Worst Not Dead Yet Scare Ever.

They always come back. The monsters at the end of the movie. It’s like a whole thing. The alien in Alien, after Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley has blown up the Nostromo and escaped in a shuttle, only to find HR Geiger’s xenomorph unfurling itself among the hyper sleeps pods. The stabby Halloween guy in Halloween, after Jamie Lee Curtis finally totally stabbed him to death... right up until he casually sits up behind her at the end. Chucky, Freddy, and Carrie, they all came back in the last scene of the final reel, and their resurrections are the defining jump-scare moments of entire franchises.

Donald Trump was supposed to rise from the dead at Mar a Lago this week, but this wasn’t that.

When Trump got rolling, he could summon pure dread, a feeling you’d get that he was seconds away from flinging a two-year-old into the abyss.

However, instead of striding the Earth and shooting Force Lightning from his massive bazooka fists, he had a long, low-energy soak in a tepid bath of neediness, bubbling with the occasional rage fart. As a cri de coeur of self-pity, that speech was a sovereign state of egomaniacal despair. It had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons; it was systemic and complete.

The vague gestures and meandering sentences shadow-walking through Sigmund Freud’s hand-drawn map of the deep unconscious created an emotional ambience akin to realising that a mile-long slab of visceral fat has escaped the containment facility under America’s largest drive-thru liposuction clinic and is sliding ever closer to your open mouth.

Seemingly no one but Gina Rinehart wanted to be there, not even Trump himself. And weirdly, she had a choice. But he didn’t. Consequences inch ever closer to Baron Fuckface von Clownstick. Indictments, subpoenas, criminal charges and jail time. They’re all coming for him unless he can plant his arse behind the Resolute desk again. It’s a question for an expert psychiatric panel whether he fears answering for his crimes more than he fears being remembered as a loser, but sulphurous fear hung about that whole speech.

Tom Nichols in The Atlantic thought the announcement had everything you’d expect: the tiny accordion hands, “the singsong voice, the tussle with the teleprompter as if the machine were a hostile headmaster testing him on Latin declensions.”

What it didn’t have was that dread sense of certainty. Trump always felt like cancer, but at least it’d been in remission after Joe Biden beat his ass like a government mule.

It doesn’t mean he won’t win again, of course. They always come back. The monsters at the end of the movie.

He was always a preposterous tangerine monster fart of a man. A sebaceous turd with a combover so hideous it could dissolve Valerian steel. The surprise was that tens of millions of Americans were thirsty for that. And, of course, for the fascism and bigotry. They turned out to be way more popular than even the worst, mad keen fascist or bigot could’ve imagined. Because of that, he will be the Republican Party’s nominee for President.

Trump’s candidacy, writes Nichols, is what millions of voters and many Republican officials want.

Gina, too, apparently.

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Just a little heads up. I released a book about the end of the world that seems just a little more appropriate at the end of this week. It’s the last episode in the Zero Day Code trilogy and it’s discounted bigly for everyone signed up to my blog, CheeseburgerGothic, and for you guys, because I love you too.

Not for anyone else though. Fuck them.

You can grab it here while it’s cheap.