Donald Trump can’t even attend a charity event with elite Manhattan Catholics without gutting lustily booed for his classless, boorish behavior and bad jokes. He apparently thought it would get laughs to call Hillary Clinton a crook and say that she was only at the event to “pretend she doesn’t hate Catholics.”
To be clear, ripping on your opponent and prominent guests is expected at the Al Smith Dinner. Hillary Clinton made many jokes at Trump’s expense and didn’t spare Rudy Giuliani either. She said she wished Michael Bloomberg had agreed to speak because “she’d like to hear from a billionaire.” She complimented Kellyanne Conway but said that Trump probably wouldn’t pay her. She jabbed him repeatedly for not being willing to accept his pending defeat. And she said that immigrants look at the Statue of Liberty as a beacon of hope but that Trump sees her only as a “four.”
As for Guiliani, she cracked, “Many don’t know this but Rudy actually got his start as a prosecutor going after wealthy New Yorkers who avoided paying taxes. But as the saying goes, if you can’t beat them go on FOX News and call them a genius.”
As you might expect, Giuliani was a visibly poor sport about it.
In fairness to Trump, even the host laid into him.
The tone of the event was set before either candidate even spoke when [Al] Smith said “before the dinner started, Trump went to Hillary and asked ‘how are you?’ She said, ‘I’m fine — now get out of the ladies’ dressing room.’”
Trump has never been able to mix at these white tie events in Manhattan, which I suspect is a source of both his ostentatious striving and his bottomless resentment. But, personally, I think Jay Gatsby was a nicer guy, threw better parties, and did a better job disguising his mob connections.
The guy just stikes me as a lousy human being. It’s really that simple.
He’s not going quietly into the night, that’s for sure. He looks to be building into something epic. Hopefully his meltdown will be public and very thorough.
.
Bigly.
Shakespeare he’s not.
And try as I might, I just can’t get “bigly” into my vocabulary.
Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!
Farewell the plumèd troops and the big wars
That makes ambition virtue! Oh, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th’ ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
Actual Shakespeare, emphasis mine.
Bravo!
As much as wealth is wasted on America’s embarrassing upper class elites, even they can’t abide the boorish, juvenile Trump and his appalling gold-plated vulgarian paradise. Trump seems to have thought Rodney Dangerfield was the hero of the piece…
As far as can be seen, any sensible person who has had to come in contact with Trump can’t wait to get away.
Sad!
He really knows how to warm up a crowd:
There are still others firmly in his quarter. If so inclined, scan the 1800 plus comments as of an hour ago at Krauthammer’s WP Op-ed where some die hard Trumpistas are giving him a hard time for not supporting Trump. Of course, Krauthammer’s not saying who he’s voting for. He just can’t bring himself to vote for Hillary.
And, just now, on CNBC, the billionaire guest, Harold Hamm (Mr. Shale Oil entrepreneur & developer), was speaking positively about Trumps’ jobs plan? Also showeing across the TV screen to his left were photos of the 5 Billionaires who support Trump still.
On the positive side, my husband of 45 years said last evening that he hopes Hillary wins in a land slide. He sorta has been an independent voter most of his life but truly despises Trump the candidate and person.
Trump actually got off a few good jokes in his opening 7 minutes, well-crafted and appropriate to the occasion, even as the material he delivered of a self-deprecating nature was virtually non-existent. Then he took a dark turn and things went south in the room.
My guess is he decided he would “improve” on some of the zingers in the last half, and re-wrote them to be more congruous with his bitter mood.
Hillary, not being a wacko narcissist like Donald, had some fairly good jokes appropriate for the dinner and a few at her own expense, but fell short occasionally in the delivery and timing. A polished humorist she is not.
But what a disastrous evening for Donald. Back-to-back disastrous nights.
A humorless pompous ass. I can only think of Nixon and Lyndon as coming close to him in that department.
Obama was his usual funny self at the Smith dinner in 2008 but fell kind of flat in 2012. He seemed exhausted. This time, Hillary seemed tired. I can understand why. It’s been a grueling campaign.
I don’t know that she’ll ever be a comic genius but I look forward to seeing her at Nurdprom this coming year. My guess is she’ll be her best self then.
I have the dubious distinction of having been in a position where I could really gauge what is going on at these so-called “High Society” gatherings both in NYC and DC for well over 40 years (from the bandstand and also often from freely mixing with the audience wearing their own tuxedoed/suited disguises) and I am here to tell you that anybody whatsoever…including Mr. Trump…who succeeds in making the denizens of that society feel even the least bit discomfited is performing a public service.
They are by and large the lamest bunch of motherfuckers ever to congregate in one ballroom. Genteely drunk, most of them, and so layered in their protective coats of wealth, exceptionalism and entitlement that they are almost immune to any sort of stimulation except naked disregard for their importance.
Trump got them booing!!!???
Maybe he’s onto something.
Later…
AG
He’d get credit if he did a Colbert and told them how lame they are.
That’s not what happened.
I know…
But he did tell them how lame they were. Not like Stephen Colbert…whose ratings, by the way, are dropping like a pile of bricks. More like Guy Fawkes.
Say these sorts of thing…in public, live and to their faces…to people who almost never, ever hear a truly discouraging word spoken in their presence because they surround themselves with highly paid yes people…is nearly insurrectionary. Like Guy Fawkes trying to blow up the House of Lords. If they could get away with it, instead of booing him they’d string him up from the Waldorf Astoria’s Grand Ballroom chandeliers and then go on about eating their dinners and ignoring the (almost entirely minority) servants circulating amongst them.
A more disgusting group of sycophants I have never met.
Trump won’t get elected president and he most probably would have been a disaster if he was elected. But he has served a purpose. He has thrown a clear light…along with Wikileaks and the other hacker/whistleblowers…on the heretofore hidden machinations of the .01 percenter wizards who hide from their subjects…Oz-like…behind almost impenetrable curtains of money and power.
U.S. politics will never be the same.
And that’s a good thing.
AG
Coming from New York we understand what a Götterdämmerung this event probably was for Trump personally. Catholic specificity aside, the Manhattan elite have always been his Waterloo. He never could get cross “that damn bridge”. I reckon he would have rather been mayor than president but he knew New York would never have him. That’s half the reason he made a career of shaming them with his flagrant vulgarity. The tabloids loved it and a star was born.
That Republicans inadvertently provided him with a Bond-villain scale platform for his revenge (on the grounds of his antagonism and toxicity to elites in general) is hugely ironic and somehow fitting. But their whole enterprise has, predictably, come to grief and his slow and unrelenting humiliation will likely be vast. Perhaps historical. This is disturbing on a lot of levels.
Knowing the incessant, pathological narcissism and restless energy of Trump I’m a little concerned for him, self-harm wise; that’s one possibility I haven’t heard mentioned but he’s not, clearly, in prime mental health and the public humiliation strikes deep at his fatal vulnerability.
Interesting what you say about Mayor. It makes perfect sense. And now he humiliates Christy and Giuliani.
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That’s right. In the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, no less; with Hillary, another New York cognoscenti, goading him from the podium. It was like a scene from Citizen Kane.
I would watch a modern, musical version of a Greek tragedy Trump where a man who simply wants to be adored, through his overweening and blind machinations, inadvertently humiliates himself to destruction and engulfs his family, associates and fellow citizens in a conflagration of mistaken justice, vengeance and racial shame. Chorus of ghosts from 9/11 or something, keening for a golden, inclusive, perhaps mythical but hardly deplorable, America of days of yore.
This reminds me of the play Disgraced. It’s a steep and shocking fall.
I’ve come to think that almost all of Trump’s many own-goals during the campaign come from his being totally ensconced inside the Breitbart/Fox News/Hannity bubble. This is just another example of the same thing we’ve seen over & over. The things he says & his reactions to events all seem perfectly reasonable to him, because that’s what people are thinking and have been saying on the alt-right for years now. One thing about the fascist right is that they have absolutely no sense of humor at all. Trump just takes their insane nonsense and says it publicly in front of people who aren’t inside the bubble. And it comes across as heavy handed, luncacy:
Ex: Trump says that Obama & Hillary invented ISIS. Fox News tries to spin it in an interview with him, saying “I understand what you mean. We left a vacuum.” But, Trump contradicts him saying “No. Hillary Clinton invented ISIS.” Because there’s no subtlety in Breitbart World. They can’t say “Obama & Hillary left Iraq in 2009 and ISIS took advantage” because that gets you into a foreign policy debate about the Status of Forces Agreement having been signed by George Bush, etc. And their ignorant tiny heads would explode. Much better to say “Hillary created ISIS” because that the Trumpkins can understand.
At this dinner, Trump offends the elites because after 1 year on the campaign trail in the midst of his raging supporters, he’s not temperamentally prepared to talk to people who don’t share this narrow world view. He takes offense so easily this dinner was never going to go well. It’s really a microcosm example of why he’s losing this race so badly.
Astounding to witness someone so breathtakingly unqualified, most likely with a major personality disorder, at the head of the Republican ticket. Who would have thought this possible in 2000 or even in 2012? Trump makes frickin W seem like Abraham Lincoln. I never thought I could think of Bush, McCain or Romney as qualified.
Bush and Romney were/are Robber Barons. That makes them ‘ordinary’. And of course McCain is just ambitious, once again an ‘ordinary’ trait.
But what all of them had was an uncontrollable compulsion to outdo Daddy. This compulsion is most pathological in McCain and Bush.
But all three were within the parameters of ‘ordinary’ republicans.
Trump also seems to have Daddy issues, but it seems to have driven him around the bend. He is NOT ‘ordinary’.
It’s VERY interesting that the last four republican nominees have pretty obvious Father issues.
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I can think of three that all appear to fit:
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Antisocial Personality Disorder
Apropos your allusion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the line often attributed to him, “There are no second acts in American lives,” came to mind. Trump is not going to get to perform a second act as an American caudillo. Of course, I then read about the actual history of that line in Fitzgerald’s work and saw that the meaning is rather more nuanced.
I always assumed that it meant that there is no acknowledgement of conflict by Americans, with the classic 3-act play formulation being:
Skip Act 2 and characters go from success to success, and everyone lives out their dreams.
The press has always interpreted it as if people are changing their circus acts, as in “my first act was juggling, but now I tame lions.” This seems idiotic to me.
just watched the Trump part – his obsessive attacks on Hillary strike me as, well, obsessive. I assume that’s what ppl booed, that he got started attacking her and just kept on. he’s a thin skinned mean guy. has nothing to do with discomfiting the privileged. they started booing when it was clear that he was going to keep attacking her.
Proving the old saying: “You can dress ’em up, but you can’t take ’em out.”