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).
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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.”
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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!”
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“Every single poll shows he’s MOPPING THE FLOOR with Biden!”
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“This is the healthiest, most coronavirus-free, White House in the history of the country!”
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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.
Sing it.
FEVER
Never know how much I love you
Never know how much I care
When we do debate preparation
I get a fever that’s so hard to bear
You give me fever at the rallies
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever in the mornin’
Fever all through the night
Sun lights up the day time
Moon lights up the night
I light up when you call my name
And you know I’m gonna treat you right
You give me fever at your golf club
Fever when you’re raising cash
Fever in the mornin’
My toes have got a nasty rash
Everybody’s got the fever
That is somethin’ you all know
Fever isn’t such a new thing
You knew about it long ago
Donald he loved Melania
Melania she felt the same
When he put his arms around her
He said Melania baby you’re my fame
He gave her fever
When they cuddled
Fever with his flaming kiss
Fever I’m on fire
Fever yeah I burn and hiss
Captain Smith and Pocohantas
Had a very mad affair
When her daddy tried to kill him
She said daddy oh don’t you dare
He gives me fever with his kisses
Fever when he holds me tight
Fever I’m his missus
Daddy won’t you treat him right
Now you’ve listened to my story
Here is the point that I have made
Trump was born to give you fever
Be it fahrenheit or centigrade
He gives you fever
When you meet him
Fever if you live you learn
Fever till you sizzle
What a lovely way to burn
What a lovely way to burn
Entire Top of the Republican Party has been Exposed to Covid
‘President Trump’s campaign schedule has insured that that the top tier of the Republican party either has contracted or has been exposed to covid-19.‘
‘The president knowingly exposed his wife, his adult children, his staff, his donors, and his supporters in the Cleveland debate hall. He refused and forbade the most basic safety precautions in the close quarters of the West Wing and on Air Force One, except for testing, which was intended to protect him personally. On Tuesday, Trump was on the debate stage mocking former Vice President Joe Biden for wearing face masks; as the positive tests came in, he did not bother to inform Biden or his team that Trump had exposed him to the coronavirus. Until we know the date of Trump’s last negative COVID-19 test, we can only guess at the number of people he exposed. By sticking to an aggressive travel schedule with in-person gatherings while eschewing even minimal safeguards, Trump has carried the risk of disease across the country.’
What is due in the way of kindness and sympathy to people who have no kindness and sympathy for anyone else? Should we repay horrifying cruelty in equal measure? Then we reduce ourselves to their level. But if we return indecency with the decency due any other person in need, don’t we encourage appalling behavior? …
The pandemic was not Trump’s fault, but at every turn, he made things worse than they had to be—because at every turn, he cared only for himself, never for the country. And now he will care only for himself again.
Trump should never have been allowed anywhere near any public office. Wish him well, but recognize that his deformed spirit will never be well—and that nothing can be well for the country under his leadership.
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The shriveling of Trump makes UD think of that Philip Roth title — The Dying Animal. Or the Yeats poem from which the title comes – for Yeats too knew how nightmarish it was to be merely an animal.
What is due to this self-sickened man? The pity we feel for a dying animal.
Once inside the venue, [having arrived too late to be tested,] the Trump party were approached by a white-coated doctor, who asked them to put on face masks, but they refused, NBC reported.
… down the street from UD: Bethesda’s Walter Reed Hospital. (Around here, we all grew up calling it the Naval Medical Hospital.) The place is directly across from NIH, where UD’s father spent his career studying (among other things) BCG’s effect on cancer. BCG is now considered one of the more promising covid therapies.
On Trump: Absolutely no surprise here. You spend your days and nights surrounded by crowds of strangers during a pandemic. You’re elderly. You’re under a lot of stress. You lead a relentlessly active life. You refuse to wear a mask.
I mean, you have go to characters like Adrian Leverkühn, who “goes out of his way to catch syphilis,” to approach the intensity of self-destruction.
Sources cited by The New York Times say the President was already lethargic on the way back from Thursday’s New Jersey event, and that he fell asleep on Air Force One on Wednesday night when returning from a rally in Minnesota.
They’re both currently reaping the personal rewards of cruelty, shamelessness, arrogance, and ignorance. And since the disease they recklessly invited to overtake them is insanely contagious, they are sharing those rewards with the rest of us.
“Most of the [ultraorthodox] community had it already, so we’re not so worried.“
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“Most people had it way back,” [Tzvi] Rosenberg told The Daily Beast, enjoying a cigarette unmasked a few feet from a similarly unprotected friend. “… We’re not wearing right now, because we’re smoking.”
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[M]any in the community believed in the Trump-touted … treatment of hydroxychloroquine…
[One man] approached his wife in synagogue and warned her … that masks cause COVID-19 infection.
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One man walking through Williamsburg provided the simple explanation.
“We all had it already,” he said of COVID, not stopping long enough to give his name.
An 18-year-old walking nearby said the same.
“I had it already and my community had it already,” he said…
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No major Hasidic rabbis in New York City have been seen wearing masks. In fact, photographs of large indoor gatherings — weddings, large prayer services and tisches, gatherings in which the rebbe sits at the head of a table surrounded by followers — have circulated on local news sites and social media.
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[M]ost of the rabbis themselves had the virus earlier this year and believe they have immunity.
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To some, the disregard for masks is evidence of an outlook in which everything in life is up to God.
“I don’t sense a lot of fear,” an administrator at a network of clinics in Williamsburg said. “I think there is a fatalistic attitude, like if it’s meant to be, I’ll get sick.”
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And Trump’s epitaph? UD takes it, with a small alteration, from Larry Kramer’s great play about AIDS, The Normal Heart:
Being defined by [the president’s cock] is literally killing us.
In his swagger lies our doom.