Not content with being a figurative laughingstock anymore, Donald Trump broke out his FIGJAM act (Fuck I’m Great, Just Ask Me) at the U.N. this morning and became a literal laughingstock as well. When he started bragging about how his administration is the greatest in U.S. history, the room full of world leaders broke out in laughter. Trump responded, “I didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s OK.” Fox News viewers never saw it, though; the network cut the replay just before the guffawing begins. The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz joked that Trump will say, “I got much bigger laughs than Obama,” but that actually sounds like something he’ll tweet before the week is through.
The Kavanaugh Klusterfuck is exposing a class divide in this country, and Michelle Goldberg points out that the mollycoddling of America’s soft, pampered rich boys is how the privileged perpetuate themselves.
I never know how much stock to put in people like body language experts, but this one picked up an interesting tic in Kavanaugh’s Fox News interview: Whenever he said he wanted a “fair hearing” (not an investigation, as an innocent person would), he shook his head from side to side, as if his body were negating what his mouth was saying.
Novelist Gary Shteyngart, who was born in Russia, has a jaundiced view of his adoptive country, as evidenced in his novels “Absurdistan” and “Super Sad True Love Story.” He says when the Soviet Union fell he hoped the country would become more like the U.S. Instead, he laments, America is becoming more like Russia, a naked kleptocracy.
