Doom Report (Week 67: Big, Strong Men with Big, Hard Muscles)

So, I’m watching Zeteo this week, and Mehdi Hasan is interviewing Naomi Klein, and, while talking with her about unlikely alliances between progressives and rightwing nutjobs, he brings up the infamous Mamdani-Trump meeting in the White House.  And this is not really an “alliance” ... but on the other hand Mamdani did get something out of it, so the characterization is not wholly unreasonable.

But what actually struck me was this offhand comment from Mehdi:

I mean what’s so interesting about that—apart from the fact that Donald Trump looks at Mamdani the way he looks at no one else.  Mela—he doesn’t look at Melania the way he looks at Mamdani.

And a little bomb went off in my brain, and I instantly thought about how I’d heard people poking fun at this comment of Trump’s, from his 60 Minutes interview after the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

I also saw a lot of very strong, uh, physically strong, really attractive law enforcement people come through those doors.  And frankly, it made me feel very safe.  Very, very safe.  There’s nobody going to get by them.

“Really attractive”?  I mean, at the time I didn’t think that much of it—this is, after all, a recurring theme with Trump.  Remember when he said that ICE agents “just happen to have much larger, and harder, muscles than most”? or when he spoke about deploying the National Guard into DC by saying “we have very big, strong, good-looking soldiers standing around, and I think they make the place look better”?  Many people have commented on how much Trump focusses on appearance, and the consensus seems to be that this is typical narcissist behavior: focus on the skin deep, ignore the deeper stuff.  So this was just more of that ... right?

Except that now all sorts of explosions were going off in my head: this guy hates women—I mean, really hates women—and even his own female supporters will admit that.  And it seems like he’s always going on about how attractive men are.  Sure, he supposedly had sex with a porn star, but the main thing we know about that encounter was that he wanted her to spank him.  Sure, he has children, but then so did many men in the European monarchies who are, in retrospect, considered to have been gay.  What if ...

Like, what if Trump is secretly gay?

And, yes: I know I’m slandering gay men by even suggesting such a thing.  But, hear me out.  What if he is so deeply closeted that his sexuality is a secret even to himself?  His urges so deeply repressed that even he dare not look too closely at them.  That might explain his interest in women primarily as exploitative, primarily for the shock value: that perhaps he thinks of women as arm candy, that he expresses interest in them only because that’s the thing men are supposed to do.  And I’m not trying to imply that all gay men hate women, but I do believe that, in order to want to oppress a group, you first have to have a disinterest: an ability to see them as less than human.  Somehow I feel like we were one trauma away from knowing the name “Donald Trump” as one of our most prolific serial killers.  At the very least it would explain all the drooling over other men’s rock-hard abs.

So that’s my revelation for the week.  Probably nothing to it, but it’s a weird possibility to ponder—a real brain-bender.  And, just to add synchronicity to epiphany, Michael Che made this joke on last night’s SNL “Weekend Update”:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she thinks it’s possible that America has already had a gay president.  And, here’s a guess: maybe it’s the one obsessed with ballrooms and the Village People.

So if the worst thing you can say about my insane idea is that I’m on the same wavelength as Michael Che, I’ll take that.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• The Supreme Court basically gutted the Voting Rights Act as being too discriminatory against white people.  There’s a plethora of coverage on this, because it is vitally important that everyone understand how bad it is.  So you can hear Mark Elias (normally found on Brain Tyler Cohen’s channel, but here appearing as one of the lawyers who actually argued the case) talk about it on Scrict Scrutiny with Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, or you can hear Leah talk about it on What a Day with Jane Coaston, or you can hear Jane return the favor by appearing on Strict Scrutiny with Leah, or you can hear Jamelle Bouie talk about it, not once, but twice.  And you should definitely listen to at least one of those, and probably all of them.  If the Republicans manage to hold on to the House in the upcoming election and you can’t figure out why ... this is it.

• The other big legal news, of course, is indicting James Comey over seashells.  Leah Litman covers it on Strict Scrutiny, Lize Dye covers it for Legal Eagle, and Kate Shaw visits The Bulwark to talk about it as well.

• In leftover legal news, remember how last week I was all about the NYT’s exposé on the shadow docket?  Well, Legal Eagle also wanted to get in on that one, so this week Cristian Farias covers the shadow docket leaks.

• Some people feel that the shooter at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner was a staged event.  That seems doubtful, but it’s completely understandable to think it.  For one thing, the flurry of coordinated messages that went out about the ballroom immediately afterwards is insane.  Cody Johnston covers this in Monday’s Even More News, where he notes: ”... we know that there’s this built-in apparatus where you have like 50 to 100 MAGA accounts on like these group texts, with people in the White House coordinating messaging.  So, when this happens, the message goes out: ballroom, we’re doing ballroom today.  And so, they all do it.  And so it seems very coordinated, because that part is ...”  Seth Meyers also covers it in a “Closer Look” segment this week, if you want a shorter version.

• SNL has an amazing cold open this week, with Colin Jost reprising his excellent Pete Hegseth and a surprise spot-on impression of Kash Patel from Aziz Ansari.

• On The Weekly Show this week, Jon interviews Graham Platner.  And, later in the week, his main opponent in the Democratic primary, former Governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the race.  So it looks like we’re definitely getting a Platner vs Susan Collins race in November, which hopefully he will prevail in.

• In another banger “In My Opinon” segment on The Daily Show, Mo Amer explores the inherent weirdness of Islamophobia.

• Look, I understand that Ben McKenzie (who I mentioned both last week and the week before) is hawking his new movie, and that’s why he keeps showing up everywhere, but, damn: he’s good, every single time.  This week, he shows up on the Coffee Klatch, with Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse.

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This week, King Charles paid a visit to the US, and spoke to Congress and in various other venues.  Josh Johnson covers this on The Daily Show, and Seth Meyers did yet another “Closer Look” on the topic, but the truly incisive coverage this week was, I think, from Brian Tyler Cohen.  What Charles said was this:

The US Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.

And BTC follows that up with this:

First of all, the irony is not lost on me that even a literal king is more democratic than the president of the world’s oldest continuous democracy.

And, at the end of the day, that sort of says it all.  Oh, sure: there’s plenty to make fun of when it comes to the British royal family—certainly SNL UK had some fun spoofing Charles and Camilla in this week’s cold open—but even the King of England knows that our madman is a bridge too far.  Here’s hoping we work it out soon as well.