Allentown, Pennsylvania:
“Nice trucks. You think I could hop into one of them and drive it away? I’d love to do it. Just drive the hell out of here. Just get the hell out of this. I had such a good life.”
Erie, Pennsylvania:
“[Before covid,] I wasn’t coming to Erie. I mean, I have to be honest, there’s no way I was coming. I didn’t have to.“
***************
For Trump’s political playbook (“Ah, I’ve had enough. It rains lead and iron here and we could damage our precious person.”), go here.
Serbia and Kosovo, so we signed a deal, so they gave me a prize for that, they gave me a Nobel Prize for something else, they should give me a Nobel Prize for what I did in Syria.
*******************
UBU: Hey! I’m becoming richer. I’m going to have them read me MY list of MY possessions. Herald, read me MY list of MY possessions.
THE HERALD: Earldom of Sandomir.
UBU: Begin with the principalities, you dickhead!
THE HERALD: Principality of Podolie, Grand-Duchy of Posen, Duchy of Courlande, Earldom of Sandomir, Earldom of Vitepsk, Palatinate of Polack, Margraviate of Thorn.
UBU: What else?
THE HERALD: That’s all.
UBU: How can that be all?
The question of the day, as we near the election, is whether a once-dominant nation, having discovered through its sadistic president the political gratification of ass up/head down, forced squirting, and nipple clamps, can forswear its Naughty Duce fetish and cast its vote for a man who will almost certainly not leather strap it until its bottom bleeds. Are we ready for that?
“I’ve seen all that I can take,” writes Frank Bruni, echoing a growing anti-sex-slavery sentiment in America.
The strongest holdouts against change are women: Lara Trump (violent rallies are “fun”) and Kimberly Guilfoyle (“The best is yet to… you know…”) speak for those Americans who remain mouth-gagged and ready to go. Women know that Trump is the only president they can rely on to call them disgusting and retarded and ugly and fat and weak. Disgusting because they have periods and menopause and plastic surgery. Women are not going to get this treatment from any other president, ever.
The Trump side’s latest campaign song, Do That To Me One More Time, makes an indirect appeal to the pursuit of happiness through increasingly exotic forms of humiliation, such as, say, Japanese rope bondage. There are always new and different ways to be spat at by a presidential strong man – certainly enough to fill up the next four years. And look how many of us crave him! Have you ever had hot wax dripped onto your thighs?
************
‘The state that’s closest at the moment is — Texas. If Joe Biden wins Texas, it’s over.’
UD’s mother’s favorite film was I Know Where I’m Going, featuring a conventional, materialistic young woman waylaid in her money and status ambitions by a dashing young man and the phantasmagoric Scottish island culture that surrounds him.
Early in the film she observes a friend of the man’s acting bizarrely. She turns to the man and says:
“He’s a bit odd, isn’t he?”
And the man answers:
**************
As the Cheshire Cat says, “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
But there’s conventionally, universally, prosaically, woman-in-the-street mad, and there’s bedlam-mad. Our current president is arguably a confirmed bedlamite.
Gail Collins, in this post’s headline, dares to anticipate a new, non-crazy president in three months. Like many pundits, psychiatrists, and ordinary people, she has concluded that Mr Trump is mentally ill, and UD‘s inclined to agree. Immaturity, hyper-irritability, petulance, grandiosity, mendacity, manipulation – these are character flaws, but not necessarily signs of pathology. We have watched DJT exhibit them all with increasing frequency and intensity as the election looms, and though they clearly designate a horrible person, it hasn’t been – at least for me – until the last week or two that they begin also to designate a clinically unbalanced one.
For me the tipping point came when I realized that he hates everyone. Watching the president, I keep thinking of that line from Ubu the King, when Ubu describes his political plans (If you put Ubu in my search engine, you will see that from the beginning of the last presidential campaign, UD has identified Trump as “Trubu,” the Ubu of our day):
I shall soon have made my fortune, and then I’ll kill everybody and go away.
Everybody – everybody – Trump meets every day — Leslie Stahl, Anthony Fauci, his followers (he calls them “disgusting”), debate moderators, debate commissioners – he hates. Everyone’s a monster, an idiot, a catastrophe, a zero, a disgrace, a joke, pathetic, stupid, vile, sickening… It’s the nihilistic sweep of his rejection of humanity (I’m thinking Melania gets the absolute worst of it, which explains why she wisely absents herself from as much of their life as she can – she’s America’s most invisible first lady) that gets you thinking that you’ve got something schizy and not merely misanthropic. He’s killing everybody before he goes away.
If he is going down, he wants to bring everyone and everything down with him. He has no hesitation to break laws or destroy people. Democratic institutions and principles mean nothing to him.
*****************
Yes, I’m saying that Trump’s mental violence – again, see Ubu – threatens to become physical in these last days. Remember when he confined his violence to fantasies? Remember his comment about the 2016 Democratic National Convention?
“You know what, I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them — no, no — I was gonna hit them… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin. He wouldn’t know what the hell happened… I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin, they’d never recover. And that’s what I did with a lot of people — that’s why I still don’t have certain people endorsing me. They still haven’t recovered, okay, you know?”
Pretty fucking graphic for purely mental violence, huh? Do you really have a lot of trouble imagining a moment during the next debate (if Trump actually agrees to it), when the moderator mutes the president’s mic, and this so enrages the president that he punches the moderator – or Biden? Remember how he physically stalked Hillary Clinton during their debates? Can actual physical contact – under far more pressurized circumstances – be far behind? Can’t you hear him shrieking at Biden?
You’re the head of the worst criminal family in the entire history of the country! Someone has to stop you before you take control of the country! Turn my mic back on or I’ll hit him so hard he won’t know what the hell happened!
**************
A couple of additional points: Is this suggestion at odds with my earlier claim that the president is possibly suicidal?
Of course not. Suicide is homicidal aggression directed against the self, but no one’s surprised when suicides first direct their aggression outward and pick off the people closest to them. They do it quite often. Nihilists loaded with rageful death instinct can go either way, or both ways.
Also: It wouldn’t even be strategically dumb for Trump to become physically violent, given the enthusiastic violence of many of his most devoted followers. I don’t just mean the bloodthirsty LOCK HER UP LOCK HER UP crowd; I mean the Proud Boys and all the other big ol’ shoot ’em up gangs. Nihilists love nihilism, babe.
… 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.