Friday Funbag #5 - Mad King Edition
Trump's public mental breakdown, Israel's big decision, and a movie pick
Words are going to do it justice, but I’m going to try. Here is your Friday Funbag.
What in the blue hell is going on with Donald Trump?
I put the video in because there really isn’t much to say that the video won’t tell you itself. The town hall was abruptly cut short by a presidential candidate who proceeded to just go nuts with his Spotify playlist for the world to see. It ranks right up there with this moment in bizarre presidential campaign dances:
Twenty-eight years ago, another doddering old man was running for re-election to the presidency…of Russia. Boris Yeltsin said a few words and broken into the oddest possible dance, in full dress clothes, while it was 86°F outside. That’s what the Trump dancing reminded me of, except it kept going, and going, and going. It was so bad that his team tried to get his attention via the Teleprompter that “he never uses” that was facing up from the barricades.
It’s easy to laugh at moments like this, but the former president, aiming for another term, has veered from comedy to pure madness. He’s openly fantasizing in public about sending the military out to arrest or kill his political opponents, wants to pass a law barring people from criticizing the Supreme Court (a third of whom he appointed), and of course, enacting his mass deportation plan, the explanation of which grows more violent in each appearance on the trail. Within the past week, this has led to people in the audience yelling out “Kill them!” There is a nonzero chance that there will be vigilante violence against minorities before the year is out.
I’d judge it pretty likely that the madness and the increased calls for violence are a toxic mix of dementia setting in, his anger at his fans not sticking around for a full rally, his inability to golf until the campaign is over because of the repeated threats on his life, and his fears. The threats of violence always grow in the mind of an authoritarian when they are most fearful of losing—he is terrified of losing, of prison, of his whole life ending up in ruins.
I cannot stress how absolutely necessary it is that Trump is defeated on Election Day. If he isn’t, the dancing will be the least of our worries.
The leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah have both been killed. Will Israel finally stop turning their neighbors into dust?
The answer should be yes, but it’s not going to be.
Benjamin Netanyahu has already gone further than any Israeli Prime Minister in history has dared to go. He has flattened schools, hospitals, and entire cities in service of his political survival. Few others would ever have dared to take things as far as he has, but this is the endgame of the messianic right-wing religious parties he is allied with, and Bibi is so craven that they will get their way. It has been nothing short of a war crime by our own government to have funded this far, far longer than it should have gone. When’s the last time the hostages have been discussed? When’s the last time that we even pretended to care this was still about them?
It’s been one year and twelve days since Hamas massacred a thousand-plus Israelis going about their everyday lives. It’s been one year and eleven days since Israel began the most destructive war the Mideast has seen since the Second World War. They have burned Palestinians alive in their hospital beds, used teenagers as human shields, thrown prisoners off of a rooftop, exploded pagers across the entirety of Lebanon, and committed enough crimes to damn their souls ten times over, justifying all of it by pointing at what Hamas did and demanding we treat this as rightful behavior.
Killing Hezbollah’s leader has not stopped Israel from attacking Lebanon further. Killing Yahya Sinwar will not end what Israel is doing to Palestinians. They moved into the West Bank months ago, seizing property, jailing teenage boys for the crime of being teenage boys, demolishing homes, destroying olive trees, and generally making it abundantly clear they are launching a final solution of their own directed at the '“Palestinian Question.” It is why our continued support militarily is so heinous. Our free missiles and bombs and bullets, our restocking of the Iron Dome’s defensive projectiles, it makes Israel as close as possible to invulnerable. A nation that fears no retaliation will not hesitate to destroy those it hates. Those in power in Israel hate Palestinians the same way the Nazis in Germany hated the ancestors of Israel’s government. Israel is a nuclear power, and Iran is close enough to getting one thanks to the Trump administration’s idiotic scrapping of our deal with them. It is a lethal combination, and I fear that the end result will be the complete destabilization of the region.
It only takes one.
You’ve got a movie pick, we hear?
You would be correct, disembodied questioner.
Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, hit Netflix today. She is also the star of the film, which tells the story of serial killer Rodney Alcala and some of his victims, intertwined with the story of his appearance on the 1970s hit show The Dating Game. This is all a true story, and Kendrick gives a solid performance while showing a deft hand at directing. The film comes in at a tight 97 minutes, and there is little wasted motion here. It's a fascinating look at a multitude of Seventies phenomenons colliding—sexism, serial killers, bad TV, and strong women finding their voices. Go watch.
Bonus: An in-depth podcast series on Alcala and his repeated ability to worm out of trouble.