Sunset for grandpa

Trump, the personification of America’s decline, is Norma Desmond redux

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 and was driven by the grift and privilege and celebrity. For this round he has 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 pout. His gibbering idiocies are part-formed in what’s left of the mind of a life-long reflexive liar and braggart.

Then there’s his soaring rhetoric – better found scribbled on a truck-stop cubicle door. Discursive harangues on sharks and batteries, 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 vomits 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.

Putin’s plaything is an insecure pantywaist with a dictator fetish. Desperate for validation, readily manipulated with flattery he’d sell out his country to murderous despots in exchange for a military parade and a statue in his honour in Red Square, Riyadh or Pyongyang.

The sluggardly wibbley-wobbley gelatinous biomass of moobs and complaint was laughed at by world leaders and the UN General Assembly. He has a no humour but a fragile ego and hates to be mocked.

Lacking all introspection, he’s a graceless bore who’s indifferent to nuance and 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 own grandchildren, would fundraise at a funeral of his own spawn. Imagine a silent auction of tawdry trading card NFTs and gold-painted sneakers festooned around Junior’s corpse, posed life-like in his coffin, the residue of Bolivia’s finest dusting his nostrils, the marquee merch an autographed Trump bible™ clasped in his cod, dead hand as pneumatic Strumpettes collect the bids. 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.” (Sunset Boulevard at 70, The Guardian).

Unlike Norma Desmond, the tangerine man retains a significant retinue. Trumpworld is populated with thralls, sycophants, Nazi apologists, Bull Connor replicants, insurrectionists, conspirators and the hordes of cultists with their $9.99 gas station sunnies, goatees and MAGA caps and their insouciant Brian Moran grammar and spelling with which to drag the libtards.

There’s the ammosexuals, gravy seals and meal team 6ers, the rubes who use family photo albums as an alternative to Tinder, the evangelicals with their selective Christianity, the loons in his orbit – Elmo the space Nazi, Nick Fuentes, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk et al, and MAGAe scamfluencers ala Alex Jones.

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 never met Rupert Murdoch.

Elsewise non-entities and hangers-on, the botoxed, silicon-titted, duck-faced, inflatable-girlfriend 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. And 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.”

 

This article was originally published on Grumpy Geezer

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