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Donald Trump and the American Id
In which the National Review trashes The Combover! 
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422116/donald-trump-and-american-id-kevin-d-williamson
Oh, you’re goddamned right this is Vegas, baby! because the Planet Hollywood Las Vegas Resort and Casino is the only truly appropriate venue for a show like the one we have right here. For your consideration: the carefully coiffed golden mane, the vast inherited fortune, the splendid real-estate portfolio, the family name on buildings from Manhattan to the Strip, the reality-television superstardom, the room-temperature-on-a-brisk-November-day IQ. The only thing distinguishing that great spackled misshapen lump of unredeemed American id known as Donald Trump from his spiritual soul mate, that slender lightning rod of unredeemed American id known as Paris Hilton, is — angels and ministers of grace, defend us! — a sex tape. The gross thing is, you can kind of imagine a Trump sex tape: the gilt pineapples on the four-poster bed, the scarlet silk-jacquard sheets, the glowing “T” in the background, the self-assured promises that this will be the classiest sex tape the world has ever seen — that it’s yuuuuuuuge! — the cracked raving 69-year-old Babbitt analogue barking inchoate instructions off camera . . . no, no more, that way madness lies.
The awful, horrifying, despair-and-cringe-inducing real-talk truth that is causing the more mobile and proactive among us to start downloading those teach–yourself–Swiss German apps onto our iPhones and to read up on the finer points of immigration law is that the Donald Trump presidential campaign is the Donald Trump sex tape, an act of theater performing precisely the same functions as Paris Hilton’s amateur porn-o-vision escapade: exhibitionism, theatrical self-aggrandizement, titillation, etc., all of it composing a documentation of transient potency to be shored up against the inevitable passing of that potency. Trump is a post-erotic pornographer, and his daft followers are engaged in the political version of masturbation: sterile, fruitless self-indulgence.
Spend any time around the Trumpkins — the intellectually and morally stunted Oompa Loompas who have rallied to the candidacy of this grotesque charlatan — and you will hear purportedly heterosexual men working up freestyle paeans to Trump’s alleged virility — those “pussies in Washington” aren’t ready for “a real man like Trump,” as one put it — and cataloguing his praises in exuberant gonadal terms, with special attention paid to calculating the heaviness of the Trumpian scrotum relative to the equipment being packed by, e.g., Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. One says: “He is the only one that has the balls to tell the truth and to stand up for America.” “Trump’s got the balls,” proclaims the headline in a right-wing blog. “Donald Trump is a perfect example of an alpha male,” declares a commenter at (ahem!) Bodybuilding.com. “Alpha males lead for a reason,” retorted a Trump admirer when National Review’s Jonah Goldberg called for an “intervention” for the Trumpkins. Members of the GOP establishment, says another, “don’t know how to handle an extroverted alpha male personality like Trump” — ritualistic prostration of the faithful before Trump’s presumptive “alpha” social status being fundamental to the Trumpkin liturgy. Sensing the emergent theme, the left-wing columnist Michael Tomasky declared in the Daily Beast: “Trump’s got the GOP by the balls.”
Speaking in Vegas, his blood-flushed face a hypertensive moon rising against the background of a much larger photographic version of that same violet face, Trump declared: “I’m much, much richer than what they say,” one of the few complete sentences he managed to utter over the course of a performance that inspired Reason’s Matt Welch to observe: “This isn’t a speech, it’s a seizure.”
The awful, horrifying, despair-and-cringe-inducing real-talk truth that is causing the more mobile and proactive among us to start downloading those teach–yourself–Swiss German apps onto our iPhones and to read up on the finer points of immigration law is that the Donald Trump presidential campaign is the Donald Trump sex tape, an act of theater performing precisely the same functions as Paris Hilton’s amateur porn-o-vision escapade: exhibitionism, theatrical self-aggrandizement, titillation, etc., all of it composing a documentation of transient potency to be shored up against the inevitable passing of that potency. Trump is a post-erotic pornographer, and his daft followers are engaged in the political version of masturbation: sterile, fruitless self-indulgence.
Spend any time around the Trumpkins — the intellectually and morally stunted Oompa Loompas who have rallied to the candidacy of this grotesque charlatan — and you will hear purportedly heterosexual men working up freestyle paeans to Trump’s alleged virility — those “pussies in Washington” aren’t ready for “a real man like Trump,” as one put it — and cataloguing his praises in exuberant gonadal terms, with special attention paid to calculating the heaviness of the Trumpian scrotum relative to the equipment being packed by, e.g., Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. One says: “He is the only one that has the balls to tell the truth and to stand up for America.” “Trump’s got the balls,” proclaims the headline in a right-wing blog. “Donald Trump is a perfect example of an alpha male,” declares a commenter at (ahem!) Bodybuilding.com. “Alpha males lead for a reason,” retorted a Trump admirer when National Review’s Jonah Goldberg called for an “intervention” for the Trumpkins. Members of the GOP establishment, says another, “don’t know how to handle an extroverted alpha male personality like Trump” — ritualistic prostration of the faithful before Trump’s presumptive “alpha” social status being fundamental to the Trumpkin liturgy. Sensing the emergent theme, the left-wing columnist Michael Tomasky declared in the Daily Beast: “Trump’s got the GOP by the balls.”
Speaking in Vegas, his blood-flushed face a hypertensive moon rising against the background of a much larger photographic version of that same violet face, Trump declared: “I’m much, much richer than what they say,” one of the few complete sentences he managed to utter over the course of a performance that inspired Reason’s Matt Welch to observe: “This isn’t a speech, it’s a seizure.”
