What the fuck is going on?
Trump's inner circle is out of pocket.
Only the Democratic Party could square off against a rapidly deteriorating and chronically felonious golf blob in a presidential election and make it a nail-biter. In his current state of diminishment, Trump takes the stage at his rallies an hour late, and his speeches are mostly a matter of him maundering through a free-associative list of half-remembered cable news gripes, as he gesticulates awkwardly while looking salty and glum and increasingly damp. The Washington Post wrote about why so many people wait in line to get into a Trump rally and bail before it ends. Some said they were sick of “the insults,” but it seems that many of his supporters are grown-ass adults with other and better things to do. It’s increasingly difficult to justify spending several hours of free time watching a gleaming septuagenarian oaf stumble halfway through the same 14 words and then laze off into a tangent about Hannibal Lecter. He tries to demonstrate vigor and stamina by saying “millions and billions” in increasingly agitated ways, but he mostly settles into drowsy authoritarianism and dusty celebrity gripes paced over two hours like a sleep apnea episode.
It’s clear Trump is past his expiration date as a showman, like he’s in the late-stage checkdown Eli Manning arc of his career. But it doesn’t take much to entertain a right-wing audience. They mostly want a B-tier late-night show host to feed them lurid genocidal fantasies and validate their odious bigotries. So the little Trumps keep lining up to watch the big guy garble one-liners and bluster through whatever bit of pogrom incitement is currently running on Fox News. The audience is clearly bored at these rallies, but Trump has enough of a performer’s instinct to keep the show going. So he’s bringing in some guest stars to fill the gaps, like a charismatic void who talks with the cadence and pacing of someone about to be hospitalized for a case of indigestion.
Trump with his eunuch. Imagine the tremendous effort it takes to get either of these men hard.
Me walking up to the plug to grab a bag at 2:30 AM.
When did Elon get ancient?
There is something funny about Elon Musk and his cohort of Silicon Valley alpha-brained defects investing in Trump at what seems like his peak value, but this is the same blathering idiot who torched $44 billion to be a glorified social media moderator. But there is something extremely hilarious about a world-historically wack and charmless billionaire hyping a crowd of foot-sore small-business fascists mulling around in a field in rural Pennsylvania. It is a testament to how awful and grating MAGA is as a movement that it can include both the most mentally ill jetski dealers in every American suburb and middle-aged tech reactionaries who unironically use the word “based.”
Of course, the point of featuring Elon Musk as a guest speaker is to convey a blank edifice of power, a sort of surface in which the audience might see themselves reflected. Instead, Trump summoned someone who jumps around like a special needs 4-year-old entering a Chuck E. Cheese for the first time.
He’s demonstrating what he renamed Twitter to!
He doesn’t have a single song where he needs to be doing all this.
He looks like a toddler after begging you to watch them do a cool trick.
Either get Elon a propeller cap and a lollipop or tie cinderblocks to his shoes.
The cast of High School Musical on the DVD cover:
“OK, class! Today, we are going to learn how to jump!” … Kid named Jack:
It is unclear how someone can make jumping look painful, but this is the most unathletic hop I’ve ever seen. He looks out of breath mid-air before he lands. Elon’s weird gestures have undermined the sense of power that Trump was trying to convey and how patriotic it would be for the audience to serve such epic god-emperors for the rest of their seething and scrambling little lives. But it seems like you’ve already lost if Elon Musk is on your side. His nipples were protruding through his hardo Mars shirt and he carries this disgusting, wet loser energy. The man is built like a bag of cereal. He is the epitome of that guy who will do everything to make himself look cool but always fails because he’ll never understand why people don’t like him.
Despite being the richest person on this planet, Elon Musk has chosen to become one of the thirstiest, corniest, most tiresome posters on Twitter. This dude has been trying to successfully name something “X” for 20 years, and remains a pathetic and long-running nerd fixation. In his hamfisted attempt at transforming Twitter into an American WeChat, he fired his most talented engineers, chased off half his advertisers, and dumped one of the most successful brand campaigns of the last 20 years. This should shred any illusion that he’s anything beyond a smooth-brained nepo baby who fluked his way into riches through PayPal.
Considering the largest percentage of Twitter Blue subscribers are howling obvious marks who fancy themselves as galaxy-brained entrepreneurs, it is amusing to see the overlap of simp behavior and pure servile instinct between Elon stans and a sea of MAGA homunculi. These people live to be unappeased, and for all their overwrought demands—kill my neighbors, cut my taxes, get the gays away from my Bud Light—there is a sense that they are gasping and preening and starving for a new hero story. The selfishness and willful ignorance that define and sustain this politics are so unstable, and there are just too many enemies in it for the world to make sense as anything but a concentric field of threats. In this context, Musk and Trump have some appeal as a potential annihilating godhead, but they were always going to disappoint—not because they are clumsy or insufficiently brutal, but because this politics is grounded in disappointment.
Speaking of full-throated support…
“I just ate dog food. It’s human grade. Which means you and your dog can share a tasty, nutrient dense treat together.”
—Laura Loomer: A tweet posted on September 6, 2024
If it weren’t for Joe Biden decomposing in public, Donald Trump’s declining mental capacity would’ve been more evident to the average American voter, even before his Haitian migrants eating dogs meltdown at the most recent presidential debate. Trump is rattled and has lost something ineffable, and this was cemented when he flew to that infamous showdown in Philadelphia and was caught with his consigliere and alleged mistress, Laura Loomer—one of the most busted women on the planet. In addition to being a replacement-level alt-right grifter and a self-identifying “white advocate” and “proud Islamophobe,” Loomer looks like the Benjamin Button version of Roseanne. Republicans blamed her outsize influence on Trump for his debate debacle. Now imagine being a five-star general with decades of service and watching the president take advice from someone like her. Trump looking to Laura Loomer for guidance has convinced me that if I was given 10 minutes of his time, I could convince him that the Shadow Moses incident was real.
This rumored affair reminds me of the cruel high school prank of randomly picking two of the grossest kids in the class and saying, “Yeah, they’re fucking.” Picturing these two clapping cheeks is repulsive, and I attribute a lot of recent weight loss to this. Somehow, Trump wouldn’t even be the most disgusting person in this hypothetical sex tape, and that is unnerving. I wouldn’t even watch that for the street cred out of fear that it would induce erectile dysfunction.
I was partially convinced the Trump-Loomer affair was a Mean Girls rumor to get people to picture Trump laying pipe on this gargoyle, but his response was also suspicious.
“Laura has been a supporter of mine, just like a lot of people are supporters. She’s been a supporter of mine. She speaks very positively of the campaign. Laura says what she wants. She’s a free spirit.”
“She’s a free spirit” is exactly what a guy like Trump says when he is embarrassed to be fucking a specific kind of person. In the eyes of someone like the Donald, a person like Laura Loomer—and let’s be polite and not say what that means—would only have one redeeming quality: She may look bizarre, but at least she gives great sloppy top. He probably closes his eyes mid-BJ and pictures himself sinking a hole-in-one or winning the popular vote. Laura Loomer is the right-wing manic pixie dream girl that’ll hopefully ruin Trump in the way John Edwards ruined himself with Rielle Hunter.
Behind every great Florida Man is a Florida Woman.
Removing the secret romance from the equation, Loomer appears to have taken over the Hope Hicks role of the campaign. This confirms the total degeneration of Trump World—it was once a mix of the thirstiest and least principled GOP faithfuls and some alt-right lunatics on the fringes, but now the terminally online freaks have taken over.
When you look at the rankings of the GOP Renfield mentality types, the metrics are not there. Loomer is unsettling in every way, and all of her—let’s call them “campaigns”—end in public mockery. Loomer’s entry point into the right-wing influencer swamp was her decision to start an ISIS fan club while she was a student at Barry University to *prove* that liberals would join such an organization, except she couldn’t enroll a single member and was promptly expelled for “creating a hostile environment.” She chained herself to the entrance door of Twitter HQ to protest her permanent ban from the pre-Elon hellsite after she tweeted that then-Congresswoman-elect Ilhan Omar was anti-Jewish and pro-Sharia law. However, she handcuffed herself to only one of the door handles; in the background of her live stream, people are walking in and out of the building through the other door, and when she was asked why she didn’t chain herself to the entire entrance, she responded, “It would be in violation of the fire code.”
Laura Loomer also managed to get herself banned from Lyft and Uber after going on a racist tweetstorm, one of which she tagged both companies and said: “Someone needs to create a non Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver.” Having every ride-sharing app disassociate from you is impressive considering it’s a desperately cash-strapped industry. She’s banned from things that don’t ban people like Strava, the app that helps you find running groups. If she tried to pick up a free window AC unit from Craigslist, a SWAT team would bust down the doors to her house. If she tried to play Farmville, Amnesty International would sue her for somehow accidentally committing human trafficking.
It is impossible to hand it to her because she’s incredibly vile, but when Trump’s dull and preening family or the superannuated GOP legacy goblins detached from his inner circle, she was ready to grind. Laura Loomer is in a field of some of the worst people that the culture has ever produced, and she has fought the hardest against getting a real job. It is entirely plausible that she has been living in her car for her entire adult life. She doesn’t earn a living off a podcast that sells emergency meals and patriot fanny packs to people who are basically in a coma—she makes money the same way The Three Stooges did. Any revenue she has seen throughout her adult life is a result of running a metal detector up and down a beach. Laura Loomer is the only person who would get hired for some ignominious job like the assistant to the nighttime janitor at a museum, and she’d end up getting chased by a mummy. Although, if the Russians are paying Dave Rubin of all people, Loomer must have a tab for plastic surgery—they’re using degraded plutonium in her fillers.
Even though Laura Loomer is a real person, it is impossible to see her as anything other than a rejected Coen brother character. Sideshow Mel has more personhood. If you dropped her off a cliff, she would pause for nine seconds and say uh-oh. Whenever she runs, you can hear the Hanna-Barbera sound effects. She is some kind of right-wing Borat extra who escaped into reality. She looks like when Dwight Schrute cuts the CPR dummy’s face off and wears it. She speaks in a tone similar to the Kids in the Hall chicken lady.
Everyone else in Trump World embodies an archetype, or you can evince the type of character they would play in a life divorced from politics. Someone like Kayleigh McEnany would be an evil real estate agent, or the type of person who would hire a hitman to kill her husband so she can inherit a safe that has nothing inside. Anthony Scaramucci would be a gym owner who gets caught trying to burn it down for insurance money because he sent himself an email from a burner account with the address ISIS@hotmail.com, and the email reads, “Your stair climbers are haram. We’re going to kill you for being Christian.” Laura Loomer is someone who would marry a hunchbacked chiropractor and spend her time becoming an annoying PTA member, but she rebelled against this fate by getting a new dramatic face applied to her head every six months.
Even when Trump is gone, he will be alive in all the Americans who are not just blinkered and vain enough to consider a Twitter ban as somehow tantamount to dying in the Holocaust, but who also believe that their confrontations with the tyranny of Twitter employees must be streamed someplace where people can throw it hearts or money. There is no more toxic or deranging a grift for a person who is already like Laura Loomer, but social media looks and feels like a megaphone compared to the influence Trump is now giving her. It is in Trump’s personal damage to believe that the world revolves around him and his every cheesy, chiseling gripe. His vanity is limitless, but it limits him. But his legacy will be everywhere around us, in the people he has empowered to think and feel and act and be more like him.
Why do you Americans let your election cycles go so long? In Canada, we're legally allowed only one month of campaigning, and that's it.
Loomer is what happens when mental illness not only goes unchecked/untreated, but is encouraged.