deeply, historically, how it feels to be the object of someone else’s cruelty. That feeling never goes away.
(We have all inflicted cruelty too, and, if we are decent people, our recognition of our capacity to be cruel in the way of Donald Trump provokes things like shame, apology, and reflection on why we behaved that way.)
There is indeed something obscenely, intimately knowing in the way Trump stimulates Americans – even feeds them – with his cruelty, and makes his cruelty theirs. Commentators talk about the “nihilism” of Trump’s tea party followers, but don’t people really mean their cruelty? Trump leads them into a thrillingly disinhibited realm of communal disgust, horror, and violence – SHOOT THE BITCH – and the reason people attach “nihilism” to this is that, when you actually examine it, there’s nothing there. Nothing political. (This explains why his followers don’t mind that Trump also is a political black hole.) What’s there is inchoate inner rage, exteriorized into pleasurable cruelty by a charismatic sadist. (Pleasurable vindictive cruelty, as when Eliza Doolittle, having hurt Henry Higgins very badly, says triumphantly Ive got a little of my own back, anyhow.)
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In his poem, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” William E. Stafford notices how easy it is for human beings to give up the struggle to understand one another:
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the
world
and following the wrong god home we may miss
our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break …
That nihilistic shrug says I’ve tried to understand you – really understand you – but it’s too difficult or threatening or something so I’m going to betray you and my better self by letting the fragile human intercourse between us, our tentative conversations in the direction of mutual comprehension, break. I’m going to retreat to “a pattern that others made,” to regress to whatever my parochial upbringing might have been in regard to people outside my circle.
Cruelty, the root of cruelty, says the poet, is willful blindness to the vulnerability and complexity of the human beings around you. It’s the decision to shrug off the moral imperative to be careful what you do and say with vulnerable and complex people:
… I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something
shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should
consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the
dark.
This makes me think of Trump’s “Second Amendment people’ dog whistle the other day, his knowing what was occurring but deciding not to “recognize” it as it got transmitted to a fragile and complicated social world. He shrugged and “fooled” people rather than considering the darkness into which, with his careless words, he led them.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to
sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
Turns out you can’t attack a female reporter … for reporting, and a grieving mother … for grieving, and make death threats against the first female presidential nominee who’s kicking your ass in the polls — and still get as many women as you’ll need to win.
… with Donald Trump today coming close to suggesting Hillary Clinton should be shot.
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UD thinks it’s time to roll out the term Kafkaesque to describe what this nation will be going through until the beginning of November if the Republican party is unable to figure out a way to replace Trump as their candidate. We are experiencing, for the first time in our history, the presidential campaign of a person who exhibits signs of serious mental disturbance.
***********
Michael Hayden thinks the Secret Service should interview Trump; UD thinks instead that the relevant security outfit should interview his personal physician. Trump behaves like a person with an opioid dependency. (“He’s almost like someone with an addiction who can’t stop,” [one Republic political operative] said. “Until he gets help and admits it, he won’t be able to change.” — UD would suggest that he may indeed be a person with an addiction…)
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For anyone who cares about the future of American politics, the comment represents a dwindling commitment to politics itself, to the notion that, through rhetoric and competition, we might find a common way as a people. Instead, the Republican candidate made a casual nod to the final force of arms. At this stage, so little that Trump says shocks us, but, now and then, it is worth stepping back and regarding the full damage of it all: the wounds to our fading global image of openness and generosity; the stomping on our admiration for intelligence, eloquence, or honesty; and now the blithe contempt for safe and civil government.
*******************
UD thanks Greg.
… fails to endorse – indeed denounces – Trump (H/T: TPM).
Remarkable, thinks UD. Given that the 538 Election Forecast has Trump at 98.4%, Clinton at 1.5% in Oklahoma.
… Titties, by Loudmouthed Dickens.
***************
In the grand oratorical tradition of Winston Churchill.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous titties and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.
**************
Why the Freudian slip?
Cannot stop thinking about Barney Frank, subject of a 2011 Trump tweet.
Barney Frank looked disgusting–nipples protruding–in his blue shirt before Congress. Very very disrespectful.
Buyer’s remorse has more than a few Trump donors looking to cancel their recurring donations.
But the Trump website won’t let you. (Hillary’s will.) ‘Tis in vain, says Vanity Fair:
In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that donating money to a political candidate is a form of free speech. Imagine being forced to scream for an hour once a month, and you get a pretty good idea what disillusioned Trump supporters must be going through.
Here’s the right way to look at it. Your unstoppable donation to America’s Übermensch is part of the hideous Eternal Recurrence in every human existence. Nietzsche argued that the strongest person, the person most able to affirm life, is able to say Everything in my life – all the suffering and confusion and humiliation – if you told me I would have to live it over and over and over again, I would rejoice to do so!
It is only the weak who, like Woody Allen, say:
Nietzsche … said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.
Your donation to Donald Trump is your Ice Capades.
Be strong.
***************
UD thanks dmf.
“The financial-services people, as much as many of them would like to see more deregulation, are also deeply frightened by the prospect of a Trump presidency,” [Elizabeth] Warren said. “Nuclear war is bad for business.”
… Disorders, with its at-least-one-guaranteed-billable-disorder-for-every-American (put DSM in my search engine), but she has never denied that in cases of grossly obvious and damaging psychological imbalance it can provide clarity about characteristics and treatment.
Representative Karen Bass, a politician with a background in health care, has launched a petition calling on “mental health professionals to publicly urge the Republican party to conduct an evaluation of Mr. Trump and officially determine if he is mentally fit to lead the free world.” Citing in detail the DSM’s criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Bass suggests that Trump seems indeed to have been so debilitated by NPD that he should be replaced at the top of the ticket — pending professional confirmation of his condition.