Malodorous Brain

 Trump's obscene statement last weekend about the death of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner was generally regarded as a new moral low—even for him. In his rambling social media remarks, Trump not only cruelly mocked the murder victims, he also insinuated (baselessly) that Reiner had been killed by an angry Trump supporter for daring to criticize the president. 

Usually—in the wake of a killing or act of mass violence—political leaders try to distance themselves and their supporters from the crime. They say: "oh no, our side is never violent; only the other side is violent."

Here, Trump bizarrely chose to do the opposite. He started fomenting a conspiracy theory against himself. Without any evidence—indeed, contrary to public evidence—he tried to suggest that his own partisan supporters were responsible for killing Reiner, and that the brutal murder was an act of MAGA political violence. 

The only explanation for this bizarre behavior is that Trump is not only pathologically vindictive and malevolent—but also that he wants to use random acts of violence in order to intimidate his critics. He wants to imply: "You should be afraid in today's America if you criticize me; my supporters might come and silence you." 

Sheer thuggishness and depravity. The remarks were so bad that even the center-right commentator Bret Stephens was moved to describe Trump—not inaccurately—as "the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House."

"The word for all this is 'horror,'" the writer and historian John Ganz opined on his Substack yesterday. "It combines a sense of both fear and revulsion, like lifting a rock to find loathsome creatures all crawling on top of each other, except here we see the swarming hatefulness of Trump’s mind. It’s disgusting." 

Which reminds me of a line from the poet Isaac Rosenberg, which I've quoted before vis-a-vis our ever-repulsive president: 

In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire [...]

His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls 

Of course, the only good news is that Trump generally appears to be approaching the last act of this tragedy. His administration is less popular than ever, weighted down by scandals, corruption, and their own many unforced errors. 

It's a gradual, slow-motion unwinding, though. "There’s no Götterdämmerung, no dramatic denouement," Ganz had written in an earlier piece. 

But yesterday, he felt moved to retract his own statement. Trump's utterly repulsive statement on Reiner's death did, Ganz was forced to concede, have an element of Grand Guignol theatrics to it. "The decline of Trump seems to hold some dramatic spasms of madness after all," he writes. 

Isaac Rosenberg's poem has a phrase for this rank, putrescent, bathroom-variety of Götterdämmerung too—this twilight of the gutter:

Ah! his poem concludes: this miasma of a rotting God!