The word “grotesque” jumped out at me in this article:
I thought I’d exhausted the thesaurus in trying to find words to describe Donald Trump but somehow didn’t come up with grotesque as a more than apt description.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines grotesque as a form of art, i.e. “Mid 16th century (as noun): from French crotesque (the earliest form in English), from Italian grottesca, from opera or pittura grottesca ‘work or painting resembling that found in a grotto’; ‘grotto’ here probably denoted the rooms of ancient buildings in Rome which had been revealed by excavations, and which contained murals in the grotesque style” and of course as can be applied to people “incongruous or inappropriate to a shocking degree.”
You have to hope that it is of some significance that not only was the word used to describe Trump’s most recent assault of decency as grotesque in progressive publications, Donald Trump Slammed As ‘Grotesque And Disgraceful’ By Former GOP Strategist On Memorial Day, for example; but even in The National Review: Trump’s Grotesque Tweets addresses the issue ( the article that also refers to Markos Moulitsas of the left-wing website Daily Kos, but this is besides the point) :
No one goes to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed to be edified, but Trump’s series of tweets the last two weeks about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has been grotesque even by his standards.
Trump didn’t leave it at boasting about how he supposedly used Scarborough in 2016 (when the host gave him kid-glove treatment), or at mocking Scarborough’s ratings, or calling him “nuts,” all of which would have been routine unpresidential conduct, but insinuated that Scarborough is guilty of murdering a young woman who died in one of his Florida district offices in 2001 when he was a congressman.
I looked up grotesque on Wikipedia:
Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks. In art, performance, and literature, however, grotesque may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity. More specifically, the grotesque forms on Gothic buildings, when not used as drain-spouts, should not be called gargoyles, but rather referred to simply as grotesques, or chimeras.
What stuck me in addition to how spot-on the word grotesque is to describe so much of both Trump’s behavior and his personality, is how oddly similar to Trump one of the pictures used to illustrate the Wikipedia entry (shown above) is.
Note that gold thread artwork is on a saddle pad. I doubt Trump has ever ridden a horse (like Putin) although the image of his ample nether regions perched on this is, well, grotesque.
Images of Trump on horseback, some with Putin.