Trump, the personification of America's decline, is Norma Desmond redux
Sunset Boulevard - an aging silent film queen refuses to accept that her stardom has ended.
The Washington Post and charactour.com drew some parallels:
A Norma Desmond-like character, Trump watches Sunset Boulevard, “one of the greatest of all time,” again and again and again according to former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham.
Grisham notes, “I’m sure that Trump has no clue — like none — how similar to him she was.”
"I'm a star...The greatest star of them all."
"I'm rich! I'm richer than all this new Hollywood trash!...I own three blocks downtown..."
Norma Desmond. Sunset Blvd
A narcissist, “obsessed with her looks” and “convinced that everyone loved her and lived in a fantasy world of her own making. With delusions of grandeur, living in a big white elephant of a place,” a home filled with portraits from the glory days, and she spends every afternoon in the projection room, watching her old films.
“Every character in Sunset Blvd is tragic.” Norma’s life is a lesson. “Movie stars did not have happy lives.”
* * * * *
Trump, Grand FUBAR and Loser-In-Chief, is an addled old man.
In his first tilt at the presidency he had some control of his faculties. He was driven by the grift and privilege and celebrity. For this round he has displayed the self-awareness, bowel control and temperament of a toddler and a panicked desire to avoid bunking in with Bubba. Not so much alpha male as scared, insecure, whiney bitch. His verbal discharges are a drone of self-pity from an otherwise vainglorious blowhard, the sibilance of a deflating cognition lisping from a puckered sphincter of a pout. His gibbering idiocies are part-formed in what's left of the putrefying mind of a life-long liar and braggart.
<sarcasm>But then there's his soaring rhetoric</sarcasm> - better found scribbled on a truck-stop cubicle door. There's discursive harangues on post-birth abortions, Hannibal Lecter, schools undertaking sex reassignments, Marxist, fascist radical left windmills killing whales and causing cancer. There's his slurry of slurs and hate and grievance that rots his brain and may kill him before the corpulent Junk food epicure* has one double cheese-burger too many and prolapses his intestines into a gold-coloured toilet.
Untroubled by the burdens of either wit or intelligence he unironically refers to himself in the 3rd person, and in fanciful anecdotes as "Sir" wherein scholars, the finest legal minds and big strong men with rippling muscles and tears in their eyes all defer to his genius, overwhelmed by his mastery of whatever issue is to hand.
This self-fellating narcissist surrounds himself with ostentatious kitsch, a vacuous vulgarian whose gaudy Mar-a-Lago horrendium sur la mer is a revival of the "excessive, dated, dark, baronial LA manor" of Norma Desmond, reeking of mould and desperation and the "alcoholic ferment of generations of cougars in Chanel No.5" (ouch New York Intelligencer).
Trump is spiralling into dementia but deserves no sympathy. Recall his character, some of which I remind you of below.
His only gift is the grift. An inveterate cheat he believes that playing by the rules is for losers.
This Putin plaything is an insecure pantywaist with a dictator fetish. Desperate for validation he's readily manipulated with flattery and would sell out his country to murderous despots in exchange for a military parade and a statue in his honour.
The sluggardly, wibbley-wobbley, gelatinous biomass of moobs and complaint was laughed at by world leaders and the UN General Assembly for his buffoonish, self-congratulatory onanism. He has no humour but a fragile ego and he hates to be mocked.
Lacking all introspection he's a graceless bore who is indifferent to issues beyond his immediate self-interest. He's an appallingly ignorant simpleton yet he cannot stand being challenged.
Grandpa Donny the family man, who you just know doesn't recognize the names of his grandchildren, would fundraise at a funeral of his own spawn. Imagine a silent auction of tawdry NFTs and gold-painted sneakers...displayed about Junior's corpse posed life-like in his coffin with the residue of Bolivia's finest still dusting his nostrils. The marquee merch is an autographed Trump bible™ clasped in his cold, dead hands as pneumatic Strumpettes gather bids from the mourners. Classy.
"Norma Desmond...epitomises super-rich self-delusion. Cocooned in privilege, she fancies herself a meritocratic success story. The fantasy of her self-made triumph is abetted by an information silo that she doesn’t even know she’s trapped in. Her sycophantic enabler...showers her with forged fan letters, as though anticipating the echo chamber that would manifest under the banner of Fox News."
Unlike Norma Desmond, tangerine man retains a significant retinue. Trumpworld is populated with thralls, supplicants, Nazi apologists, Bull Connor replicants, insurrectionists, conspirators and hordes of cultists with $9.99 gas station sunnies, goatees, MAGA caps and insouciant Brian Moran grammar and spelling with which to drag the libtards.
There's ammosexuals, gravy seals and meal team 6ers, there's rubes who use family photo albums as an alternative to Tinder and there's evangelicals with their highly selective Christianity. The loons in his orbit - Elmo the space Nazi, Nick Fuentes, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk et al and MAGA scamfluencers ala Alex Jones are opportunistic but hugely influential freaks and weirdos.
The shameless long-drop of Fox News rolls the turd in chocolate and covers him with sprinkles. If you don't believe that there truly are malevolent lizard people out there then you've not met Rupert Murdoch.
Elsewise there's the non-entities and hangers-on, botoxed, silicon-titted, duck-faced, inflatable skanks who gravitate to flash hucksters and, not least, the aspiring fellators of the tumid choad - trumpoline Laura Looney, parking garage lawyer* Alina Habba and Judge Toady Aileen Cannon. He's even got simps on the SCOTUS.
But he is quite insane. He's ready for his close up, Mr. DeMille.
*@itsJeffTiedrich
To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer. George Monbiot, The Guardian.
"Trump exemplifies extrinsic values. From the tower bearing his name in gold letters to his gross overstatements of his wealth; from his endless ranting about “winners” and “losers” to his reported habit of cheating at golf; from his extreme objectification of women, including his own daughter, to his obsession with the size of his hands; from his rejection of public service, human rights and environmental protection to his extreme dissatisfaction and fury, undiminished even when he was president of the United States, Trump, perhaps more than any other public figure in recent history, is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values."
Hard to comprehend, but not impossible. Why do so many support Trump? Firstly, a great many dislike Trump but are simply lifelong Republican voters and any candidate is preferable to a Democrat. Apart from that, there are probably hundreds of reasons but chief amongst them must be the decades of the dumbing down of America's public education curricula, the long term resentment festering since scamming of the middle class by the banking system in the GFC, and the information sewer that is social media. Then there are disaffected liberals appalled by the new puritanism being pushed by the "progressives", reviving a level of oppressive censorship not seen since the 1950s under which lives are being destroyed by an "inappropriate comment".
Important to examine why so many support Trump. Probably hundreds of reasons but chief amongst them must be the decades of the dumbing down of America's public education curricula, the long term resentment festering since scamming of the middle class by the banking system since the GFC, and the insanity of uncontrolled social media.
Hey Geezer, thank you for another fabolous post, very much appreciated, however, I have an apology to make. I used a line from this article: "Untroubled by the burdens of either wit or intelligence," to stick it to the troglodytes that read a Murdoch rag in NY. I only read it to keep the enemy even closer, as Churchill once said. I get my subscription for free courtesy of a certain credit card, otherwise I wouldn't bother to contribute to Rupes. Being a failed Catholic, I still felt the need to confess. As I entered the confessional, before the priest spoke, the Lord whispered in my ear: "The Geezer forgives you," can you kindly confirm your forgiveness and issue my…
“Using the family photo albums as an alternative to Tinder.” Bahahaha. Very clever and frigging hilarious🤣
Donald Trump exists. I suppose that’s undeniable. But as has been said before why so many support him remains hard to comprehend, Monbiot’s take notwithstanding. Dump Trump.