QOTD -- Out Of Control

 

"... We see outtakes of that January 7th video address and it’s the voice of daughter Ivanka we hear off camera trying to help him through it. He’s delicate and it’s clear his handlers know only she could manage the moment for him. He keeps snapping, snapping in anger. He’s not getting the lines quite right and they’re lines he doesn’t want to say. He’s editing them in real time, trying to bully them into conformance with his Big Lie. In what’s now the headline quote he insists, 'I don’t want to say the election is over.'

"What stuck with me is that I don’t remember seeing that kind of anger from Trump before. I can’t really remember it once. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen Trump angry. In many ways it’s his core emotive tenor. I’ve seen him channeling anger, malevolence, predation, violence. But this is different. This is clench your teeth and bang your hand on the lectern before you’re able to regain your composure anger. And that is the key. It’s the emotional register of someone who is out of control, dominated by events rather than dominating them. I’m sure it happens often enough. We’ve heard about it before. But he and his handlers are clearly keen to keep it off camera. That kind of powerlessness, losing is difficult for everyone. But you can see in those Jan 7th outtakes and we’ve really always known that for Donald Trump it amounts to a kind of psychic death. No wonder he needed his beloved daughter tending to him in those moments." -- Josh Marshall on the outtakes of the Malignant Loser's video address shown at last night's January 6 committee hearing.  His coup -- his final, violent attempt to stay in power -- had failed spectacularly, but he persisted in the psychic fig leaf of the Big Lie, persisting in it to this day.