Trump is getting creepier and meaner by the day

I know, I know. We've all heard way too much about seditionist felon Donald J. Trump. Unfortunately the criminal is still running for president, thanks to the Republican Party's rejection of any and all premises of basic decency, and unfortunately he's still saying things.

If you've tuned out Trump's antics because you can no longer stand the sound of his voice or his penchant for makeup tones that can only be described as "moderate chemical burn, some scarring," you might want to check back in. Whether it's cruelty for the sake of cruelty, openly fascist rhetoric, or letting his freak flag fly, Donald Trump appears to be descending into outright madness.

First let's talk about the open eliminationism.

Note that the Haitian refugees he's talking about are here legally, and we can assume that Trump, running mate JD Vance, and the jeering crowd knows that. This isn't about legal or illegal, this is about a fascist movement picking concrete targets to blame for their nation's ills and vowing to purge them. Laws don't enter into it, and Trump's camp has been increasingly open in asserting that they do mean legal migrants, and they do mean American-born, citizen children, and they do understand that what they're proposing will require massive "infrastructure" in the form of internment camps, since there's no plausible way to send "20 million" arrested people anywhere.

At this point it's dishonest for media outlets to not compare the movement to Naziism; he's ticking off all of the boxes.

“One thing about propaganda is that you hear extreme things over and over again then they don’t seem so extreme anymore and they become familiar,” [authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat] explained. “Now Americans have been hearing Trump malign immigrants for almost a decade now and so what Trump’s method is, is to slowly introduce more and more extreme ideas.”

Trump and Vance are now “introducing this idea of remigration, which is really scary, because this is an idea that’s very popular with the most extreme far-right people in Europe and it holds that you should be deported and sent back to your country of origin regardless of your citizenship status because if you really want a racial state, a white-ethno state, then whether you’re legal or illegal doesn’t matter,” she said.

At this point, Springfield, Ohio is indeed in crisis—but it's not because of immigrants. It's because Trump and Vance's attacks on the city have resulted in a steady drumbeat of bomb threats leveled against schools, universities, government agencies, and whatever else movement brownshirts can find phone numbers for. We're on the cusp of fascist violence, all because these absolute fucks would rather be responsible for that violence than suffer the indignity of losing a political election.

The Trump campaign rhetoric targeting women has also taken an even-darker-than-before turn. Not to worry, says the movement's self-imagined messiah.

If you didn't get a shiver down your spine at that, you're more jaded than I am. Various social media wags have wondered if he thinks he's doing hypnotism or if this is the speech Trump gives right after he's slipped something into your drink. Jeebus, buddy, I guess it's no wonder you keep bringing up serial killers in your speeches.

So Trump's speeches have gotten even more vicious than before, and the man has somehow managed to be even creepier then he was before despite "how he was before" including the part about being an adjudicated rapist. But we just had The New York Times and other media outlets orgasm themselves to near-unconsciousness with dozens and dozens of stories speculating without evidence about President Joe Biden's supposed health, and it's astounding to watch the same outlets ignore, very pointedly, daily evidence of Donald Trump's descent into likely dementia.

Dead. Johnny Carson isn't just dead, he's been dead for nearly two decades now. He died in 2005. If Dear Leader wants to issue an order to Bring Back Johnny Carson, he's going to have to take it up with necromancers, not television producers.

By itself it's just weird and creepy, but Trump's speech patterns been regularly slipping into behaviors associated with dementia and other age-related illness. In a Sept. 19 interview he claimed "the audience" went "crazy" during his most recent debate performance; there was no live audience at that debate. He repeatedly appears to think he's still running against Joe Biden. He mixed up Alaska and Afghanistan, which is the precise sort of thing journalists thought was evidence of unfitness for office back when they were combing Biden's speeches for gaffes.

All and all, we will probably never fully come to terms with just how interminably weird this would-be dictator and his family has always been. Former first lady Melania Trump is allegedly married to a billionaire, but you wouldn't know it from her recent attempts to scrounge up some income of her own. There's the halfhearted attempt to sell her memoir; we can take a guess as to how dreadfully dull the contents of that book are from her push to revisit what she thought of what other people thought of her former nude modeling career. Yeah, nobody cares. It only made for a minor media story eight years ago, when Trump was running for the presidency for the first time—and if that's literally the most interesting insight or event Melania's publishers could scrape up for presenting in the book's publicity materials, you know the rest of the book consists of trivialities even less interesting than that.

But there's also this, and at this point maybe we need to start speculating. Is Melania planning on finally divorcing this felonious turd?

The former first lady spoke at two political fundraisers for the Log Cabin Republicans this year, and she was paid $237,500 for an April event, according to former President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosure form. The payment was listed as a “speaking engagement.”

Trump’s latest disclosure form said Melania Trump was paid by the Log Cabin Republicans for the April fundraiser. But it’s a mystery who actually cut the check: Charles Moran, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, told CNN earlier this month the group did not put up the money for her to speak, and the disclosure form did not give any more information about the source of the payment.

Ahead of the other fundraiser in July for the conservative LGBTQ group, a person familiar said at least one request was made to a donor about a similar payment. It’s unclear whether Melania Trump was ultimately paid.

If you think it's strange for the spouse of a presidential candidate to only show up to campaign events if somebody's paying them to do it, yeah. Yeah, everyone else does too. And it may also turn into another ethics scandal for the Family That Has No Ethics, because presuming she is still married to Dear Leader he had better damn well be revealing the source of those payments on his own financial disclosure forms. For now all we know is that a mysterious somebody handed Melania nearly a quarter of a million bucks for a brief campaign speaking gig.

Melania's been otherwise staying well off the campaign trail this time around, so it seems her own interest in seeing Donald get re-elected is close to zero. Her interest in getting paid $237,500 for an hour's work, however, now that's enough to get out of bed over.

Because Donald Trump is a fascist who instigated a violent attempted coup and pressured his own vice president to throw out American democracy for his own self-interest, and because Trump at this point is virulent in his press for Holocaust-scale internments and worse, I don't feel much compulsion against speculating on how that fascist turn may be affecting the non-stupid members of his family. You don't hear much from Ivanka these days; she and Jared are probably hobbled in what they can say due to the billion-dollar Saudi investment into Jared, since Saudi royalty would very much like to see an authoritarian ally take over the U.S. government.

Melania, though, I'm beginning to think Melania finally thought things were paying off when it looked like she was married to a billionaire who would likely be spending a good long time in the American prison system. Finally, Mar-a-Lago to herself. Finally, no gasbag making gasbag noises whenever she goes to breakfast or shows up at one of the parties being held in her luxurious home-and-club.

But now it looks like the gasbag in question has a good chance of regaining the presidency and staying out of jail; the dream has fallen apart. Perhaps Plan B is to hoard as much money as she can, divorce the jackass, and live the remainder of her life in reasonable luxury while he trots off with new wife Laura Boomer Trump or whatever-the-hell.