Since Trump offhandedly endorsed the notion of him becoming pope, I wanted to offer a few papal names that he might deserve:
Pope Decadent X
Pope Doucheus Amoralis III
Pope Un-Innocent IV
Pope Anus Equinus IX
Pope Idiot Maximus
Pope Irredeemable V
Pope Judas Democratis II
Pope Fuckface I
I want to talk for a moment about these “artworks” of Jon McNaughton. I have come to appreciate them as perhaps the most succinct embodiment of the projection and hypocrisy of the MAGA movement. It is, in short, an unapologetic trolling exercise. I think the overarching theme of the modern Republican movement is pure FANTASY, much of it of the sinister kind. Power and policy based on lies and half-truths. For McNaughton these visions come conveniently in both bright, aspirational and also dark, apocalyptic colors. He’s Bob Ross for the paranoid, conspiratorial, gun-toting, white nationalist, homophobic, incel coalition. It’s all so fucking sad and ridiculous.
The political problem of triangulating with an opposition force ran Clinton into trouble as he tacked to the center and signed the ill-advised criminal justice bill while balancing the budget; yet they still gutted him over the Lewinsky affair (Blowgazi). The chief inquisitor, Newt Gingrich, at the time cheating on his wife, showed them the way and now, true to form, they herald Trump — the serial groping, philandering and porn-star paying dirtbag — as their holy deliverer. That asymmetrical dynamic has only increased since the 1990’s in the “post-truth” and “alternative facts” era. The GOP has turned itself into what Paul Newman’s character in “The Sting” called “the big con.” You can’t win a game if one side keeps changing the rules and, even then, won’t abide by them. It’s an administration run, literally, by members of FOX News, which itself creates a dizzying stream of propaganda, fearmongering and counterfactual stupidity. They succeed daily at Steve Bannon’s exhortation to “flood the zone with shit.” In fact, that would be an apt tag-line — “FOX News: Flooding the Zone With Shit Since 1996!”. Obama faced the same headwinds, as evidenced by the absurd faux outrage over his TAN SUIT (to ponder: how many tan suits equals an attempted stolen election?).
It is well known that there are a great many more words in the English language for negative attributes than positive. I think the wordsmiths were preparing us for the extreme buggery and skullduggery from the likes of McCarthy-Nixon-Trump, the axis of weasels. Psychologists have a term that well applies here, the “dark triad,” which includes the following pathological charcteristics (all fully max’d out by Trump himself):
Narcissism
Machiavellianism
Sociopathy
What differs in Trump 2.0 is that so many more of his administration, and in the Republican Congress, share some or all of these negative characteristics. It’s a gigantic morass filled with mis/disinformation, conflicts of interest, illegality, non-transparency, and an utter lack of expertise. A menacing-clown-car driving wildly around the country with “dirty” fissile material in the trunk that contaminates anything within a hundred mile radius, while also playing really shitty music. The White House is now a gilded Porta-Potty for all the “waste, fraud and abuse” that comes out of Trump’s mouth. Yup, it’s a Dark Fantasyland that McNaughton and FOX and QAnon have created and continue to prop up. To the upside, you could teach kids a panoply of negative vocabulary terms based in DJT alone. But first, a little music theory. As some will know, a musical cord is made up of three notes (a triad), often the root, the third and the fifth of a given scale in Western music. A particular chord is called “tritonic” if it contains a “tritone,” which is a dissonant interval of three whole tones between two notes. In the Middle Ages, it was sometimes referred to as “the Devil’s interval” for its spooky evocations and is frequently employed in horror films like “Halloween.”
So I began thinking in “triads” or chords, vis-a-vis Trump/Musk, Inc. Here are a few tritonic chords sketched out as examples. Feel free to build your own chord library at home!
Destructive
Divisive
Duplicitous
That works pretty well. Let’s try another:
Sadistic
Sycophantic
Sleazy
Fun, right?! And also damn accurate!
Heedless
Hypocritical
Huckstering
There are so many possibilities. It’s hard to stop!
Mean
Manipulative
Maniacal
Would you like more….???
Disruptive
Destructive
Defiling
It just never ends…..
Bombastic
Bullying
Buffoonish
… sadly for us…
Un-Constitutional (Authoritarian)
Un-Christian (Assholes)
Un-Scientific (Asinine)
But to veer away from the alliterative, I offer these last few:
Incompetent
Vengeful
Corrupt
With their typical actions characterized as…
Fabrication
Projection
Bluster
Then finally we have the home triad…. and this should be their new slogan (but, then again, why stop at three??):
FANTASY…!!
VENALITY…!!
CRUELTY…!!
BIGOTRY…!!
HYPOCRISY…!!
MENDACITY…!!
Great Exudations 