Althouse

So begins "The Devastating New History of the January 6th Insurrection/The House report describes both a catastrophe and a way forward" by David Remnick, in The New Yorker.

I'm not reading this article. (It would take a lot to get me to read a January 6th article at this point.) I just thought that was a very funny sentence.

What would it take for Donald Trump to "betray" a "sense" of "alarm" or "self-awareness"? Why doesn't David Remnick betray a sense of alarm or self-awareness? Are we, generally, supposed to betray a sense of alarm or self-awareness? Is that something good people do? I guess it's something guilty people do, if they're good people who are not good at being guilty.

But it's just hilarious to imagine a Donald Trump who: 1. Feels that he is guilty and 2. Cannot cover up his feeling. How would we even begin to recognize such a creature to be Donald Trump?

I'm considering becoming the blogger who finds articles that I refuse to read, then reading just the first sentence, and blogging that and only that.

I'm reading the Politico report on a new book about Biden, "The Fight of His Life" (by Chris Whipple).

DONALD TRUMP followed a tradition carried out by several of his predecessors and wrote Biden a letter before leaving the Oval Office. Biden’s reaction? “That was very gracious and generous…Shockingly gracious.”

Any graciousness is shocking these days. 

Biden caught himself uttering a bit of graciousness about Trump — calling him "very gracious and generous" — but he couldn't let it stand. It required immediate poisoning. It had to become an occasion for commentary on how Trump is generally to be considered a man incapable of graciousness and generosity. Trump, we all must know, is, overall, a boorish lout.

That perfectly kind letter, following the standard etiquette, had to be repurposed as an occasion for comment on how awful and abnormal Trump is on seemingly every other occasion.

What was more shocking — that Trump left an appropriate and traditional letter or that Biden uttered a simple compliment acknowledging Trump's act? What's not shocking at all is that Biden immediately and impulsively tainted his own compliment.

There's a lot of talk about Kanye West. Chappelle takes a cagey position, neither attacking him nor supporting him: "I don't think Kanye is crazy.... He's possibly not well."

Then there's a long pause and an extended run-up to a big leap: "I've been to Hollywood." Pause. "I don't want y'all to get mad at me. I'm just telling you. I've been to Hollywood. This is just what I saw." Pause. "It's a lot of Jews." Pause. "Like a lot."

"But that doesn't mean anything." That's a setup. Punchline: "There's a lot of black people in Ferguson, Missouri. That doesn't mean they run the place."

It's not a crazy thing to think: "The Jews run show business." Pause. "But it's a crazy thing to say out loud." He said out loud. 

And that was the end of the Kanye and anti-Semitism portion of the monologue, very carefully written and delivered. That was halfway point, and he paused after saying the "crazy thing" out loud, and started talking about the midterm elections. Hershel Walker: "I don't want to speak bad of him — because he's black, but, um" — pause — "He's observably stupid."

Chappelle hears people saying the Trump Era is over, but he needs to explain something that he knows, because he lives in Ohio, "amongst the poor whites." Trump is loved. And the reason he is loved is because people have never seen anything like him: "an honest liar."

Here I am at 4 in the morning reading the OED entry for "mystic." See previous post for context. 

I have to open a new post to show you something I found that has nothing to do with the "mystical cord" [sic] that was or may have been Queen Elizabeth. 

For years now, I've run into the name Donald Trump not only in the many, many stories about him but in all sorts of articles that have nothing to do with him. Just now, I found this in the OED, under the meaning "Of or relating to mysterious or occult rites or practices":

1577   in T. Thomson Acts & Proc. Kirk of Scotl. (1839) I. 384   The heid given to the laird of Dun..being thocht be him obscure and mystick....

1644    J. Milton Doctr. Divorce (ed. 2) 42   Their filthines was hid, but the mystick reason therof known to their Sages.

1697    J. Dryden tr. Virgil Æneis  i, in tr. Virgil Wks. 212   I have search'd the Mystick Rolls of Fate [L. fatorum arcana].

1725    W. Broome in A. Pope et al. tr. Homer Odyssey III.  xi. 59   And mutter'd vows, and mystic song apply'd To griesly Pluto, and his gloomy bride.

1785    R. Burns Poems 59   When Masons' mystic word an' grip, In storms an' tempests raise you up.

1805    W. Scott Lay of Last Minstrel  v. xxvii. 151   Cared not the Ladye to betray Her mystic arts in view of day....

1911    F. H. Burnett Secret Garden xxiv. 261   Every beautiful morning the Magic was worked by the mystic circle under the plum-tree.

1996    Spy (N.Y.) Apr. 28/1   Short-fingered acolyte Donald Trump may have been introduced to the mystic secrets of the East by dim New-Agey trophy wife Marla.

 

 

Trump’s boorishness is of a piece with what some of them view as the rough-and-tumble nature of political life. “The philosophers that we tend to study are not deluded about this,” Anton told me. “Aristotle, in the treatise, explains how the actual practice of politics can be bare knuckle in lots and lots of ways.” On an American Mind podcast last year, Anton reflected that what is “too insufficiently remembered is that a lot of what went down in revolutions was rough stuff. We have a picture of dignified men in Independence Hall deliberating and debating. And all that happened, I don’t discount that. But there was a lot of other stuff going on, too.”

... because they "just fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter." He said: "If there are tweets that are wrong and bad, those should be either deleted or made invisible, and a suspension — a temporary suspension — is appropriate, but not a permanent ban.'"

Intelligencer reports. 

Musk was speaking at a conference in London.

Trump, it should be remembered, has said he won't return to Twitter, but I suspect he'll change his mind

Here's the video. Note that Musk says the decision to ban Trump was "morally bad and foolish in the extreme": 

ADDED: Here's a much better video clip: 

It's only just now that I found a way to fit it on this blog — a goodbye to Gilbert Gottfried.

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"I'm here to supervise balloons!" 

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"Thank you, mein Führer"/"Only Gilbert can get away with that."

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"'For all his urbane affect, Obama was still the left-wing agitator who had patiently steered the Democratic Party toward an illiberal, identity-obsessed progressivism,' Barr writes; no doubt actual 'left-wing agitators,' who have regularly denounced Obama for centrism, would like to have a word. Barr’s version of Trump, meanwhile, contains multitudes: The former president may have 'an imprecise and discursive speaking style,' even a tendency for 'madcap rhetoric,' but Barr also believes Trump has 'a deep intuitive appreciation of the importance of religion to the health of our nation.'

From "William P. Barr’s Memoir Is Part Lawyerly Defense, Part Culture-War Diatribe/In 'One Damn Thing After Another,' the former attorney general suggests that Republicans move past Donald Trump and his 'madcap rhetoric,' but saves his harshest words for the former president’s critics," by Jennifer Szalai (NYT).

That description of Barr that I put in the post title — that's what just about everyone does these days. I think Szalai is especially heated up about it because Barr is so skilled in the craft and, I'm guessing, because she'd like to see that craft applied for the benefit of the other side.

[F]or this overwhelmingly conservative population — the Villages went two-to-one for Trump — the very thing that may be attracting those who want to “Make America Great Again” are its pseudo-suburban neotraditionalist aesthetics, as James Brasuell wrote in Planetizen last year, asking whether “the village ideal is actually inherently conservative, and a vehicle for segregation.” (The Villages remains 98 percent white, even as the surrounding counties grow more diverse.) So, yes, there’s a lot wrong with the Villages.

"... just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain. In Donald, I saw the latter.... I have asthma, so I am acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe. He was in pain, he was afraid, but he would never admit that to anybody – not even himself. Because, as always, the consequences of admitting vulnerability were much more frightening to him than being honest."

Mary Trump has a new book, quoted in "Trump was ‘in pain and afraid’ during post-Covid display of bravado, niece’s book says/Mary Trump’s new book The Reckoning, seen by the Guardian, describes a national trauma worsened by her uncle" (The Guardian).

What is the value of Mary Trump's writing? The writing style isn't horrible, but she didn't have access to him. She was just watching him on television like the rest of us, right? Purporting to know the workings of his mind makes her less credible than those of us who would add phrases like "I think" to assertions like "he was afraid" or who would change that "was" to "looked." 

There are other efforts to bolster her authority. In that brief passage, I note "just as my grandmother did" and "I have asthma." Let's examine those 2 notions. 

1. "just as my grandmother did" — This must be a reference to Mary's grandmother who was the mother of Donald Trump. Mary has observed her grandmother and perhaps knows a style of holding her mouth and can say that Donald Trump's mouth has the same look. She implies that there are family mouth positions and other members of the family know what they mean. So Mary has special expertise at watching Donald Trump on television.

2. "I have asthma" — Mary claims a sort of medical expertise: "I am acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe." Really? You're aware of "what it looks like"? No, you're not looking at yourself when you are having an asthma attack. You are acutely aware of what it feels like, not what it looks like. Unless you do your asthma attacks in front of a mirror.

ADDED: I could write a book about Mary's book, in which I use Mary's approach to observational expertise against her. I would go through the book paragraph by paragraph and find every turn of phrase that I can characterize as evidence of the traits that she finds in Donald Trump and I would repetitively bolster my points by reminding the reader that Mary and Donald belong to the same family, so we can presume these are family traits. Whatever she says about him I can observe in her, and the only evidence I will need is her own book.