Lunacy on the lawn

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.

The vilest man in the world

And there they were, the hirsute hillbillies and toothless terrorists who mobbed and defiled the U.S. Capitol yesterday, a cankerous confederacy of dunces, rampaging racists and whooping ignoramuses. That much cheap camouflage is never a good look.

The lowest of the low, these punks and goons are in lockstep with their pestilent potentate, whose grotesque name and rightfully imperiled title shall go unspoken. 

I’m at a loss to add anything brilliant to the roiling conversation about the fatal White House-whipped insurrection. But what was it Robert De Niro famously said about the one-term racist/criminal/liar/sexual assailant? 

This.