Although the President has recently made various authoritarian gestures—in June, he threatened to deploy the military against protesters, and in July he talked about delaying the election—[Yale’s Timothy] Snyder contends that Trump’s predicament “is that he hasn’t ruined our system enough.” Snyder explained, “Generally, autocrats will distort the system as far as necessary to stay in power. Usually, it means warping democracy before they get to where Trump is now.” For an entrenched autocrat, an election is mere theatre—but the conclusion of the Trump-Biden race remains unpredictable, despite concerns about voter suppression, disputed ballot counts, and civil unrest.

Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits.

[The] leadership that we have … seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population…

Donald Trump doesn’t merely want to criticize his opponents; he takes a depraved delight in inflicting pain on others, even if there’s collateral damage in the process… There’s something quite sick about it all.

A lot of human casualties result from the cruelty of malignant narcissists like Donald Trump—casualties, it should be said, that his supporters in the Republican Party, on various pro-Trump websites and news outlets, and on talk radio are willing to tolerate or even defend. Their philosophy seems to be that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. If putting up with Trump’s indecency is the price of maintaining power, so be it. Will Trump’s white evangelical supporters—Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, Mike Huckabee, Ralph Reed—defend his behavior as the perfect embodiment of the New Testament ethic, the credo of Jesus, the message from the Sermon on the Mount? “Blessed are the brutal, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

…

There is a wickedness in our president that long ago corrupted him. It’s corrupted his party. And it’s in the process of corrupting our country, too.

He is a crimson stain on American decency. He needs to go.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track… Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

… The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected…

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era… It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump… [Their community] is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them; [they] have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life… Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty…

The president’s ability to execute … cruelty through word and deed makes [his followers] euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

Every woman adores a Fascist!   
The boot in the face, the brute   
Brute heart of a brute like you!

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tx., who currently finds himself in an unusually competitive race against Democratic opponent MJ Hegar, previously falsely represented himself as a graduate of Oxford University in England in the run-up to his successful election to the Texas Supreme Court, press and public records show.

In Texas politics, the word “intellectual” [or (God forbid) “professor”] is the equivalent of saying “fucks goats.” So why would Cornyn want to claim such a thing – and a foreign thing – in the first place? Texans are looking to elect people like Rick Perry, a cheerleader at Texas A&M.

***************

Ride ’em, cowboy!

I thought that my outrage meter had maxed out over the last eight months but today I found out that was wrong. I’ve been trying to gather thoughts for you about this all day long and all I can come up with is this unrelenting stream of profanity.

I’m an air force veteran. I served in Iraq. I served in Afghanistan. I took care of a lot of broken bodies over there. When the president came out and said we were suckers and losers I was pissed off. I wasn’t surprised but I was pissed off. When he said nothing when Putin put a bounty on our heads, I was pissed off but I wasn’t surprised because [Trump’s] in his pocket.

But NOW. Now he’s coming for my integrity and he’s coming for the integrity of my entire profession. Like I would sell my soul, fake a death certificate, to get two thousand bucks. This is a bald faced brazen lie from the biggest bald faced brazen liar that’s ever sat in [the oval] office.

… a witch, a table with candy, and the abominable snowman.

… in autumn.

“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends,” [Utah Senator Mike] Lee said. “Think of [Trump] as Captain Moroni. He seeks not power but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the wellbeing and the peace of the American people.”

The party’s over
It’s time to call it a day
They’ve voted early and soon
To send the buffoon away
It’s time to wind up the masquerade —
The IRS called.  It wants your taxes paid.

The party’s over
The Trumpers flicker and dim
They rallied all through the night

It seemed to be right but covid got them
Now you must wake up, all dreams must end
Take off your makeup, the party’s over
It’s all over, my friend

WE ARE DRAWING TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE. THE GREAT RED WAVE IS COMING!!!

… good writers like Caitlin Flanagan know how to tackle hopelessly tacky pointless topics. Faced, for instance, with writing about Melania Trump’s former BFF‘s tell-all, a publishing event registering magnitude minus one on the Richter Scale, Flanagan executes perfectly that old standby, the hilarious juxtaposition of high and low.

C’est entendu after all that her empty subject matter degrades anyone who approaches it; the only way to emerge unfilthed is to stop moaning and go the other way: resplendent-ify it by situating the nothingness within the world’s greatest, most substantive, cultural expressions.

The all-time great model for this approach, in SOS‘s humble opinion, is Drew Jubera’s piece on East Mississippi Community College (read and learn). When they go low, we go high is the technique. The lower the setting, the higher the cultural references. Try it and see if you don’t piss yourself laughing.

Now of course you have to be an extremely good writer (not to mention culturally literate) to do this thing. If you clicked on the Jubera link, you see how he did it. This is how Flanagan does it.

[A]t last we have a glimpse into the feelings and nature of our first lady, who has stalked through these past four years in high heels and a perfect blowout, her gaze pitiless as the sun.

Okay, hands? Do I see hands? Yes? Question over there?

What is the most famous line from Yeats’s The Second Coming doing at the end of this sentence? And why didn’t Flanagan write “slouched” instead of “stalked”? Though stalked is good super-modelogically, Yeats writes “slouches,” and supermodels also slouch…

But this is a quibble: By tossing into her review without comment this phrase from the crisis-ridden twentieth century’s highest-cultural poetic expression, Flanagan signals the base futility of her endeavor as well as the fun that might be had with it. Readers appreciate this sort of thing: The reduction of Yeats’s terrifying apocalyptic heartless beast to the runway robot’s belle indifférence … See what our world has come to kinda thing…

“I was there at the beginning,” [the ex-BFF] tells us, as though she had witnessed the separation of the Earth from the firmament, not bumped into a model in the Vogue offices.

Again grand Biblical/planetary language of inception is invoked in the context of the start of a chick flick.

[The BFF] describes working the inauguration as the 13th labor of Hercules…

Grand mythic sweep…

When [the BFF] explains that [Melania] will have to wear the clothes of an American designer to the inauguration, Melania is horrified. Her soul wounded, she cries out to the gods: “But I want to wear Lagerfeld!”

You get the idea.

[Trump’s] three-pronged strategy of political suicide and public health disaster came together seamlessly last night in Omaha, Nebraska. Before stranding thousands of his hapless followers in the cold, ink-black darkness outside of the airport, the president babbled on for two minutes about this inscrutable non-scandal (“Vice President Biden was directly involved and personally involved in establishing corrupt business dealing with China and getting money for it”) and then repeatedly made fun of the media for covering the coronavirus: “But you notice the fake news now, right? All they talk about is COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. And we’ve made such progress it’s incredible.”

Is the president on meth? Nebraska is a virus hotspot.