I’ve added to this “pictoon” periodically, wondering why nothing, from bombshell or smaller explosive device, blew up the orange beast. Nothing stuck.
While the saying “the straw the breaks the camel’s back” and the shorter “the final straw” goes back in various forms to 1677 it was Dickens who popularized it in “Dombey and Sons” in the 1840’s.
It is relevant that Mr. Dombey was very rich and full of pride. He had one woe after another pile on him until a comparatively small sadness broke him:
`So I'm a going to, Sir. One of my little boys is a going to learn me, when he's old enough, and been to school himself.'
`Well,' said Mr. Dombey, after looking at him attentively, and with no great favour, as he stood gazing round the room (principally round the ceiling) and still drawing his hand across and across his mouth. `You heard what I said to your wife just now?'
`Polly heerd it,' said Toodle, jerking his hat over his shoulder in the direction of the door, with an air of perfect confidence in his better half. `It's all right.'
`As you appear to leave everything to her,' said Mr. Dombey, frustrated in his intention of impressing his views still more distinctly on the husband, as the stronger character, `I suppose it is of no use my saying anything to you.'
`Not a bit,' said Toodle. `Polly heerd it. She's awake, Sir.'
`I won't detain you any longer then,' returned Mr. Dombey disappointed. `Where have you worked all your life?'
`Mostly underground, Sir, 'till I got married. I come to the level then. I'm a going on one of these here railroads when they comes into full play.'
As the last straw breaks the laden camel's back, this piece of underground information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr. Dombey. He motioned his child's foster-father to the door, who departed by no means unwillingly: and then turning the key, paced up and down the room in solitary wretchedness. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he did so; and often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a witness, `Poor little fellow!'
It may have been characteristic of Mr. Dombey's pride, that he pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind who has been working `mostly underground' all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit--but poor little fellow! From Chapter Two: In which Timely Provision is made for an Emergency that will sometimes arise in the best-regulated Families
We’ve been counting the bombshells one after another and keep thinking one will finally break Trump and turn a significant number of his less hypnotized supporters away from him.
One might be tempted to say “he’s only human” when speculating that they has to be a cumulative effect on him. But he’s not a typical human like Mr. Dombey who had feelings.
As many have said, he and his core supporters live in an impermeable bubble. But despite that psychological phenomena of delusion combined with wishful thinking combined with the extreme narcissism of Trump himself something has to seep through the wall of defenses.
At some level he has to know that things have gone horrible wrong for him. I am sure he doesn’t dwell on this, and neither do his strong supporters.
So what could be the last straw?
Like with Mr. Dombey, it could be something comparatively insignificant.
It could be as simple as his disappointment after counting on a huge anti-Clinton scandal coming from Julian Assange, or some unanticipated minor affront.
