… back in the ‘sixties, gets (UD confers upon him) the Ignaz Semmelweis Award. Harassed and ridiculed to the point of madness (he died in an asylum) for telling idiots who didn’t believe in the germ theory of disease to wash their hands before delivering babies, Semmelweis stands for all humane, rational human beings who spend their entire lives up against arrogant, vindictive, and even violent degenerates.
Although our most idiotic and disastrous president ever has now called the world’s most distinguished infectious disease expert an idiot and a disaster, Fauci will remain in his covid-fighting task force position as long as he can – the health of the nation being more important than ongoing scrapes with a verbally violent psychotic. At any moment this paranoid could make his move and replace Fauci with … no one, since there’s no covid problem? Or with, say, Jon Voight… but Fauci, like Semmelweis, will continue to fight the good fight as long as he can.
Covid, says Michelle Goldberg, seems to be making the difference.
The D.C. government on Friday set up a free coronavirus testing site outside the White House in response to the growing number of confirmed cases linked to the Trump administration.
Things are getting shaky for the Genius of the Carpathians.
“IF MY DISGRACEFUL ATTORNEY GENERAL DOESN’T IMMEDIATELY ARREST PRINCESS VICTORIA of Sweden AND HER HUSBAND PRINCE DANIEL, Duke of Västergötland, I PLEDGE TO FIRE THE MONSTER THIS AFTERNOON. HE’S GOT ALL THE EVIDENCE HE NEEDS. EVERYONE IS WONDERING WHY THEY HAVEN’T BEEN INDICTED. LOCK. THEM. UP.”
… and she’s delighted he’s scheduled to be standing next to Pelosi today, introducing legislation that would trigger the 25th amendment, replacing an incapacitated president. This announcement will push the Sitting Paranoid further into what UD believes will likely be, unless help is forthcoming, a suicidal rage.
He has this disease because he’s more afraid of not being seen as a man than dying… I don’t think he’s afraid of killing himself if the price would be to avoid what he feels is the humiliation of wearing a mask and submitting to common sense and care for others…
Didn’t take much time for UD to find a commentator who agrees with her about DJT’s suicidality. Giridharadas’s theory of the president’s self-destruction tracks precisely with theories about why so many macho men in Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana (America’s BIG suicide states) kill themselves. (This blog has covered our suicidal macho/nihilist states forever.) Angry, isolated, obsessed with projecting strength, these are men who, like Trump, can look back on sordid personal lives that make unavoidably graphic the lovelessness they feel and inspire. Care for others, in Giridharadas’s words, is felt as a humiliating depletion of their strength; rage at others for … for obscure reasons, I guess having to do with others trying to draw love out of these men… ? … eventually finds its way inside the man himself and attacks him. As Andrew Sullivan notes, Trump is “dead inside apart from regular swoons of rage and resentment.”
Goes without saying that these same presuicides in our reddest states represent the very heart of Trump’s voting bloc, his demographic par excellence. Everyone noticed, during the last campaign, that Trump’s most solid support unerringly came from America’s most pilled-up, ginned-up, gunned-up, nihilistic counties and states (see, for instance, West Virginia).
************************
Look at it this way: These guys really need their guns, since they’re probably going to want to use them on themselves. They really need a president who supports the NRA.
A New Republic writer identifies Trump as the leader of the “Flailing Masculinity Death Cult.”
***********************
And Trump’s other high-profile, 80% support demographic? Self-destructive ultraorthodox Jews – many of whom, by the way, share the heartland presuicide’s love of violence (this group spent last night rioting, burning masks, and assaulting people on the streets of New York) – cultish enclaves seemingly unmoved by the many covid infections and deaths among them.
How unsurprising that these two morbid, isolated constituencies are viscerally drawn to our nihilist in chief, whose “psychotic unraveling [is there] for all to see.”
… he urgently needs a Baghdad Bob, a spokesperson who will get out there and gloat that “THE MARKETS HAVE SPIKED!”
*************
“Every single poll shows he’s MOPPING THE FLOOR with Biden!”
**************
“This is the healthiest, most coronavirus-free, White House in the history of the country!”
**************
He’d better do something fast, cuz the adults in this country can laugh off a lot, but when you seriously fuck with our stock market …
[Donald Trump watches Rudy Giuliani coughing throughout his Fox interview.]
Donald [to Don Jr]: Oh I do so hope Rudy has the coronavirus. It makes all of us so much stronger and wiser. [Shouts.] Biden isn’t even coughing yet! He’s a total zero with his [spits]… MASKS. I have personal experience fighting the coronavirus. That firsthand experience, Joe Biden doesn’t have that.
Don Jr: Dad, I want a word with you. [Nervously, with his father still watching the screen.] You know how much better you’ve been lately… I mean, more … in touch! More grounded! The family really feels you’ve come back to us after… drifting from us a bit… [DT does not respond. Still watching screen.] But Dad, your behavior the last few days… It’s like you’re back in the … bad old days…
Donald: [Hand goes automatically to his hair. Scowls.] The nurses messed up my do. Son, am I still young and beautiful? Have my looks faded? Howard Stern – how long ago it seems! – told me I was the handsomest man he’d ever met. How much simpler life was then!
Don Jr: [Gazes with deep sorrow at his father.] I feel so damned sunk. Because this time you had me fooled. I really believed you were mentally sound. I really believed you had it licked. I can’t forgive you yet. I’d begun to hope… I’ve never known you to drown yourself in it as deep as this…
Donald: The Secret Service delivers a dozen bumper cars to the Rose Garden tomorrow. Hope, Kayleigh, Thom, Mike, Ron, Chris, uh, who else, Melania, Ronna, and Kellyanne, have all said they’ll be there and we’ll play bumper cars and show Americans that the Rose Garden isn’t a place of quote infection or whatever but a place of FUN. We all feel better than we did twenty years ago!
Take heart. You’re not the only one. About three hundred million of us have been hammering that point home.
When meeting with journalists daily
She handles them firmly but gaily.
Her briefing’s now viral
She’s entered the spiral:
Corona has caught up to Kayleigh.
Nice summary. UD likes the addition of stupid. UD feels stupid is insufficiently referenced in this matter.
How weird we are, my fellow Americans. We are witnessing the playing out of our version of Greek tragedy, the downfall of the hero, the revelation that one of our most gifted envied potent figures has been corrupted, has degenerated, has been brought low by hubris or some other fatal character flaw, leaving us to regard with pity and fear his appalling end.
Unlike Trump, however, the traditional tragic hero (Oedipus, Hamlet, Faustus, Kurtz, the Consul) starts off dramatically better than the rest of us – morally and intellectually superior. His fall is thus from a very high height, and this is the horror and the pity of it – that even the very best among us will be shot down by the gods, or by some long-latent intrinsic defect. Although the hero soars above the rest of us, his eventual all-too-human fall instructs us in (and, Aristotle argues, helps reconcile us to) the limitations of our human nature, and the universal extinction that awaits us all, high and low.
The model of the tragic reversal, the hero’s sudden turn from high to low, from glory to catastrophe, doesn’t fit the president, who, as many have noted, has from the start played out a strikingly low-life narrative. This American tragic hero seems simply to have brazenly gotten away with a lot of things, and now time and circumstance have caught up with him. No one watching his effort, during the debate with Biden, also to brazen that event out, can have missed the desperation of a man coming to the bottom of his bag of tricks.
And, well, I guess we can reference tragic irony, of a sort. As Maureen Dowd’s comment in my headline suggests, we certainly have here that old dramatic chestnut whereby the thing the hero dreads the most – in this case, losing – over-abundantly, maximally painfully, with the whole world watching, comes to pass.