What in the world is with the button-nose no shift of genetics had given this weird, appalling man? The unnaturally pointed chin, the Suprise brows? A man in his thirties should not look more weird and fucked up than a Las Vegas superstar in his--I don't know--70's? He seems like a bastard Wayne Newton or a mutant Chuck Woolery.
Situation artificial, also pretty fucked up.
This is a guy who has "too much hookers and blow" written all over his trampoline-tight face. Theory people in TrumpWorld do not even really love themselves.
UPDATE: Why does he try so hard to be pretty when he has this mind of his?
It really helps to know a bit about professional wrestling to grasp some of the weird stuff that comes out of Donald Trump, who is a WWE Hall of Famer, and a long time friend of Vince McMahon. I'm certainly no pioneer in calling this reality out--Chauncey DeVega and Oliver Willis both laid out how Trump learned some of his mic skills from the wrestling world and seems to have applied them to politics.
I would say one of the features that has popularized his campaigns has been the ability to generate fan loyalty by both working the mic and working out his trash talk routine when touring smaller venues (like his rallies) to work up to different bigger shows. Twitter is a circuit performance where Trump is trash-talking his future opponents (Crazy Bernie Sanders and Sleepy Joe Biden) to advertise that he is not worried about them because he knows he holds the White House belt. They are just challengers.
This is where some political observers might get Trump wrong--Trump says in the screen-capped Tweet above "May God Rest Their Soul!". Sure--in real world terms, this is the language used to bless dead people. In the wrestling world, however, it has echoes of the Undertaker and Paul Bearer, who were a kind of fan-favorite heel wrestler and manager combination of the late 90's/early 00's. Saying stuff like "God have mercy on your soul" is just some cold shit (or maybe, your weird early 90's memory might flash on Jules from Pulp Fiction, if you aren't given to wrestling analogies) someone might say to get a rise out of a person. It doesn't mean an actual threat, as in Trump is going to literally get Sanders or Biden murdered. It's just a warning that this fight will be epic entertainment for the Trump Brand.
Now, this commentary might make it seem like Trump has strategy and is conscious that he is doing wrestling memes in a political context to own the libs. I would say, I don't actually know that Trump even now understands that wrestling works aren't altogether real. He thinks he can create works and they become shoot. He might actually believe he can Twitter-slay people.
After all, he Twitter-advised the Paris Fire Department to use flying water tanks to douse the Notre Dame flames, thinks rakes could prevent forest fires, and that branding is the problem with a class of airliner that crashes very fatally. It becomes a question of whether he knows a work from a shoot, even if his works seem pretty calculated.
For anti Trump folk, one read of Trump's comments here might be this. He wouldn't be saying this if he didn't think he had to.
It's amazing to me that I didn't glom into this story like a very glommable thing, but a couple of months ago, there was a deeply weird story where an Elvis impersonator was believed to be the sender of some ricin-laced letters to assorted politicians, but it turned out that a Wayne Newton-impersonator rival of his was actually behind the dastardly plot. Or near as we can tell.
Anyhow, it has come to light that another set of ricin-tainted letters has been sent out to assorted pols, this time from an actress who has had bit parts in The Vampire Diaries and The Walking Dead.
I note that in both cases, the poison-pen posts appear to have been made with the express purpose of setting up some other person to take the fall, but it can not escape ones attention that the mailings in both cases were made by tangentially show business persons. One hopes this is not the thing people are resorting to for attention these days. There is always YouTube is there not?
I was driving home from work listening to the Jersey guys on 101.5, just punching different stations. I was hoping to catch the weather, but they were joking about Michael Jackson being taken to the hospital with an apparent heart attack. Joking because, you know, it's a celebrity, and it was Michael Jackson, and he's, well, weird. And he had been pretty weird, for a long while.
Also, highly talented. Add to that, a little tragic. Make that, a lot tragic. But to the tabloids, mostly weird. I expect the coverage of his death is going to be no less weird than the coverage regarding his life. That's how it is.
I remember in 1983, Micheal Jackson wasn't really weird--he was hot. For people my age, a lot of us are going to remember Thriller as being one of the first albums we bought ourselves. I remember sitting on a bed with girlfriends singing along to it. I was probably right about the age where girls who really dig the Jonas Bros and Miley Cyrus are, now, with the exception that Micheal was actually good. His voice was compelling, his dance moves were almost extraterrestrial, his songs had verve....and in the age of videos, he set the standard of what a music video could be. "Thriller" was a musical movie short with brilliant choreography and effects. He was the King of Pop.
But there was always something just a little odd. Hyperbaric oxygen chambers to sleep in? His own zoo at his Neverland (how Peter Pan) abode/private theme park. Wanting to buy the Elephant Man skeleton?
But he kind of seemed to know what it was about--after all, he'd been in the spotlight since he was ten. An incredibly talented, but very young, vulnerable kid. In a big, sometimes dysfunctional family. So he knew about being in the spotlight, but he had maybe a little less of an idea about....being normal.
There are people who believe Micheal Jackson was a pedophile, and as for me, I can't say one way or the other. I just don't know. I would prefer to believe he was just a really confused person in some ways, musically gifted, but childlike and arrested in others. What I can say is, as certain things started making it clear he was a troubled person, like the drug issues and obvious frequent plastic surgeries, it seemed clear to me that this was a person who knew pain. And just like people say with genius sometimes comes eccentricity (apparently true with Jackson), it's also become axiomatic that people who've been abused sometimes do abuse. Life doesn't always make sense, and Michael Jackson's life kind of shows it.
When you look at his music and his performances, you see the brilliance shining through--the work and polish he applied to his natural talents. But sometimes there was a twist in that creativity. And while he had a great eye for staging his appearances (c'mon--he knew you knew who he was when he turned up in a surgical mask, or in some exotic costume), a look at his plastic-surgery-battered face seemed to suggest a deep insecurity. If half of what was said about him was true--he was a strange and even bad man. But the half that wasn't true doesn't say much about our gossiping culture. So let the man be--he's dead. I'll remember the artist.
When I saw this kind of anti-"Singing in the Rain" dance, I remember thinking it was angry, provocative, but jaw-dropping. It was like weaponized choreography.
