Fox … is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a “hostile” network…
One-on-one interviews are hard for Trump, because they require him to focus on individual human beings and engage with them as if he cares about—or even heard—what they just said. [LOL] He always runs the risk that the other person might continue to ask pointed questions even after he has wandered into some incomprehensible reverie... [LOOOL]
“I’m no great fan of Fox,” Trump complained at one point. “You’re sitting here,” Baier responded calmly. “Well, you gotta get your word out somehow, right?” Trump mumbled, with that sullen, childlike affect that is always so disconcerting to see in a man closer to 80 than 8. [This is the moment to visit all of UD’s UBU/TRUMP/TRUBU posts over many years. (Scroll down.)]
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Roger Shattuck on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu:
[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…
Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character? It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability, the vestiges of original sin. Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him. He remains a threat because he can destroy at will, and the political horrors of the twentieth century make the lesson disturbingly real… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images. He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.
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UD thanks Dmitry, a reader, for pointing out that Fox settled 787.5 million, not billion. She has corrected it.