TRUBU’S BACK!

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.)]

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

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.

***********

UD thanks Dmitry, a reader, for pointing out that Fox settled 787.5 million, not billion. She has corrected it.

For years, this blog has argued that Alfred Jarry’s character, Ubu, is an eerily exact prefiguration of Trump. I have even coined a name for the former president: Trubu.

Trump would Eat Torn Up Documents

in the Oval Office,

ex-White House Aide Claims

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

If you haven’t read Ubu the King yet, for goodness sake, do. Here’s the whole thing in pdf. Read and understand. It will put the latest revelations – and so much else – in perspective.

Trubu Roi’s 2020 Campaign Slogan: LOCK THE ENTIRE WORLD UP

Campaign song:

Make the world go away
Get it off of my shoulders
Bolton, Kelly, what the hey?
Just make the world go away.
Do you remember when you served me
Before your conscience won the day?
Well if you do, then show some pity
And make the world go away. Make the world go away
Get it off of my shoulders
Say the things you used to say
And make the world go away.

Trubu Roi

… Trump implored Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, to help him jettison the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump whines to a group of aides…

… While visiting Pearl Harbor, according to John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, Trump seemed to have no idea what had actually happened there. Throughout he is misinformed and confused while at the same time utterly certain of himself.

… Administration lawyers came up with a nickname for Matthew Whitaker, the former acting attorney general. They called him Mongo, after the illiterate galoot played by Alex Karras in the Mel Brooks movie “Blazing Saddles.”

The Art of Political Writing in L’Age de Trubu.

This is good.

Between calling Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) a panoply of Trumpish insults (and for the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to be held for treason), engaging in his usual hatred of the press, talking about Mike Pompeo’s intimate undergarments, and quite obviously scaring the shit out of Finnish President Sauli Niinisto—who looked like he was the very unwilling star of an ISIS hostage video—Trump spent the day rapidly decompensating, and it was a hideous spectacle. All the Maximum Leader pronunciamentos won’t change the reality that Donald John Trump, 45th president of the United States, has lost his shit.

In private, Republicans are in the deepest despair of the Trump era. They’ve got that hang-dog, dick-in-the-dirt fatalism of men destined to die in a meaningless battle in a pointless war.

Trubu Redux

Recognizing Trump as pure Père Ubu, this blog in 2016 featured some posts imagining a new American version of Jarry’s great play whose main character is Trubu. Trump’s Grand Victory silenced UD‘s parodic energy, but the powerful reemergence – under impeachment pressure – of the man’s ubuesque character has me, if not penning an additional scene or two of Trubu Roi, at least turning to one of Ubu’s greatest perceivers, Roger Shattuck.

(A comment of Timothy Snyder’s on the Rachel Maddow Show had me thinking Trubu thoughts again; he described Trump’s “scorn for the idea of law… [For him,] there isn’t really law. It’s just a joke.” Instantly I pictured vile, hilarious, obscene Ubu rolling around the stage slashing and burning because everything except his power over other people is a joke.)

Shattuck:

[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.

In other words:

Keep smiling through
Just like you always do
‘Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away

PERE TRUBU: Act Three

(Act Two is here)

Characters

Loose Bannon
Manthefort
Miss Kissy
Pa Trubu
Secessions
Tense Rictus
Watch Their Tails


Location

A room in Trubu Tower.

Tense Rictus, Miss Kissy, Manthefort, Secessions, and Watch Their Tails seated at a splendid table. Excitedly talk over one another as they eat and drink.


Secessions:
A toast! To the latest poll! It has us up by twenty points in northern Idaho.

Manthefort, Miss Kissy: A toast! A toast! We’re killing her!

Watch Their Tails: It’s the beginning of the end for that epileptic.

Tense Rictus: I thought we were going with Alzheimer’s.

[Laughter. Shouts of Whatever! Okay!]

[A sudden hush.]

Tense Rictus: Here he comes.

[Enter Pa Trubu with Loose Bannon. The men at the table eye Bannon warily.]

Tense Rictus: Uh, hi, Bannon. What brings you by this lovely afternoon?

Pa Trubu: Gentlemen, I give you my new campaign manager. Manthefort, give Bannon your seat.

[Manthefort’s face flushes. He abandons his seat.]

Manthefort: So where do I sit now?

Pa Trubu: How about… KIEV?

[All laugh except for Manthefort.]

Pa Trubu: My friends, change as we know is a part of life, it’s a part of life, change, change, part of life, and although we’re doing great in Hayden we’re doing unbelievable in Hayden, we’re winning so much in Hayden they’re begging us to do less winning, there’s always room for improvement. Loose Bannon is the attack dog we need at this point in the election cycle.

Loose Bannon [on all fours]: Rrrrrrfff! Rrrrrrrffff!

Pa Trubu: Manthefort – you and Miss Kissy go to the wine cellar and get us another bottle. Tense Rictus, Secessions – walk my dog. [All four leave.] So – Loose Bannon, Watch Their Tails – it’s time for the three of us to get to work.

Père Trubu: Act Two

Enter Père Trubu, shredding a copy of the New York Times:

FIFTY FAILED ELITES! That’s all they are! By my green candle, Madam, I’ll chop every one of them up into tiny bits and flush them down this gold-plated crapper!

Mère Trubu:

OOOOhhh but ooh Père Trubu also that nasty Senator Collins called you a nasty little merrrdddrrrrre plus she’s not voting for you. What’re we gonna do, Père Trubu? Your campaign’s the one in the crapper! How’re you going to be PRESIDENT and eat all the Boston Cream Pie you want and sit around and tell everybody what to do? Come on Pa Trubu: BE A MAN.

PT:

Pschittabugger and buggerapschitt Ma Trubu another word out of you my lady and I’ll shove your stinking face in the crapper! [Rushes into the bathroom; returns brandishing an unmentionable brush.] DON’T MAKE ME USE THIS. [Chases Mère Trubu about the penthouse. She screams.]

MT:

You MORON. You COWARD. You must capture the Clinton woman and JAIL HER.

PT:

Fuck me Madam brilliant idea HOW do you propose that I do it?

MT:

You must sneak up behind her while she’s giving a speech and scream THUS EVER TO TYRANTS and give her a big fat rap on the head with your brush and drag her off.

PT:

You’re a genius my fine woman but wait what if it doesn’t work and I get caught and I get put in jail?

MT:

You MORON. You COWARD. No one will expect a presidential candidate to do something like that so you will have the advantage of surprise. For once in your life SHOW SOME GUTS.

PT:

Call me a coward again Ma Trubu and I’ll smash your teeth in! [Again runs after her with the brush. She screams. End of Act Two.]

‘I shall soon have made my fortune, and then I’ll kill everybody and go away.’

Trubu, the Genius of the Carpathians, Ada Doom — call him what you will (these are what we call him on this blog) — moves another step toward his obvious end: The limited nuclear explosion of Mar-A-Lago. As sure as Absalom‘s Clytie burns down her house full of devils and dolts, Trump hoards the codes in preparation for the nihilism to end all nihilisms.

He himself, like Faulkner’s Jim Bond, will flee the estate while family members and Trumpians burn within. He will head for Ted Kaczynski’s Montana hideaway, where, after some remodeling, he will settle in for his legacy years.

Man, I’ve been calling Trump UBU for years, but I had NO IDEA…

… how perfectly the mad fucker fit the description. Read my TRUBU posts here, and listen to Cassidy Hutchinson’s description today of his physically assaulting his security chief, throwing his lunch against WH dining room walls, and pulling tablecloths in order to upend all the food and drink on WH tables. Trump is indeed the reincarnation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu the King – a massive ball of vile, angry, idiot flesh deployed against the world when it frustrates his infantile, nihilistic desires. Listen to Hutchinson describe his rage when security officers kept AK-47-wielding madmen out of the January 6 rally enclosure: Let ’em in! Guns are okay! They’re not gonna use ’em against me!

Go for it.

Andrew Bates, White House Deputy Press Secretary, on Trubu and Putain:

Two nauseating, fearful pigs who hate what America stands for and whose every action is driven by their own weakness and insecurity, rubbing their snouts together and celebrating as innocent people lose their lives.”

“His bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”

On his favorite day of the year, Trubu gets a presidential shellacking.

But like his namesake King Ubu, he will bounce back jollier and jollier and jollier!

‘ The child-separation policy was definitely the administration’s single most disgraceful policy. Cruel, reckless and stupid — like Trump himself.’

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.

“We’re going to have a great time fighting about the agenda of a non-crazy president.”

UD’s mother’s favorite film was I Know Where I’m Going, featuring a conventional, materialistic young woman waylaid in her money and status ambitions by a dashing young man and the phantasmagoric Scottish island culture that surrounds him.

Early in the film she observes a friend of the man’s acting bizarrely. She turns to the man and says:

“He’s a bit odd, isn’t he?”

And the man answers:

“Who isn’t?”

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

As the Cheshire Cat says, “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

But there’s conventionally, universally, prosaically, woman-in-the-street mad, and there’s bedlam-mad. Our current president is arguably a confirmed bedlamite.

Gail Collins, in this post’s headline, dares to anticipate a new, non-crazy president in three months. Like many pundits, psychiatrists, and ordinary people, she has concluded that Mr Trump is mentally ill, and UD‘s inclined to agree. Immaturity, hyper-irritability, petulance, grandiosity, mendacity, manipulation – these are character flaws, but not necessarily signs of pathology. We have watched DJT exhibit them all with increasing frequency and intensity as the election looms, and though they clearly designate a horrible person, it hasn’t been – at least for me – until the last week or two that they begin also to designate a clinically unbalanced one.

For me the tipping point came when I realized that he hates everyone. Watching the president, I keep thinking of that line from Ubu the King, when Ubu describes his political plans (If you put Ubu in my search engine, you will see that from the beginning of the last presidential campaign, UD has identified Trump as “Trubu,” the Ubu of our day):

I shall soon have made my fortune, and then I’ll kill everybody and go away.

Everybody – everybody – Trump meets every day — Leslie Stahl, Anthony Fauci, his followers (he calls them “disgusting”), debate moderators, debate commissioners – he hates. Everyone’s a monster, an idiot, a catastrophe, a zero, a disgrace, a joke, pathetic, stupid, vile, sickening… It’s the nihilistic sweep of his rejection of humanity (I’m thinking Melania gets the absolute worst of it, which explains why she wisely absents herself from as much of their life as she can – she’s America’s most invisible first lady) that gets you thinking that you’ve got something schizy and not merely misanthropic. He’s killing everybody before he goes away.

If he is going down, he wants to bring everyone and everything down with him. He has no hesitation to break laws or destroy people. Democratic institutions and principles mean nothing to him.

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

Yes, I’m saying that Trump’s mental violence – again, see Ubu – threatens to become physical in these last days. Remember when he confined his violence to fantasies? Remember his comment about the 2016 Democratic National Convention?

“You know what, I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them — no, no — I was gonna hit them… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin. He wouldn’t know what the hell happened… I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin, they’d never recover. And that’s what I did with a lot of people — that’s why I still don’t have certain people endorsing me. They still haven’t recovered, okay, you know?”

Pretty fucking graphic for purely mental violence, huh? Do you really have a lot of trouble imagining a moment during the next debate (if Trump actually agrees to it), when the moderator mutes the president’s mic, and this so enrages the president that he punches the moderator – or Biden? Remember how he physically stalked Hillary Clinton during their debates? Can actual physical contact – under far more pressurized circumstances – be far behind? Can’t you hear him shrieking at Biden?

You’re the head of the worst criminal family in the entire history of the country! Someone has to stop you before you take control of the country! Turn my mic back on or I’ll hit him so hard he won’t know what the hell happened!

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

A couple of additional points: Is this suggestion at odds with my earlier claim that the president is possibly suicidal?

Of course not. Suicide is homicidal aggression directed against the self, but no one’s surprised when suicides first direct their aggression outward and pick off the people closest to them. They do it quite often. Nihilists loaded with rageful death instinct can go either way, or both ways.

Also: It wouldn’t even be strategically dumb for Trump to become physically violent, given the enthusiastic violence of many of his most devoted followers. I don’t just mean the bloodthirsty LOCK HER UP LOCK HER UP crowd; I mean the Proud Boys and all the other big ol’ shoot ’em up gangs. Nihilists love nihilism, babe.

More on the Long-Running …

… Trubu Show.

[Joe] Lockhart … said Trump should add Michael Avenatti to a defense team of Rudy Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz for the “Three Stooges defense.”

Next Page »

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories