...last night was the one taking on tfg’s rallies.
He actually held together better-and much longer- than I had expected he would. I’d thought he’d have lost it within 20-30 minutes; but adrenaline is a pretty effective survival drug, (even on top of anything else that may have been on board), and he was definitely perceiving the threats to his election bid, (and therefore his chance of staying out of prison), and of being embarrassed on a national newscast, so his subconscious was in overdrive trying to keep up his defenses & hold him together.
But the jab at his rallies was the final nudge that sent him off the rails. His subsequent lies about the size of his rallies- and his projections about hers, (bussing people in, having to pay an audience to show up, etc)- were ratcheted up to another level of desperation.
One he really didn’t recover from, he was much more erratic after that.
In a glass studio there’s an appliance called an annealing oven. Working with hot glass introduces stresses, which can cause the worked piece to shatter as it cools and temperature differentials within the glass become too great. The annealing oven allows those stresses to resolve as it slowly cools the entire mass to the ambient temperature and freezes the form.
DonOld Trump uses his rallies as an annealing oven to soothe the potentially fatal flaws and conflicts in his psyche. To keep him from shattering under all the conflicting pressures of his current life.
His delusions, confabulations and lies have done this for him most of his life, but the constant high profile attention, (and threats of being caught and publicly exposed as a fraud- or a humbug, whichever), in the past decade has required a much larger, warmer oven to deal with all the threats and losses he’s been living with since coming down his brass, (fake gold), escalator.
(Pet peeve of mine, btw, the damned thing is polished brass, gold colored, yes, but common, vulgar, not nearly on par with the real thing. Perfectly appropriate for him, mind you, but it always irritates me that people buy in to his hype & call it gold)
He’s always been obsessed with ratings, as an indicator of his popularity and support, but rallies gave him an interactive audience, with immediate feedback. Much warmer and more soothing to the cracks in what passes for his soul. Addictive as hell, too.
When Kamala Harris brought up his rallies last night, and correctly noted their size had fallen sharply, and that people now regularly walk out and leave early- from boredom, or other reasons- it not only made the public at large aware of those facts, it ensured that from now on, every time he walks out on stage, she’s going to be right there, rent free, in his head, disparaging his diminishing ability to command positive attention from masses of people.
She has dropped a ginormous turd into his safe space. One that I don’t think he’s going to be able to unsee.
He’s very strongly associative- remember the observation that he sounds like the person he last talked to. Well, Harris’ attack on his ability to electrify huge crowds of people sent an adrenaline spike of terror through his brain like few other things could have, so now that association is deeply embedded in his internal landscape, working its way even deeper, like a porcupine’s quill.
I don’t think he’s going to be able to disassociate the two, so now the thing that had been his happy place, that warm, supportive space that he’s been using as a woobie for years now, has Kamala Harris firmly planted alongside it, looking at him and reminding him that he’s not the crowd draw that he was. That he’s getting old and losing track of things even faster, (like his dad did with Alzheimer’s- which he watched happen); that he’s talking about fictional characters as if they were real, and boring people with his whining. He’s going to have those thoughts and images intruding into his consciousness as he steps out on stage.
She landed a lot of solid punches, from the handshake on, but that was the one that really staggered him.
I’m going to be interested to watch how his rallies change from here on out.
