Mr. Bannon, I’m ready for my close-up
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This Olivia Nuzzi piece is indescribably horrifying and depressing, but should be read in full despite or because of that.
It captures the torpid nihilistic aimlessness of Donald Trump’s for the moment essentially non-existent re-election campaign, which right now is staffed by D-list people from MAGA land, but which will be full of all the usual suspects as soon as it becomes clear that, despite everything, he is going to be the 2024 Republican nominee.
In theory, as the kind of still-a-little-Trumpian character who loves revenge, he should take only pleasure in observing his old boss’s accumulating failures. But this? It was almost too pathetic. “It was sad to watch,” Nunberg said. “It was like watching Elvis at the end.” On second thought, it was worse than that: “It was like watching Elvis at the end if he was completely relegated to just piano bars.” He laughed a sad laugh. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
“It’s not there. In this business, you can have it and have it so hot and it can go overnight and it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing it’s gone. The magic is gone,” an adviser said. “When Seb Gorka and Raheem Kassam and Kash Patel and Devin Nunes are your stars, that’s the D-list. It was D-list MAGA. When Brick Man — that freak, Brick Man — is in the VIP seating, we’ve got a problem.” Brick Man is a man who wears a suit made of fabric with — you guessed it — a brick pattern. The bricks symbolize the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He wandered around the ballroom offering interviews to reporters. I have a high tolerance for this kind of shit, obviously, and I could not. “If you’re looking for an indication of how bad things are going,” the adviser added, “it’s Brick Man not just being there but being in the VIP section. Don Jr.’s not there!”
I find it genuinely weird and creepy and inexplicable that Trump is obsessed with, of all things, Sunset Boulevard; it nearly humanizes him, which I would have thought impossible.
It’s also the kind of hack touch I would expect in a low-grade horror movie, which is what all this is, except you can’t flip over to SportsCenter.
Speaking of which, here’s a clip of Elvis at the very end, a few weeks before he keeled over for the last time. He’s obviously drugged up to the point of almost total incoherence; he can barely walk to the piano, and if he had dropped dead on that stage right then and there it would have been the least surprising outcome of the proceedings. Then he starts to sing: