He wanders, pale, sleepless, delusional, into a room, and performs a surrealistic piece that more and more people are calling, simply, “46 minutes.”
Soon the title of Trump’s unprecedented performance last Wednesday will shorten to 46, a nod to its obvious precursor, John Cage’s silent, genre-busting, 4’33. Recall the shock, amusement, anger, discomfort, and fascination when, in a New York concert hall in 1952, a pianist walked onstage with a flourish, sat grandly at a grand piano, and for four minutes and thirty-three seconds proceeded to do absolutely nothing. In a grand room of the White House, Trump’s appearance – vacuous, arrogant, hallucinatory – generated similar emotions.
Yet because of its basically unendurable sickness, the president’s performance was above all ignored by almost every American media outlet. It appeared only on Facebook.
Susan Glasser argues that we avert our eyes at our peril.
… This might have been a holy-shit speech, but it came in the “yeah, whatever” phase of Trump’s lame-duck Presidency. The courts have thrown out his legal team’s cases. The battleground states have all certified their election results affirming Biden’s win. The Electoral College will meet on December 14th, and the outcome does not appear to be in doubt.
And yet there are nearly fifty days until Biden’s Inauguration. This is far, far beyond the craziness of the past four years. Is this the kind of speech from their leader that Americans should just ignore?
… [Not] a single Republican senator had a word to say about Trump’s insane remarks from the White House on Wednesday …
… [W]hen the President launches a direct attack on the most important traditions of American democracy, I’m not ready to say “Yeah, whatever” just yet.
The presidency of Donald Trump is not mere performance art. In its degenerate stage it looks like Cage; it looks like Jarry. It looks like Mary Tyrone wandering in, pale, sleepless, and delusional at the end of Long Day’s Journey. But it is real. It is actually happening. A fourth Christ of Ypsilanti has entered Milton Rokeach’s hospital, this one with presidential powers.
‘Newt is coming from a very dark place. First, his wife is the “ambassador” to the “Vatican” and is according to unimpeachable sources in bed with (yes literally) an illegitimate pope who has openly questioned Donald Trump’s Christian faith. Behind Gingrich stand the massed powers and riches of the idolatrous Roman Catholic church, which, in league with George Soros, seeks the death of Donald Trump in order to protect their global “brand” from the internationally proliferating MAGA movement. If you break the letters NEWTGINGRICH into their component parts, you get GRINCH TWINGE. Newt Gingrich is The GRINCH who Stole the Election Without a TWINGE of Guilt. His wife’s name – Callista – is the title of an 1855 novel by none other than John Henry Newman, the most famous British Catholic priest ever. Aligned with Newt’s popery and Sorosian World Order is his capture by Bolivarian “Chavismo” and more broadly Hugo Chavez’s “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century.” For someone with this portfolio to call me destructive is really something.’
***********
(UD thanks a reader for correcting her extensive misspellings of Sidney Powell.)
I predict a series of more and more paranoid presentations after this one. This is Number One.
I predict that this guttering man will do something psychotic on camera. No one can stop him. Sane people have tried.
Time to read the 25th Amendment with care. We can’t have the most powerful person on earth be isolated and insane. We need the Vice President, the Cabinet, and Congress to work together to remove this unhinged threat to democracy, and to the world.
Complainancies of the loseur, and late
Burgers and Diet Coke in a baby chair,
And a gold eagle with its wings outspread
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The violent rush of avenging hatred.
He dreams a little, and he feels the dark
Encroachment of this new catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
His rooms of opulence and fine bright blings
Seem things in some procession of the dead
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of his dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Bedminster,
Dominion of the trap and fairway bunker.
************************************
Why should he give his country to the Dems?
What is autocracy if it can fail
After they hold free and fair elections?
Shall he not find in motions of the court,
In pungent tweets and chicken wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of winning?
Malignity must live within himself:
Passions of rage, or moods in falling polls;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Vexations when the Bidens come; nasty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
No pleasures and all pains, remembering
The past of glory and the present doom.
These are the measures destined for his soul.
That’s what you get when you elect a businessman-president!
… go after Trump’s advisor on covid.
Judge Brann dismisses Trump’s latest effort to nullify the votes of millions. He had a few things to say along the way.
[S]trained legal arguments without merit, and speculative accusations, … cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of [our country’s] sixth most populated state… [Trump threw haphazard allegations together like] Frankenstein’s Monster… [Trump cannot] deny more than 6.8 million people their right to vote …
He’s an old white guy full of rage, despair, and vindictiveness; all of the strategies he’s used throughout life to be a winner have lately failed, and he now finds himself a very public loser.
Because he is narcissistic, the public nature of his failure is close to unendurable, and he continues to try everything in his power to reverse events. The collapse of these efforts only adds to his public humiliation.
He has been in bad physical health. It’s quite possible that at his age, and just having recovered from the corona virus, he has a number of serious medical problems, though these will not have been disclosed to us.
Many of his former friends and associates are bailing on him, or giving him the silent treatment. He feels lonely, isolated. He has isolated himself. Maureen Dowd calls him “a child isolated and miserable living inside a national landmark, lashing out and spiraling into self-destructive acts.” Former FBI counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi goes so far as to describe Donald Trump as currently a “barricaded subject.“
Hey. I ain’t drawing the pictures.
**********************
He is the very embodiment, in other words, of the suicide.
Demographically, he stands smack in the center of the self-slaughter sweet spot.
You’re shocked. You think it’s a crazy notion. Allow me to quote a recent NYT headline:
‘How Did We Not Know?’ Gun Owners Confront a Suicide Epidemic
Try to keep in mind two salient features here (You probably won’t be able to, because people HATE to think about suicide.):
- A suicide epidemic. In some states (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico), the numbers are staggering.
- General ignorance about the suicide epidemic.
“Utah has very permissive gun laws, but we also have a very low homicide rate. What we didn’t realize was we have a huge suicide rate.”
How can you not realize that you have enormous suicide numbers, like Utah? How can you fail to notice that three of your counties have suicide rates 58% higher than the rest of the state? Than the rest of the state with close to the highest suicide rate in the nation? You can only succeed in not seeing this carnage if you’re totally determined not to see it. Just the way you will not see – will laugh off – the idea that the president of the United States might not be immune to the suicide epidemic, even as he’s flagrantly melting down in front of the nation.
I don’t say it’s likely. I do say it’s possible.
************************
Suicide, writes A. Alvarez, is “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.” Donald Trump is trapped in exactly this way: he has created necessities having to do with power, prestige, money, sexual conquest, cruelty, and above all victory in every contest. Yet he is about to lose power; he is widely viewed as a vulgarian; he has much less money than he boasts, and stands to lose a large chunk of what he does have as a result of many lawsuits; he is too old for sexual conquest; most people regard his cruelty as contemptible, and it certainly no longer works as well as it once did to frighten people into giving in to his demands; he has lost by six million votes to Joe Biden. Only the all-out paranoid or self-servingly degenerate are willing to appear on television to defend him. He himself has become quite paranoid. He moves in a paranoid world: “Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set.”
This horrible outcome is a result of extensive conspiracies against him (he appeared in front of the nation last evening, ranting in this instance about pharma conspiracies). There are too many of these conspiracies to count, and he feels undone by unrelenting deep state machinations.
What are his options? He lacks the courage and the cohorts to stage a coup; the prospect of doing anything on the outside after having been in the Oval Office is completely depressing. Degrading. For all his talk of 2024, he knows he’s already too tired to do the job, and that, realistically, he won’t have the energy to run again.
********************
There’s no compensation in affective life awaiting him – a cold wife; various ex-children, some of whom (paranoia, and an intolerable sense of being displaced, rising again here) clearly intend to ride his coattails into political positions of their own; a dwindling number of people willing to be seen with him on a golf course.
*******************
Then there’s guilt. People think he’s incapable of it, but his fatal failures in the matter of the pandemic gnaw at him. He knows he acted badly there; and not only badly. At night, in bed, he considers whether it’s true as many say that he is responsible for a lot of deaths. During daylight hours he can convince himself he’s a great man who saved many people. At night, images of the sick and suffering, of funerals, visit him. He thinks he begins to be haunted.
Another conspiracy against him. A conspiracy of the dead.
The only real pleasure left derives from the thought of the dread and misery he’s inflicting on his enemies. Also from the reception and broadcast of his suicide note, which he has written a thousand times in his head: Hope you enjoy seventy million Americans rising up to beat the shit out of you now that you’ve driven me to this…
*******************
Strangely, what sticks in his craw the most from all of this is his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. It’s so clear that, of the second generation, Bionic Woman, who even named her daughter for the state she plans to run in, will be the mid-twenty-first century Trump. Jesus.
*******************
Finally: It is in the nature of cults that the cult leader kills himself. He may, like Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh, take everyone with him one way or another; but Trump has far too many followers for this to be practicable. He’ll have to take one for the team.
*****************
How? Barricaded subject shoots himself in the head, at his desk in the Oval Office.
A song by John Dowland (1563-1626). Revised version.
Sing it.
What if I never leave?
Shall I still yield to despair,
And still on sorrow feed
That I can’t my loss repair?
Or shall I change the vote?
For tis disgrace and fraud.
Since, as good Rudy notes,
The love for me is broad.
Will thou let me stay
President For Life?
Then ever should I serve you all my days.
Come, come, come, for I want the thing so bad
Come, come, come, for I fear that I’ll go mad
What bothers me most of all … is Trump’s serial trashing of political norms, which wasn’t so much a moment as it was a constant. He’ll be remembered as the president who treated every civil servant as a personal servant, every cabinet secretary as a toady, every critic as an enemy, every enemy as a role model and every supporter as a fool…
I have a hard time imagining that anything Biden will ever do as president will fill me with the kind of visceral loathing I feel for Trump. There’s a difference between disagreement and disgust; between thinking a politician is taking the wrong route to the right destination and thinking he’s taking an insane route to a horrible destination.
Bret Stephens does some pre/post thinking about Trubu.
A Fox News anchor briefly paused mid-segment on Saturday after a sign carried by a demonstrator at the so-called “Million MAGA March” in Washington, D.C. appeared on the screen bearing a racist threat. Fox anchor Eric Shawn broke from his conversation with a Republican strategist to say, “We’ve just seen a very disturbing sign. It said, ‘Coming for Blacks and Indians first welcome to the New World Order.’”
Makes perfect sense when your base detests anything that even remotely suggests a government.
[T]yrants always die. The empty heterosexual posturing, the shirtless photo ops, the misogyny and indifference to the female experience, the anti-gay campaigns, are designed to hide one basic fact: A cult of personality is sterile. It cannot reproduce itself. The cult of personality is the worship of something temporary. It is thus confusion and, at bottom, cowardice: The leader cannot contemplate the fact that he will die and be replaced…
This is how UD accounts for Trump’s otherwise unaccountable ignoring/indifference/magical thinking in regard to the most appalling pandemic of our time. The phenomenon involves death. Soldiers who die in battle, Trump says, are “suckers.” You get the drift.
“A cult of personality says that one person is always right; so after his death comes chaos.” Ah, but Trump believes himself to be deathless. Death is for suckers. He operates on an unimaginably higher plane.
Which is why it’s so easy for Bill Maher to make us laugh right now. All he has to do – as Aristotle counseled – is bring the Immortal down fast, and with a big bump.
If this presidency is a bar, it is way past closing time. We need that guy who goes “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.“