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.):

1. A suicide epidemic. In some states (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico), the numbers are staggering.
2. 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.

People have started noticing a change in the president’s hair color.

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.“

“[A]ll he’s got now is breaking stuff, and he’s going to do that with a vengeance.”

More proof that Donald Trump easily won the election.

… interruptus.

… elector set!

[This] really is, really, I think, the Island of the Misfit Toys at [this] point. You have crossed the Rubicon, you jumped on the crazy train and you’re headed into the cliffs that guard the flat earth … [It’s] the dissolution of reason…

Crazy train is nice – captures the runaway, headlong, tragicomic feel of these latter days… The rest of us can only grip the armrests, eyes shut against the possibility that our fellow American voters really have rigged it that a psychotic [Latest tweet: WE WILL WIN!] currently engineers the locomotive.

The Netherlands. Trump is notoriously obsessed with height, routinely savaging opponents who stand less tall than he, and saddling little Barron with the life of a freak — Trump selective-mated with a woman so tall that at his tender age Barron is already on his way to seven feet.

The tallest people in the world are in the Netherlands, where the much-belittled ex-president can feel that he inhabits a world commensurate with his self-image.

In a little while, we’ll start parsing the sickest of them, the lies that degraded us just by our having to be in the same room with them. Soon we’ll marvel at four years stuck in a surround sound of the absolutely rankest bullshit, as if the president this blog calls The Genius of the Carpathians were indeed Nicolae Ceaușescu, and we his hopelessly entrapped auditors.

For me the sickest and most degrading lie of all was uttered in Trumpism’s late decadent stage – just a month before his downfall, when his brightest and slickest enabler, Lara Trump, assured an interviewer that Trump telling a rally to scream lock her up at an American governor who had just narrowly avoided being violently kidnapped, and whose only offense against Trump’s crowd lay in her responsible approach to a pandemic, was all in fun. A Trump rally is a “fun, light atmosphere.” Everyone was just “having fun at a Trump rally.”

Violent, repeatedly stoked, crowd hatred is frightening. Two-Minute Hates are a horror. Got that? It’s not light, and it’s not fun, and the country will be safer when perky all-American shitmongers like Lara Trump go away.