“Let them eat cake,” has resounded through the centuries as the casually cruel comment of a clueless elite leader, totally out of touch with her people or their real world struggles. Donald Trump basically one upped Marie Antoinette the night of the first presidential debate, when he mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask, and then came down with the coronavirus a day later — and hid the fact. His cavalier and unconcerned attitude towards a malady which has claimed 210,000 American lives and is getting ready for a stage two surge, repulsed a lot of Americans. Their revulsion was demonstrated amply the next day when Trump’s polls plummeted, particularly in critical swing states.
But the debate was intriguing for other reasons, because in so many ways it showed not only how divorced from reality Trump is but divorced from common humanity as well. When he wasn’t mocking Biden’s mask he was attacking his children — and in doing so, “reimagined his protean repulsiveness as riveting dominance.” And his fluffers pandered to that delusion as well. Hugh Hewitt termed Trump’s performance that of an “apex predator” rather than the grotesque, classless half wit the rest of us saw.
The message that came across loud and clear is that Trump is fiercely committed to redoing his 2016 playbook, in the face of all sanity and logic. This has been apparent, as well as astonishing, for quite some time. He’s the incumbent. He doesn’t seem to know that that puts the election on an entirely different footing. He never tried to expand his appeal beyond his base and now he’s lost some of the people who put him in office, because they’ve realized, to their horror, what a fraud he is. He’s not only not the big shot billionaire that was going to run the country like a successful business — he’s pathetic and he’s broke. Richard North Patterson, the Bulwark:
In truth, Trump is America’s ersatz Wizard of Oz—a one-trick faux populist with deep but finite appeal who, in 2016, filled the mother of inside straights. By 2018, he had squandered his winnings. In 2020, he’s become the little man behind the curtain, brutally exposed by his own incompetence and instability.
Forget the first three-and-two-third years of self-aggrandizing incompetence. Just take the last three weeks—during which Trump has demonstrated the survival instincts of Jim Jones in his final hour at Jonestown. He is committing electoral suicide, and taking his party with him.
We remember Jonestown and the kool-aide, similarly history will remember Trump world and the COVID.
By a margin of three to one, Americans believe that Trump should prioritize coronavirus relief over bulldozing Barrett’s confirmation. In his solitary grandeur, Trump believes otherwise. Endangered Republican senatorial and congressional candidates, murmuring feeble dissents, are perceiving too late that Trump’s Kool-Aid is poisoned.
Its most deadly ingredient is COVID-19. Seven months ago, our ersatz wizard proclaimed that the virus would disappear—appropriately enough—“like a miracle.” As Trump availed himself of superb medical care, 21 states showed a rise in new cases—including the electorally critical states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Nationwide hospitalizations rose for the first time since July. It is hardly a coincidence that among the most vulnerable Americans, seniors, Biden leads by more than 20 points. Trump may outlive the virus, but it is killing his campaign.
Our other one term presidents have found themselves at the hands of forces beyond their control and larger than themselves. In Trump’s case, his destruction is entirely of his own doing. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter went on to do meaningful things after the presidency and were respected as statesmen. Trump is likely to go to prison.
Given Trump’s burgeoning plague of political locusts, the revelation of his tax records last week seems to have occurred half a lifetime ago. But this particular mortification exposed that, as a businessman, Trump was less wizard than chiseler. He paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years; took highly dubious write-offs to shelter his income; showed staggering business losses; and now faces hundreds of millions in loans which will shortly come due. […]
Trump was never a brilliant businessman—he was a sociopath who used bullying, bankruptcy, and branding to perpetuate a false image of success. As an entrepreneur, and as president, he now stands exposed as a narcissistic fraud.
After enduring four years of Trump, too many Americans see this too clearly. He has done that to himself, and it is lethal. Character is, after all, fate.
If Joe Biden can simply stay safe, you can stick a fork in the man behind the curtain.
This is today’s COVID Chronicle. 25 more days in this charade and then 78 until the inauguration. It ain’t over till it’s over.
I think he will leave, drop in penxe’a lap and leave. Or die. Or something.
It ain’t over till it’s over.
That is what I’m most worried about, those last 78 days.
**eye roll** These people are not worth the ulcers or stress. It’s why I save that for COVID.
The image of jack Nicholson, playing the debonair ultra wealthy devil that seduces the witches of eastwick, strikes a chord. In the end, instead of the image, he was revealed to be a tiny pitiful cteature, an insect really. America needs to stop with arrogance & ignorance. We need to strive for having real character, as Dr. King pointed out. Then we would never dishonor the sacrifice of millions for the freedom to type these words without fearing violent retribution by the State. We would vote like the sacred & holy duty it is. Maybe this is the time. Let’s pray it is.
Well said, Scott.
Rather than the “Qu’ils mangent de la gateau” (mistakenly attributed to Marie Antoinette). it’s more on the lines of Madame de Pompadour’s ‘apres nous le deluge’
The ‘cake’ actually comes from Rousseau in ‘Confessions’who didn’t name the ‘great princess and he didn’t say ‘gateau’ – he said ‘brioche’
“At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: “Then let them eat brioches.” “
Not trying to be pedantic but it’s ” du gateau” (masc)
bien sur – Je ne me suis pas arrete pour penser
I’m reminded of a scene in the movie Drive when the smooth talker runs a lethal razor over Bryan Cranston’s wrist: “Shh, shh, it’s over. It’s done. You’re dead.” Small wonder why those GOP Senators are trying to jam COVID Amy onto SCOTUS. They’ve got serious doubts on being alive for much longer.
He had the virus before the debate, maybe the day before the ACB wingding in the COVID Garden. He gave it to Christie, who’s been in the hospital since Friday and may not make it out alive.
The head of the WH Security Office, the minion responsible for handing out top security clearances to so many people who don’t qualify to hold them has been in the hospital for longer than Christie and is said to be seriously ill. I don’t want any of these people to die because I want to see them hauled up in court, convicted and sent to prison. But if one of these people in Trump’s close circle die in the next couple of weeks (a real possibility with at least two) then if you think Trump’s support has fallen over the edge of the cliff you ain’t seen nothing yet. And Trump will find a way to make it worse with tone deaf comments about any such deaths.
Trump’s call-ins were interrupted with obvious half-coughs breathing stress, he even apologized at the time and when the meds wear off he may go away in a mental/physical total fail … seems like his bravado has ignored the rest and recover any victim of CV-19 would need to do correctly, no matter the treatment …
His struggle with gasping publicly, means he is VERY sick and probably a spreader as well for those 20 days associated with cause and effect ….
Cristy was a gad-about, unmasked fool at the WH lawn fiasco, he may be in really deep trouble, his physical conditions are unknown and there may be some weaknesses there … CV-19 finds them all and is now the big black carriage/black horse team of the banshees, screaming in the wind …
And with that recap of Trump’s mismanagement of his own health, Darrel, this is your daily reminder that narcissism is considered dysfunctional for a reason.
Lethal, when that sick pup gets power.
Very poetic, Darrell! ???
He’ll blame their deaths on the Democrats. Or Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Or both. ?
Some of them – like the security office head, and the Coasty who carried the football for Himself, don’t deserve the trouble they’re having.
I had a French boyfriend…therefore I’m obligated to cite French history where it’s misstated. Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake.” That scene appears in a play that was written a hundred years before she was born.
Marie was a quiet country girl, who absolutely hated being Queen. She so hate Paris that the King allowed her to go live at Versailles, but she hated Versailles as much, which was run by French etiquette. At the time this didn’t mean not burping at the table, it meant that the day was planned out like a ballet. Like a ballet literally…that’s where the dance comes from. Every day would run like “bedchamber doors open 8:01. Two male servants enter, take two steps forward and then two apart. Three maids enter, first one taking three steps and blah,blah,blah.”
Can you even imagine?
Marie left the main palace at Versailles and moved to the Queen’s palace. But she hated that too so she moved to the chateau…which is actually quite bearable. It’s like a cross between a California McMansion and the Disneyland castle. Marie hated it there too, so the king built her an additional to the property, Le Ferme. (The farm).
The farm is about a half hour walk from the Queen’s palace to a remote corner of Versailles. It’s a replica French country village, with a lake and lighthouse, rows of houses on cobblestone streets, and gardens and fields. But it’s total Disneyland…none of it is real. There are a couple of real houses, and Marie lived there…but most of the buildings were facades, with one house being a kitchen and another livery storage. But it’s,like being in rural France, and Marie loved it.
The Farm served another purpose. It was, in essence, a science expo. 18th century France had developed the best agriculture in the world, in part owing to new technologies. The Farm was a place where foreign dignitaries would be brought to show off the means by which France was achieving such power and wealth.
And this is part of the tragedy of how we remember Marie…the aristocracy was, in fact, very good at feeding the people at the time, and the revolution wasn’t really because of starvation. There was actually a robust welfare system, by which the king tried to give everyone a free baguette daily. That’s where the standard baguette of today comes from…this was deemed to be the calories an adult male need daily.
But to Marie…sadly the revolutionary story of France does not have the wise men that our does, and there was a mob instead of a constitutional congress. They of course put Marie to death. They also sacked Versailles and stole all of the furniture…an act that crashed the economy of that entire region so deeply that it took over a century to recover.
The royal family’s remains were mistreated, but buried in the yard of St Denis, a remarkable building, one of the first gothic cathedrals, finished in 1144. I absolutely made Sebastién take me there, and he wanted to know why. Well…duh…because the math that allows those amazing arches to reach toward heaven are what started the renaissance.
In that cathedral you will find a statue of Marie praying…her remains were moved there around 1830 (around the time that a very Trumpian Napoleon III was causing as much detriment to France as ours is causing to us today.)
In that sacred space, standing before her solemn statue, I felt a connection to her, and I’m not sure why. I think because she was someone who just wanted a quiet, simple life and ended up the victim of a heinous attack on her. In a way, she was the victim of bigotry.
And in a way, she was a victim of misogyny. Men put her in a gilded cage, and then one day other men came and killed her. Even more men wrote lies about her to justify the wrongs done to her, which don’t seem too unlike the lies that men write today about Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris. It’s a bit sad, really.
Okay…that was a super long history post. I just got nostalgic for my time in France, where they sort of revere Marie Antoinette as a tragic figure.
A great history lesson that, rarely does the truth make it to the masses. Can’t look down on the French, when very few black or white folks know much of anything about history other than the myths of the winning culture. One of the cultural maladies that has led us to this moment.
That is indeed a sad history, Rory. Another thing France owes to Marie Antoinette: the croissant. In her native Austria, it was called “the kepel”, a pastry made in the shape of a half moon. The latter was the symbol of the Ottoman Turks, who nearly took Vienna in a siege but for some late-working bakers who alerted the city’s troops to the sappers they heard burrowing under their shop. The kepel was created as part of the victory celebrations after the Turks were repulsed and Marie took it with her when she married Louis XVI.
Perhaps a more fitting epitaph for her was her husband’s final word from the guillotine: “Fellow citizens, I die innocent.”
Merci bien, r.d.! I have been to some of those places you mention, including Le Ferme, St Denis — strange and lost but impressive, and the remarkable mathematics you mention never occurred to me — and the dark, wooden-sided sort of stall in which Marie Antoinette breathed some of her very last breaths before being taken out and put to the guillotine. It was swept clean but had a cold, dead, dread-full feeling about it still. Didn’t know that about French agriculture. Or the brioche, or baguette. I might understand some of your feeling for France. Mostly I was there on business. I never intended it to, but it somehow got me.
I say let them go. Because if the morons do all this stuff we don’t want they are going to fall on November third. We need to put up a fight for appearances because that’s what the people want. Democrats have been acting like sheep to slaughter. Middle ground people like you to show you give a damm even though it’s hopeless. Muhammad Ali proved that. Float like a butterfly sting like a bee. Quit sticking your head in the sand.
Correction: SOME Dems have been acting like sheep, subconsciously reenacting their behavior in the late 2000s. The ones who have been getting things done? They’re the ones the histories will remember and too many liars will claim to be part of.