Trump’s mortifying, dip-shitty U.F.C. birthday bash on the White House lawn Sunday was exactly what was intended — a sickening, self-aggrandizing trailer-trash circus as couth and classy as a cockfighting match or demolition derby. Call it pummel porn, with high kicks to the face and low blows to a former First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose grace, race and brilliance intimidates the hell out of a certain type of man.
They’re the real-life Toxic Avengers — bloodlust thugs with brains of rocks and mashed potatoes.
The MAGA mob was predictably whipped into a testosteronic tizzy, slavering U.S.A.! U.S.A.! with brainless brio. I’m all for the U.S.A.; I just don’t like it spewed with the kind of jingoist venom that denotes a dangerous and juvenile insecurity. It’s hollow flag flapping by “reg’lar” folks who haven’t a clue what it actually means. It would be embarrassing if it wasn’t so frightening.
Trump is a child, a big fat man-baby who has the vocabulary of a third-grader and the aesthetic sophistication of a finger painter. He gets off on the gauche and garish and ruffling his opponents with indisputable bad taste. His cage-fighting birthday bash — emphasis on bash — was the peak of his puerility.
“Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in the Times about Trump’s shit-show, which she accurately called “macho kitsch.”
Needless to say, we demand a much better screenwriter to script America’s future: Aaron Sorkin? Shonda Rhimes? AOC? The kid who wrote “Backrooms”?
Rewrite! And fast.
GNASHING. 