Can We Talk?

The establishment doesn't hate Donald Trump because he's a bigoted narcissist. They hate him because of truths like this that occasionally escape his uncensored maw:

We have spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges and all of the other problems, our airports and all the other problems we have we would have been a lot better off I can tell you that right now. We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East but to humanity, the people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away and for what? It's not like we had victory. It's a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion.

I didn't watch the CNN war-mongering infomercial during which Trump uttered those words, because as I noted last month, I am boycotting CNN as a form of silent anti-war protest. Judging from the snippets of it that I have seen and read, though, I did myself a y-u-u-ge favor. What was quaintly advertised as a debate was nothing less than a mental waterboarding of the entire viewing audience. Donald Trump at least provided a little comic relief as he played Good Cop to a group of blathering sadists and an immoderate moderator appropriately named Wolf Blitzer.

Speaking of comedy, it finally dawned on me who Trump reminds me of. He is the male version of his late lamented friend and fellow vulgarian, Joan Rivers. Or maybe the ghost of Joan Rivers has possessed his brain.

  In a stand-up routine Wednesday broadcast live on several channels from Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Arizona by way of the mouldering Catskills Borsht Belt, Trump was in full "Can we tawk? Can we tawk?" mode. He perfectly aped Joan Rivers' vocal pattern of never completing a word or a sentence, as a way of expressing and sharing mass exasperation with All Things Stupid. For example, instead of saying "A hundred and fifty" Iranians in a prisoner exchange, he sputtered "A hundred and fi---." You can almost imagine him resting his waving demagogic finger just long enough to pretend-gag himself, Joan Rivers-style. Awwwk!

" And Hillary Clinton?" he ranted. "She leaves and goes back to sleep for a week. It's incre--!" (incredible.)

"Am I wrong? Am I wrong?"  Double-sentencing is a Trump-Rivers standard.

"They are the worst, the worst!" is another of their trademark vocal tics. Also, "It's horrible. Horrible!" And, "It's just---. It's just....!" and its variant, "It's just the worst!"

 

 
And don't even get me started on the mocking of the disabled, a Rivers-Trump staple. So is the fine art of heckling the hecklers:

(OK, so she admitted afterwards that there are two things going on whenever you do comedy: your mouth, and your head. The same can be said of Trump and his improvisational political stand-up routines.)

And last but not least, hate speech against Muslims and Latinos is an entertainment must when your audience consists largely of white refugees from the middle class, feeling more maligned and ignored by the day. The masses must have their scapegoats.

 

Joan Rivers is dead, Donald Trump is alive, and he may become the next president of the Feudal States of America. But take heart, plebs!  Democracy is not really moribund. It has simply morphed into a laugh riot of a reality show. We the people are the paying spectators. We'll have the freedom to chortle till we die.

Amirite, or am I wrong... am I wrong that this is just... this is just the worst, the worst?

It's horrible.