Moles, Trolls and Cornholios

It seems as if everyone, bastard and non-, is running for the Republican Presidential nomination.  And they all popped up last Thursday, ready to be hammered by the Fox moderators and each other.  Particularly during the main event, when the fearsome threesome of Brent Baer (aka Eddie Munster after having raided John Boehner’s pancake makeup kit), Chris Wallace (doing his best hey-I’ve-got-gravitas-just-like-my-dad act), and Megyn Kelly (don’t call me Bimbo because I’ve got a superfluous ‘y’ in my name) inaugurated the night by seeming to stage a ‘Fox and Friends’ takeover . . . before delivering big-assed whacks, with the pol occupying the center hole taking most of the blows.

Bam!  Right off the bat, a show of hands!  Who is a potential Republican traitor, to the extent of mounting a third-party candidacy?  ‘Me, myself, and I,’ Donald Trump volunteered.  ‘I’ll support myself if I’m the nominee;  otherwise, quién sabe, as the rapists say?’  Talk about starting the debate with a ratings grabber.

The evening just got more and more strange.  With every petulantly bellicose response, Trump increasingly resembled a deranged cuttlefish squirting toxic ink over the entire Republican Party. The littler fishies thrashed about helplessly, bubbling platitudes and canning themselves in oleaginous talking points.  After the debate ended and it was time to buss up the beer bottles and popcorn, I decided that the cephalopod metaphor forming in my mind drew from the wrong part of the animal kingdom.  Instead, what about the charges that Donald Trump is really a Democratic mole?

Trump-as-mole started as an Onion-esque conspiracy theory.  Yet is it really preposterous?  Trump revels in insulting (and occasionally unmasking) almost every Republican [‘thought’?] leader (e.g. Jeb: lacks energy; Lindsey: can't crack 1%; Carly: brings on migraines).  His screed about ‘giving,’ for example — that he gives to all candidates so they will do him favors — is a strong indictment of the Citizens United decision, which has allowed cockamamie GOP candidates to compete and often win.  Sure, he used ‘giving’ to explain why Hillary Clinton attended his most recent wedding.  But it applies equally, even more devastatingly to pipsqueak Republicans in search of their own private billionaire.

Then there are Trump’s dumps on women.  Plenty were brought up during the debate (calling women slobs, pigs, and better-on-their-knees); not to be undone by himself, the Donald added to his caddishness on Friday, suggesting that moderator Megyn Kelly was ‘mean’ to him because she had blood coming out of her ‘wherever.’  [Every woman over the age of twelve knows exactly what he meant, as we’ve all heard versions of his distasteful put-down at times when we’ve been angry, outspoken, or have challenged male authority.]  What better way to expose Republican misogyny in general than to voice it crudely and wait for Republicans to come up with unconvincing lukewarm responses or for Democrats to pounce on his remarks as indicative of the mainstream GOP’s anti-women policies, as Hillary Clinton did today?  Worthy of a really really smart, really really really rich mole!

The self-gratifying excessiveness of Trump’s ‘you’re on the rag’ stupidity, and the way he has kept escalating it for the past three days, suggests that the billionaire may be more of a troll than a mole.  He’s trolling the Republican establishment for sure, which includes picking a fight with Fox News and making them grovel for forgiveness, as has been announced tonight re the conciliatory genuflection of Roger Ailes. Trump is also trolling the entire democratic electoral process; what egomaniac wouldn’t shoot for the biggest possible target?  Is this really what our country’s political decisions have become — a sorry brew of Orwellian pop-up polls, reality TV ratings, and social media buzz?

The redundantly logorrheic insistence of Trump’s outrageousness suggests another trolling target. If you’ve convinced yourself that you’re the most successful, intelligent, appealing  person in modern history, what could be more fun than trolling yourself?  Can you get the booboisie to keep supporting you, no matter how you up the insanity ante?  

A mole and a troll (and a cuttlefish, but it didn’t rhyme). Obviously, I’m casting about for ingenious comparisons with which to characterize Donald Trump’s jaw-dropping rise to political prominence.  Let me try a final one, which to me seems quite apt.

Beavis and Butthead fans know that Beavis has a completely unhinged alter ego, ‘The Great Cornholio.’  Cornholio is Beavis in a fugue state, yelling gibberish, waving his arms, and being even more scatologically juvenile than his ‘normal’ persona.  Cornholio has a thing about Latin America, like (heh-heh) Lake Titicaca and talking in a ‘Spanish’ accent . . . in one episode, he’s deported to Mexico by the INS. The ‘normal’ Beavis usually has no memory of Cornholio’s escapades, and/or will deny them vehemently.  What makes the Cornholio/Beavis dyad so funny is that the everyday Beavis is childishly, vulgarly unfiltered to begin with.  Can absolutely self-absorbed, politically incorrect excess be amped up? To make that surreal point, even the Cornholio alter has an alter: Bungholio. 

Thus I suggest Donald Trump as The Great Cornholio, incorporating the mole and the troll into increasingly fantastic, free-floating, maybe even sociopathic self-representations.  And if you don’t agree with me, you’re a stupid, weak, hormonal loser.