No one can sane-wash insane posturing, nor MAGA hokum serving up demented unreality
Respect for consensual reality is so last century. Like truth, the real world is a casualty not just of war but chicanery by predatory goons on power trips. It takes courage, if not maturity to confront reality (and these days avoid jail time). Trump’s moral vacuity makes tying down his made-up dervishes especially challenging. “Empty suit” (soiled or not) hardly covers the dilemma.
Not a few have addressed the dead Trump center only to miss the mark: how does one assess the invisible toxic vapor rising from the not drained swamp? Or a MAGA mirage in the rally desert distorted as divine revelation? Who can rope in the MAGA wind rushing across the prairie? Or the pain of hatred and oppression?
Trump does approximate a moral black hole by desperately sucking in local detritus, and with dicey cores; but they differ, too, as one has incredible mass, measurable size and force. Trump’s con job emptiness invokes the vacuum of deep space as a few shiny neutrinos whiz by. Here’s a potentially sentient being without any center, without any “there-there” values that anchor healthy earthlings. Instead, Trump is no more than his PR gush, with the mass of soap bubbles and fragile surfaces that burst when contacting anything real. Yet, Trump never vaporizes, parallel to the flimsy $5. exercise ball whose outside has shape only because the internal hot air can’t escape.
The gall to politicize human misery
With a bullseye, Dana Milbank’s satiric slash aptly depicts Trump as a huffing and puffing hurricane, forever “unleashing a destructive storm—on his supporters. He flooded them with a 13-foot tidal surge of B.S. He recorded wind gusts well over 160 lies per hour. And he rained on them a torrent of gibberish.” Certainly Trumpian hurricanes wreak vengeance, destroy lives, then gleefully dash off to the next lie. What other ferocious, hot air spiral whirls around a barren center, sucking in mayhem to spew disaster, ready to repeat on cue? Of course, wary people flee bad storms as quickly as bored or irritated Trumpers exit his tedious rallies, caught at the wrong grievance venue.
Oddly enough, while this center-less, immoral void of humanity is hard to pin down, anti-Trumpers have no trouble figuring out the immense, dire impacts that MAGA foments. Trump typically exposes both more and less than he intends—or helps him. Polls register the shocking number of marks sucked in like loose roof tiles, consumed with fixated tunnel vision. Even for a politician, Trump seems not tethered and in decline, lurching from rally to rally, half-smart and half-dumb, blind to what drives him (and ignorant by choice). No surprise then he dishes out the untruthful, unprincipled and unscrupulous, driven by avaricious self-interest, untroubled with how his malice and cruelty damage others (like Springfield, OH, Aurora, CO or Detroit working hard to revive itself).
It’s amazing how dazzled are Trumpers by this clownish, cartoon circus, still ignorant of what good government can and should do (and what laws really count). This absurd charade of a leader storms in, capitalizes on human frailty (fears, anxiety, confusion), pockets his demanded penalty fee, leaving wreckage in his wake. As Milbank quips, “Trump upgrades his con to Category 5.”
Enigma of form without core
On point, attend to what brilliant New York magazine writer Will Leitch details when explaining the challenge of portraying Trump on screen:
Actors need something to hold on to, [something] that they can relate to and build a performance around. An impersonation is just that: a mimicry. Actors are forever looking for a soul. Because Trump is such a ridiculous person, it’s nearly impossible not to play him as a cartoon in a way that can’t help but de-fang any satire and play into Trump’s hands, making him appear so silly that he seems harmless, when he is of course anything but. How do you satirize the unsatirizable?
Leitch concedes the inscrutable, empty personality shell but not the vast, transparent impacts:
Trump comes into a room full of people who think they can deal with him the way they have dealt with most normal humans, and when he leaves the room, everyone and everything inside has been torn apart—and Trump has gotten exactly what he wanted. He’s not Donald Trump, goofy guy with weird hair, bizarre vocal inflections and obsession with windmills; he’s a hurricane … an unstoppable force of nature.
Nothing I know better captures the brutal inhumanity of the Trump tornado that “zeroes in on how feeble, confused and impotent his relentlessness can make” vulnerable marks feel. Bravo, Mr. Leitch.
Brace for the looming TV quiz shows that play off this ominous phantom unreality, “Trump or Consequences” or “The Price is Wrong,” or “Name that worst Trump lie.” How about the democracy-crushing $64 million dollar question: “What really makes Donald run and run and run?” And why does this Pied Piper’s leverage endure? It’s not like his flea market of cheesy, overpriced goods come with warranties or refunds when exposed as mere trumpery. Again, think of a nasty hurricane the day after it ravages multitudes. Thanks to Trump—but only if he loses, expect massive repairs to our Constitutional welfare. If he wins, all bets are off and the calamity compounds (worse still if he departs and Vance takes over).
Mystifying two tough-minded generals
Let’s posit a modicum of person hood without character, as does stunned, world-tested, ex-White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, forced to summarize his awful Trump tenure: “The depth of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
And finally, here is worse still from General Mark Milley, Trump’s Joint Chiefs of Staff chief, eviscerating Donald as “fascist to the core” (and that’s no metaphoric “core”). Nor will many non-marks disagree with Milley’s implacable, mind-blowing conclusion, “no one has ever been as dangerous to this country.” If these two close co-workers don’t know Trump, who does? Tragically, it all fits when knee-jerk impulses come packaged within a huckster’s form that lacks moral character—with the empathy of a broken beach shell after the hurricane moves on.
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