Welcome to the ninth circle of hell, Election Day 2020! Please come, get comfortable. One feature of the ninth circle of hell is that it will last the rest of your life, maybe—also you’ll never be able to get comfortable! Welcome!
What horrors do we have here? The first is that Donald Trump woke up and gave Fox & Friends a ring. Not unusual per se. It’s the show that began airing his unfiltered brain rot, giving him a platform in the periphery of the political arena. It has continued to take frequent calls from the president throughout this past term. It’s long been a place where he could just leak sewage uninhibited onto the electorate, like we’re the Love Canal and the EPA is merely a twinkle in the eye of this country. And here, on Election Day, Fox & Friends remains his greatest hype man and his personal must-watch TV show, a feedback loop, though not a hermetically sealed one (meaning sometimes he calls Hannity).
The three hosts served him their discussion prompts, which were merely suggestions about things he could talk about; he seemed exhausted as he answered, mostly hitting only downbeats. Like when one asked him about his Michigan rally on Monday, where Trump told the crowd not to make him cry. It was potentially his last rally. Did he actually feel…anything?
“Well, I was being—I was kidding, actually. But, you know, there is a little emotion,” Trump said. He was kidding, actually! Actually, he was kidding. He wasn’t going to cry. It was a joke, guys. Guys, it was just a joke. Stop! It was just a joke. He doesn’t cry. Crying is for libs and women, but he can have a “little emotion” as a treat. Then they followed up asking if ever cried in office, which the president just didn’t answer.
And though Trump’s disembodied voice served up several of his greatest hits, they sounded more mellow then they have in the past. He did take one interminable, rambling moment to chastise the members of Fox & Friends, who have been his only real friends through it all, about whom their network features on its shows (he also shared that its hard to have friends as president because people are so…intimidated). The question, for the record, was from Brian Kilmeade, and he asked whether Trump had anything to say about his predecessor Barack Obama claiming Trump cares more about crowd size than he does protecting people from COVID. And Trump immediately, and for no apparent reason, pivoted to Fox? Featuring too much Obama? And Joe Biden? Unlike in the “old days”? When it wouldn’t?
To which the hosts made a flaccid show at defending their network’s programming, while their faces said, Uh oh, dear leader has gone off the script he wrote. What now?? The ghost of Roger Ailes, show thyself and shine a light on the way forward.
But Trump saved them even as he disparaged them as he postured like he was accepting their apology. “You have great people,” he said. “When you have Sean, and you have Laura, and, you know, yourselves, and you have some incredible people. I’m just saying—Tucker’s been great.”
“That was pretty awesome,” Kilmeade said once they hurried the weary-seeming Trump off the phone. It was indeed another home run for everyone involved. Excellent work.
Anyway, this has been a tour through the mind of our potential second-term president on Election Day morning. Democracy is fine! The ninth circle of hell is fine!
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Monica Lewinsky on the Pandemic’s Forgotten F-Word
— Why Harry and Meghan Won’t Spend Christmas With the Queen
— What One Book Critic Learned by Reading 150 Trump Books
— How Ghislaine Maxwell Recruited Young Girls for Jeffrey Epstein
— More Details Emerge on Prince Harry and Prince William’s “Bitter Explosion”
— Tracing Photographer Richard Avedon’s Bohemian Coming of Age
— From the Archive: The Mysteries of Princess Diana’s Fatal Car Crash
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.
November 04, 2020 at 02:46AM
https://ift.tt/3elzJIn
President Trump Was Joking When He Said He Might Cry. It Was a Joke, Okay? - Vanity Fair
https://ift.tt/2BsGM2G
Joke
No comments:
Post a Comment