If you watched Trump’s appearance at the Al Smith dinner last night, you might be forgiven for concluding that he bombed, big league.
The annual charity dinner is sort of a political version of a celebrity roast, albeit one that is a little less vicious and a lot less funny. The main task of any politician speaking at the event is to demonstrate the rudiments of a sense of humor, especially when it comes to jokes directed at them.
Trump failed. Unlike Hillary, who managed to more or less get into the spirit of the thing, Trump’s only decent self-deprecating joke, if you can call it that, was at Melania’s expense, not his own. And he devoted most of his time to nasty attacks on Hillary that didn’t even vaguely resemble jokes, managing to draw actual boos from the crowd in the process.
Naturally, Trump’s most terrible fans think that he totally kicked ass.
On his blog today, white supremacist pickup artist James “Heartiste” Weidmann celebrates Trump’s alleged victory over “the infirm Queen of C*nts, Hillary Rotten Clinton” with several paragraphs worth of overcooked prose:
At the Al Smith charity dinner, Trump laid a trap for the elites and unleashed his vengeance on a gathering of effete plutocrats, smug globalist whores, lapdog media hacks, intellectually inbred urbanites, and the Wicked Bitch herself. …
He nuked the ruling class and the Clinton Machine from orbit and took a piss on their smoldering ashes.
Weidmann continues on in this vein for several more paragraphs, but I imagine you’ve got the gist of his, er, argument already.
Amazingly, Weidmann has managed to find another Trump fan whose, er, analysis of the event is even more histrionic than his own, an anonymous fellow running a blog called Face to Face. Here’s what that dude has to say on the subject:
[T]he time for yukking it up with the Establishment is over. Watch as Trump the court jester begins with his routine of juggling several glistening knives in the air, for the amusement of the white-tie audience, then calmly collects them one by one into his hands, and throws them straight into the chests of the plutocrats and the media.
The courtiers mocked him as a reality TV clown, and struck cruel blows against his little-people supporters whenever they felt like a little entertainment. So the jester decides to put on a show for the court where “Trump acts like Trump” and they’re all laughing along with the act. He convinces them it would be a riot for them to put on wax masks showing elitist caricatures, then begins a fire-breathing routine — only to spit the fire right onto their masks. As the courtiers scramble around the ballroom with their faces ablaze, the jester and his little-people companions storm out and burn down the rest of the palace.
Yipes. I think someone’s metaphoric license needs to be revoked.
If you want to watch what actually happened at the dinner when Trump got up to speak, here are some of the highlights, by which I mean lowlights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knNEwNbhq9o&feature=youtu.be
You can see the whole thing here.
rugbyyogi:
Funny thing is, it’s a line I think I’ve heard before. Did he plagiarise a joke about his wife’s plagiarism? TRUMPCEPTION!
🙁 what’s that supposed to mean?
@moggie there were a number of jokes about the plagiarism on a similar line, but it wasn’t set up the same way – where you think it’s about to be some paranoid rant about the librul meedja being out to get him and then boom it’s a joke on himself (well, his wife/ campaign). It was kind of a joke only he could tell and it be that funny.
If you remember they drug someone out to crucify for the mistake and then put her back in a box.
@PsycoSilver
Mangled evopsych being flipped around.
@PsycoSilver
There’s a long-standing misogyinistic trope to the effect that female comedians are intrinsically unfunny. I assume that PoM was ironically reversing it.
In a capitalist society those really are good qualities to an extent. Most who support capitalism would never admit it (although I have encountered some arch-conservatives and libertarians who gleefully describe capitalism as a bloody, cut-throat game and they won’t have it any other way), but it really fosters that the only way to get ahead is through antisocial behavior. Clueless dorks who crow about dark triad traits fancy themselves future CEOs because of their callousness.
@Axe: Barack– and for that matter, Bill Clinton– set a pretty high bar for charisma and seemingly effortless extemporaneous speaking.
I suspect also that Hillary has had, for all her political life, had to walk a line between “bah, just another overemotional female” and “jeez, whatta ice queen”… and it might be well ingrained into her when it comes to public speaking of any sort.
@Austin Loomis
The murder-by-cutlery sounds awfully like Kuroshitsuji, or Black Butler. Which makes me very, very sad. Is there anything these people won’t sully?
http://www.capsulecomputers.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Black-Butler-Collection-1-screenshot-03.jpg
Also, if I hadn’t already stolen part of my nym from these guys:
That’s just rich with awesome possibilities 😀
@Mish
They can try, but how can one possibly sully them:
Too precious!
@Nequam
No need to suspect, she’s done an interview about that very thing.
Clinton really does not seem comfortable doing comedy. Which is a shame, because she had some good jokes in there. Ah well, I guess we’ve been spoiled by Obama’s charisma. She’ll be a great president, even if not a particularly good one for one liners.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the lovely in the red dress with white gloves. Is that Maria Bartiromo? She looks so much like Sophia Loren to me.
http://i.imgur.com/XS5LK.gif
I really loved watching Match Game when it was on Game Show Network. The jokes were pretty funny, even for me, a child of the 90s, ten to twenty years after the show aired.
The image of Trump’s ‘little people supporters’ is disturbing. Like Trump is a mighty manly figure with a horde of small vicious alt-righters swarming around him.
If this prose was any purpler, Weird Tales would rise from the dead and offer to publish it.
Side note: I’ve often thought that Al Smith dodged a bullet by losing to Hoover. If the Crash of ’29 had been blamed on a Democrat (and the first Catholic President), the long term consequences would have started with no FDR and gone on from there.
Addendum: the man to Trump’s right (stage left) is wearing a decoration (the pendant cross). Does anyone know what that is?
@Axe, you are SO right, of course. The degree of adorability is such that we even forgive them for Season 2 *shudder*
I was about to ask if you’d seen Book of Circus or Book of Murder, but I’ll save it for an open thread 🙂
Unrelated: Wait, what’s this shit about (probably) Russia DDoSing half the US?
@SFCH
The largest ddos attack ever affected a major backbone network in the us, shutting down and disrupting connections to major sites across the east coast and California. People suspect Russia because a DDOS attack with this much coordination would require alot of computing power and logistics that a couple of people in a basement would never have.
Overall the lesson to take from this event is cyber security is vastly outstripped by hackers and that any escalation would mean millions of dollar’s worth of losses in terms of revenue.
So, Trump is a poor man’s version of the psychopathic Joker without the charm or charisma of the Joker – just the psychopathy?
The other lesson may be “Yes, people *will* hack refrigerators,” since apparently the DDOS was perpetrated through compromised Internet of Things devices:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/blame-the-internet-of-things-for-destroying-the-internet-today
As a side note:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/10/12/silicon-valley-creationists/
The nu atheists pretty much are buying simulation ai god using creationist arguments. We have gone full circle, and every passing moment I feel ashamed to be an atheist when knowing I have these folks as my contemporary peers, when the YouTube conservative atheists aren’t in my thoughts. This is Animal Farm all over again.
It’s times like this where I seriously start considering reconverting to buddhism. Then I remember reading all the gross patriarchal misogyny of the Konjaku and Lotus Suttra, and how alot of scholars seem to want to gloss over the sexism in favor of contemporary depictions of buddhism, then it all just keeps tumbling down.
It seriously blows my mind that anyone can say they’re against plutocracy and support Trump. What strange twists and turns of logic does your brain have to take to get to the point?
And totally unrelated, but I wanted to express my anger that the Lynx lost the WNBA title on a really, really bad piece of officiating. Fuuuuuuuck!!!!
OK. Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest.
Robert Walker-Smith,
It looks like a Chivalric Order of some kind, though I’m not familiar with exactly which.
The closest one I could find was the Order of St. Louis, but that’s a long abolished French order
It’s hard to tell, because chivalric orders are supposed to have a specific ribbon color to denote what kind of order it is, but the ribbon is the first thing to wear and tear, so you can’t always assume the person replaced it with the right color
@OoglyBoggles
I know what you mean. I found the new atheist stuff really exciting (years ago) but ohmygod it has toxic elements. When I saw a meme on Pinterest with this: “If someone says they believe in god, I automatically assume they are stupid,” the irony knocked me sideways.
And now this AI stuff that you linked? 🙁
Not one liners, but she is good at sass! The “I discussed this in my book” line at one of the hearings was awesome, as well as the “Donald can’t write a book past Chapter 11”.