Weird. You know it’s interesting nobody really knows his last name. If you ask people, do you know what his last name is, nobody has any idea what it is. Drumpf. It’s like Drumpf. I don’t know, how the hell did this happen?
Trump’s opening statement at his recent news conference announced the likely imminence of a 1920’s style depression and also World War III. This was his howdeedo, his little world review before he took questions. From his earlier speeches and tweets we can add mass slaughter on our city streets. Mass slaughter from the border. Your child’s forced transgendering. Babies killed moments after birth. Sick filthy books lining the walls of the local library. Subsidized tampons.
UD likes the phrase dystopian hype very much (see this post’s title). Boiled down, you could just say that authoritarian strongmen always try to scare us into voting for them — Only I can fix it, but first my campaign must convince Americans that existence as such is desperately, terrifyingly, in need of fixing. Trumpian authoritarians like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and JD Vance feature, in their books and rhetoric, a religiously inflected dystopian hype, in which the always-fallen world has REALLY let itself go lately, with America an unbearable hellscape of suicide, loneliness, alienation, and late-night snacking. Only Jesus – as interpreted by Pater Edmund Waldstein – can fix it.
Into this thorny tangle of statecraft and soulcraft now bursts Tim Walz, skipping through Rappaccini’s Garden, hanging a left by the House of Usher, and finally pausing to pick a lovely bouquet of Queen of the Night tulips. It’s Cold Comfort Farm with Trump as Ada Doom and Walz as Flora Poste and it’s pretty fucking funny.
Vance … has seen his approval rating drop since Trump announced him as his running mate on July 15.
The Republican’s net favorability was -6 in a YouGov survey conducted between July 15 and July 19. It dropped to -9 in another survey conducted between July 22 and July 25.
A poll conducted by Marist Poll for NPR and PBS between August 1 and August 4 also had Vance’s net favorability at -9 (34 percent favorable, 43 percent unfavorable). This was 5 points lower than in the same poll in July.
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There are three reasons for these results, UD would argue, and we will now list them, from superficial all the way to profound.
1.) Nixon Phiz. Walz is clean-shaven, with an open, genial, sociable, curious about the world, sort of expression. Further, his features are utterly anonymous. He looks like everyone. When Steve Martin turned down SNL’s invitation to portray him, one instantly thought of tons of other people for the job, starting with your Uncle Ned. Vance has the odd dark hirsute haunted vaguely paranoid look that did in Nixon in that televised debate with relaxed handsome clean-shaven JFK. Vance skews retro-Euro, like Valentino.
With both Nixon and Vance you kind of have to search out their deep-set eyes in all their hooded tortured black-rimmed complexity to begin to get any sort of read on them as personalities. Coupled with Trump’s Gustav van Aschenbach vibe (orange makeup, baldness with baroque combover, formal expensive suits), this makes for a less than breezy all-American look.
2.) Midnight! All alone with the cat ladies! Vance’s echt-being is smart-ass Yalie, which means he totally lacks the sweet self-deprecation that would have easily carried him aloft past the cat lady thing and past a lot of other unwary trash talk. Too vain and fragile an ego to make an I fucked up blame it on my youth sort of move, he maroons himself in unlikeability territory. It’s a variant of Trump doubling down on the bogus helicopter story. Totally lacks the ability to say I guess I got it wrong and move on. Trump is threatening to sue the NYT for doubting a story no one corroborates and for which he provides no documentation. Anything other than show humility.
3.) Kah-RAZY Kah-THOLICISM. For those who look deeper than trash talk and weird faces, there’s Vance’s super-reactionary Catholicism, unrecognizable to Catholics up to and including the Pope — a person who adherents like Vance seem to regard as the anti-Pope. Pantingly eager to see America convert to something that looks a lot like a theocracy, Vance is bound to alienate any non-insane religious person.
In an ‘angry’ phone call to The New York Times, Trump is said to have lashed the paper for claims he’d lied about a near-miss during a helicopter ride with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
NYT journalist Maggie Haberman – the paper’s star political reporter, who is said to have Trump’s ear – said Trump angrily insisted he could provide proof of the near-death experience.
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The only NDE Trump can honestly point to is his current presidential campaign.
… makes clear that generous government programs will never solve low birth rate.
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But the author doesn’t consider the Vance/Vermeule solution: Criminalize divorce, contraception, abortion, and pornography. Ban children’s books that acknowledge a world of non-straight, non-married, non-reproductive people. Ultimately, perhaps, impose a Catholic government that reserves the right to burn reproductive heretics at the stake.
It’s all a bit dark, to be sure. But unlike the wide range of incentives countries have so far tried, it’s highly likely to work.
Trump’s news conference today will no doubt address this; but his main job now will be reassuring the nation that he is not insane and demented.
The only way to do that is to stop talking about the past (Kemp, Raffensperger, Jan. 6, etc.) and about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, and talk rationally and on point about the present.
Let’s see.
‘People say I’m weird because I buried my first wife on my golf course … [angrily] I meant no disrespect! I loved her! … Marla… [pondering] now Marla was just… younger … fresher…. I’m not saying it was her fault, but she used all her attractions to seduce me away from my wife and I regretted it IMMEDIATELY we divorced ALMOST IMMEDIATELY and I want my Christian supporters OOOH I love my Christians I’m a Christian I LOVE LOVE LOVE YOU MY CHRISTIANS I want you to know that I still felt married to Ivana in the eyes of God and then I only married Melania because she’s so pretty. [Campaign manager appears, whispers in Trump’s ear.] Oh ok. This guy… my campaign manager…. he’d be a nobody without me I made him I made his career and I can unmake it … This guy wants me to stick to the issues so ok three wives five children ya gotta say I got it done birthrate wise! Every one of these women dropped one or more kid and look at Kamabla NO KIDS no commitment to the future of this country and I mean look at me I’m in rut all the time so I had to get it on with Stormy Daniels when my wife was uh … postpartum indisposed… I’m still like … RAGING BULL like I’m 78 and rut-wise I mean don’t worry about it…’
“Biden is aging. Trump is dementing… He can’t get through a whole rally without revealing himself. And, because this is a progressive illness, he will continue to get worse. And if he is like most patients like this, at some point, he is literally going to fall off the cognitive cliff and he will be completely incapacitated... I am certain that if he is reelected, he will become cognitively incapacitated. There’s no way at the rate of deterioration that he’s showing that he can make it through four more years without falling off the cliff.”
“This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”
And since America is already, according to Trump, “a fascist state,” we’d be layering communism ON TOP of fascism.
Yes. Communo-fascism. Fucking scary.
… On Friday, Trump fired off multiple Truth Social posts excoriating Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, the chair of the Republican Governors Association, for being a “RINO.” Lee’s sin, according to Trump, was that he had months ago endorsed an incumbent GOP state senator, while Trump had more recently endorsed the challenger…
[On] Saturday [Trump] uncorked on Georgia Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, calling him “a bad guy” [for being an insufficiently enthusiastic election denialist]. Reacting to that rally message, former Georgia Republican Party leader John Watson said: “Attacking Brian Kemp and his family is a galactic unforced error.”
“Galactic” is good.
We’re definitely on our way to this iconic scene.
Don’t laugh. UD had the same thought.
Fight Fight Fight is his post-assassination-attempt battle cry, but he won’t debate his opponent, and he didn’t mind all of us seeing how petulantly he refused.
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I’m seeing a pilot entering a death spiral, and instead of relying on his instruments (ie his advisors) he’s going by the seat of his pants.
Trump’s pant seats have served him well, so I get it, but age is kind to no one, and his rear’s gone saggy. Fond foolish old man, he listened to his son on the vp pick and now he’s picking cat hair out of his rear. He thinks insulting women and black people will give us all a pleasant buzz, and instead grating alarms are emanating from 538.
He always knew he was bogus as hell, but huge numbers of Americans didn’t.
UD has no doubt his staff is telling him how to keep the con aloft, but his pants are telling him something else.
Nothing easier than conjuring a life-threatening illness and stepping aside to see what the cat lady guy can do.
And only if he can wear one of these.
‘[M]ocking Trump’s tendency to … post in all caps, former Barack Obama speechwriter David Litt [wrote]:
“I HAVE AGREED TO A SWIM MEET WITH KATIE LEDECKY SO LONG AS SHE WEARS A FULL SUIT OF ARMOR AND HOLDS HER BREATH THE WHOLE TIME ALSO I GET A JET SKI.”‘
“I will have such revenges on you,
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!”
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Wittle King Lear prepares us for his next rally.