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?

… alike.

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.

Mr. Miller stopped paying some of the family’s bills, including, according to a lawsuit, the maintenance and docking fees for their Van Dutch speedboat — a frequent backdrop for late-night parties shared on Instagram. Such models generally sell for more than $1 million…

… Emergency medical workers found Mr. Miller unconscious in a white Porsche Carrera that he had rigged to poison himself …

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UD never knows quite what to do with the NYT’s luridly fascinating chronicles of the downfall of high-flying, risk-taking idjits. She enjoys the F. Scott Fitzgerald fizz of these accounts, the lascivious tell of the departed’s lethally high-end products and adventures, his sudden weeping in corporate meeting rooms as the walls close in …

Since the fool in this case saw fit to borrow tens of millions of dollars he couldn’t pay back, and then to saddle his wife and small children with his debt (he left a big life insurance policy, but will it pay out?), one feels okay not feeling much. I mean, pity. I guess. But since the facts of the case are so stereotypically cautionary, so much the oldest allegory in the world, the specific person to whom it happened gets lost, and one not too guiltily feels comfortable reading the account the way most people are reading it – as a final twisted chapter of clueless conspicuous consumption, the short sad bio of an Instagram braggart who meets his apotheosis in a cloud of high-performance, super-exclusive, carbon monoxide.

… “quickly falls apart,” leaving the Trump campaign in …

… toxic shock.

… she looks great in jeans.

Owen Ziliak/The Republic

Interesting contrast.

Pete Buttigieg.

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“24 yrs of service is nothing to sneeze at, and Vance is running alongside a known draft dodger who has repeatedly disparaged veterans and Gold Star families. If Vance wants to critique a man’s honor, he should start with his running mate.”

Tampon Tim!

Toadstool-Dick Don!

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JD Vance has issued an official comment: “Tampon Tim made it easier for teenagers to staunch the very blood they should be glorying in, the blood that marks their initiation into reproductive culture. Let them bleed all over the school cafeteria! Let their precious blood flow unstaunched by soulless penetrative technology. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”

… 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.

It was only a matter of time before Harvard Law’s double hater (liberalism and democracy) emerged from the scholarly shadows to join his soulmate JV “Junior Varsity” Vance in the Trumpian spotlight. Damon Linker puts Adrian Vermeule at the heart of an emergent “politics of reactionary negation,” in which not even the fanatic Catholicism people like AV sashay around with has any real meaning to them. Rather, disgust at modernity altogether – a disgust as deep as the Mariana Trench – seems to propel world-loathers into Trumpworld.

Specifically, the double haters hate the “personal existential emptiness … the meaninglessness and inertia” with which contemporary secular American life oppresses us all. Only a Catholic theocracy (UD calls it a Cathophate) will smash a country where “liberalism is the great enemy that must be fought and defeated so that something more wholesome and spiritually invigorating can take its place.” The American government will be run by priests and their acolytes, and will graciously rid us of our personal existential emptiness.

There is no neutral ground on fundamental questions of God, good and evil, and the purpose of human life. Political conflict entails conflict about these ultimate things… Accordingly, [radical rightwing Catholics] view public institutions, social structures and religion as an integral whole. Nothing is truly private. Everything affects the common good; there is no private life or private conscience. The resulting vision is of a hierarchical society with concentrated power, close coordination between church and state, and public regulation of religious orthodoxy… [In short,] the Catholic Church should strategically co-opt the American state. The result would be a return of state-sanctioned religion and a politics that is at once socially conservative, statist and economically populist… [The ultimate goal of all human life] is heaven, and the integralist means of getting us to that destination is to subordinate politics to the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church.

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So here’s a modest policy suggestion from UD: Before fully committing themselves to the overthrow of American democracy, Vance and his army of reactionary negationists should ask themselves whether their sensation of personal emptiness and inertia has more to do with excess ejaculation than modernity.

It’s quite possible, in other words, that they are mainly reacting to the post orgasmic, post coital tristesse that tells you you’ve gone and emptied yourself of sperm yet again.

These men after all are America’s most prominent pronatalists, led ultimately by the hyper-childed, always depleted-looking, Elon Musk. Wouldn’t they all feel silly if the miserable hollowed out feeling they ascribe to the rest of us is an epiphenomenon of their excruciating coital self-coercion?

It’s important to remind ourselves that semen retention has a distinguished spiritual history:

• karezza (Italian)
• maithuna (Hindu Tantra)
• sahaja (Hindu Yoga)
• tantra (Hinduism and Buddhism)
• cai Yin pu Yang and cai Yang pu Yin (Taoist)

Every one of these traditions recognizes coitus reservatus as providing benefits in terms of focus, a greater sense of purpose, and overall harmony. I would urge Vance and his followers to give this a try before extending their own sense of emptiness to everyone else.

Remember: Our side is known as The Happy Warriors.

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…’