It’s Official, the Contest Is Harris/Walz v. Fat Elvis/Weirdo. A Preliminary Take

Let me introduce you to Halfway Cafe, a Substack page mostly devoted to comedy, but occasionally the author posts a straight piece and this is one of those. The essence of comedy is truth, and you can only satirize something if you understand it well enough to distill down what’s really going on and then add an absurd element to make it funny. That’s in the normal world, where irony or exaggeration can expose somebody’s hypocrisy or other vices. In the Era of Trump absurd and ridiculous is the starting point and vices and hypocrisy are openly touted as virtues. So it makes sense that what goes on from there is just plain beyond parody, it’s so over the top.

• Former-Republican Charlie Sykes had a recent viral moment calling Trump “Fat Elvis,” and let’s definitely keep that going the rest of the election. It’s the perfect nickname because of both how accurate it is and how much it’s going to drive Trump so crazy he might have a stroke. Trump is a washed up has-been who never “had it,” he just won a fluke election likely because enough voters stayed home or voted Trump as a protest vote against the political establishment thinking Hillary’s victory was inevitable. Then Trump went on to lose both chambers of Congress and the presidency, tying Herbert Hoover as the biggest electoral loser in US history, a record Trump is poised to surpass if he loses a second reelection bid. Trump will be, say it with me, everyone, the biggest electoral loser in American history!

Trump stands to make history as not only the biggest electoral loser but also as the only former president running for another term who has lost twice.

Now Charlie Sykes isn’t the only one using the Fat Elvis moniker. Thom Hartmann wrote a piece on the same theme. Here are a few excerpts:

He used to seem so formidable, a very real threat to American democracy, the pal of dictators around the world. Now even Putin is dissing him, cutting the very prisoner deal with President Biden that Trump said a few weeks ago the Russian dictator would do only with him.

He’s gone, in the minds of many Americans, from being a danger to being merely weird. What happened?

The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career.

He hasn’t grown or developed new routines; he’s just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days. [Emphasis his]

His pathetic attempt to question the racial identity of Vice President Harris was just a warmed-over version of his Obama Birther slanders; they played well back in the first decade of this century, but now they’re just old and flat. […]

His newest fundraising grifts — “gold” tennis shoes, bloody-ear bobble head dolls, raising the Mar-a-Lago entrance fee for spies and hangers-on to $1,000,000 — are every bit as pathetic and sloppy as his old pitches for Trump steaks, Trump water, and his failed Trump “First Class” Airline.

His entire career in the media has been characterized by rich-frat-boy flamboyance and testosterone-driven excess, from publicly cheating on each of his three wives to bragging about leering in the dressing rooms of teen beauty pageants to his faux “successful businessman” routine on NBC. Today, though, nobody is shocked, amazed, or impressed; more Americans pity him than are in awe of his proclaimed masculinity. [Emphasis his]

Fat Elvis Trump thinks he can keep spinning the old hits, but polls now show that — outside of his elderly white rally audiences — Americans have figured him out, are tired of his cons, and have moved on. [Emphasis his]

And it couldn’t happen at a better time: A new day is at hand if enough of us will simply show up and vote this November.

This is true enough. Trump might well have won due to a protest vote or because of some juvenile instinct, “Let’s see what happens.” Well, we got Trump and saw what voting impulsively and irresponsibly for a lark gets somebody. Back to Halfway Cafe.

• Tim Walz is the VP pick, but the field of potential picks was quite impressively full of competent possibilities. It’s a testament to Joe Biden’s skill as president that he left the party better — more electorally and gubernatorially dominant across the nation, more ambitious on policy, and more moderate—than he found it. I’m getting more bullish on Kamala Harris’ chances in the election by the day, and Biden’s legislative accomplishments have made today’s Democrats the most successful iteration of the party in 60 years.
• I’m a big fan of Barack Obama, but the combination of his singular talent in oratory and political campaigning, the inevitability of Hillary Clinton’s succeeding nomination, and the deplorable racism with which the GOP stymied his political mandates left the party’s national bench quite bare in 2016.
• As Kamala Harris’s poll numbers go up and Trump’s racist insanity follows proportionally, Joe Biden’s legacy of badass, Dark Brandon energy having kicked Trump out of the White House, passing long overdue investment into every corner of American society, and then quitting while he’s mostly ahead and handing the baton to a capable successor is getting more secure. Joe Biden legitimately deserves many accolades in future history books and presidential rankings.
• Democrats should do a poker-raise on J.D. Vance’s idea about kid-less people “not having a stake in the future” so they therefore should have their votes devalued by giving extra votes to people with kids, and declare that radical Christians who believe the Rapture will occur in their lifetimes don’t have a stake in the future and should therefore have their votes devalued by giving extra votes to atheists.
• I’d argue that kid-less, atheist, liberal cat ladies care MUCH MORE about kids than Republicans who oppose free school lunches, universal pre-K, universal healthcare, gun safety, etc., and many conservatives regularly proclaim that this world is damned, hopeless, and temporary. Fundamentalists literally don’t believe in the future, and maybe don’t deserve equal voting power to the people who do.

And just FYI, Usha Vance attempted to walk back J.D.’s horrific gaffe as “a quip” bringing to mind Melania’s lame, “boy talk” and “locker room talk” response to the Access Hollywood tape. Too bad Usha wasn’t asked about her husband’s comment to her son, “Would you shut the hell up for ten minutes?” He was expecting a call from the Mango Messiah, you see.

And this morning Vance himself chimed in to say the cat lady comment was “sarcastic.” “Now, if the media wants to get offended about a sarcastic remark I made before I even ran for the United States Senate, then the media is entitled to get offended,” Vance said in Pennsylvania today. So he’s making it about the sensibility of the media and completely dodging the vile and inflammatory content of the comment itself.

So here you have it friends, the Fat Elvis/Weirdo ticket stacked up against a competent prosecutor, attorney general, sitting vice president and a popular governor of a large midwestern state. Let the games begin.

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