And Brush Therein: The Losingest Loser At Work or Play
In "almost Shakespearean grotesquery," our cringe Buffoon-In-Chief just thrust himself into Sunday's World Cup final where he was unceremoniously booed, snubbed and cropped out of team photos. Then he again assailed Canada for smoke from their wildfires, though ours are much worse and they've helped us countless times with them. Still, ever-gracious, our northern neighbor has announced a new initiative to sweep the Rockies, vacuum the Boreal Forest and hand-rake each pine needle. The acronym for its hefty name: F.U.C.K.O.F.F.
The headlines for Trump's latest gatecrash of a major sports event that really, really didn't want him there tells the vainglorious, mortifying tale: "Most Universally Hated President In History Mercilessly Booed," "Crowd Boos, Player Snub and Failed Photobomb: Trump's Big World Cup Day Out," and "Confused Old Fuckwit Imagines He's Won the World Cup." The Guardian also wins a Snark of the Year Award for the caption to its photo of FIFA's Infantino deep in conversation with a clueless Trump, both men standing under a blizzard of confetti, after he literally had to drag him off-stage: "Gianni Infantino carefully explains to Donald Trump he is not part of the Spanish team."
Some of the over 82,000 fans at New Jersey's Met-Life Stadium, where Spain trounced a listless, chaotic, often-thuggish Argentina 1-0, had earlier made their feelings clear when video briefly showed Trump ensconced in his glass-encased VIP digs and scattered boos rang out. By the time he finally lumbered stoop-shouldered onto the field at the end, it sounded like all 82,000-plus had reconsidered before joining in to jeer. Trailing behind him, looking like hostages trying to keep a safe distance to not catch any cooties, were Mexico's and Canada's leaders, the tournament's alleged, far-less-despised hosts. Illogically, thanks to Infantino's long, gross obsequiousness, Trump got to hand out awards.
And he did, though not without drama: Several players hesitated, recoiled or refused to shake his hand. Then it was time to hand out the (seductively gold) World Cup. Little needy Donnie, a malignant narcissistic lump who just can't help himself, swooped in to awkwardly "help" Infantino carry it like a five-year-old hungry for the ice-cream cone his dad is holding, "a lonely, grasping figure refusing to release a trophy he didn’t win." Once it was presented to Spain's captain Rodri, Trump, "malice wrapped in vanity," painfully lingered there in the limelight as Infantino struggled to yank him to the side for the iconic hoist photo. In the end, a patient Rodri gently nudged him out of the shot, but cringingly not off the stage.
Steve Schmidt noted the clumsy resulting image's era-defining power, its display of the "breathtaking psychological fragility" of a "President Norma Desmond...incapable of understanding that the greatest office in the world confers responsibility, not ownership." "The character has been devoured by the caricature," he wrote of "self-parody made flesh," the small man so consumed by the need for adulation that, "Every trophy is his trophy. Every triumph is his triumph. Every stage is his stage." Later, in photos released both by FIFA and the Spanish team, Trump had mercifully, miraculously disappeared from both shots, because this is why God and Al Gore invented photoshop.
The awkward bit of theater with Spain came, lest we forget, in the wake of Trump's weeks of vilifying the nation and their prime minister Pedro Sánchez - first, for their refusal to allow the U.S. military to use Spanish bases to help illegally bomb Iran, then for the alleged failure of "bad" and "hopeless" Spanish people to pay enough for NATO defense spending. Despite Trump's ugly threats to "cut off all trade" with a longtime ally unforgivably following the law, it all suddenly vanished before the cameras, where Trump congratulated "a great team," even though they speak Spanish, and claimed there was "no tension" with the country’s leadership. Actually, he smirked, "I have no tension with anybody."
Tell it to Canada, which Trump has been moronically berating for "Willful Negligence," aka inexplicably allowing smoke from over 800 wildfires raging across some of Canada's 347 million acres to drift over our pristine shores. A few days earlier, joined by equally stupid MAGA lackeys, he raged the U.S. "is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air" at an "incalculable" (a big word he probs didn't write) cost, and "maybe they should pay us some damages" or billions more in tariffs, and he'd call Carney "to find out what they are going to do about it." "We are holding Canada responsible," he thundered, "for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein."
Like his long-ago claim during California wildfires that Finland's president told him they rake their forests and have no such problems -........
