Suzanne Harrington: Trump comes from a cauldron of masculinity so toxic it glows in the dark
Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump gestures to supporters during a campaign stop at Havana Express Cuban Kitchen and Bakery, Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024, in Las Vegas.
It’s that most wonderful time of the year.
The holiday that celebrates childless cat ladies, while encouraging us to laugh at monsters by dressing up as them — bet there’ll be a lot of Donald Trumps at this year’s Halloween parties... horrifying in flappy red ties and orange face paint with yellow fluff taped to their heads.
Damn! Meryl Streep is trying to steal Sebastian’s statue. So Unfair!!!! https://t.co/IhbYtDk1nb
— Ali Abbasi (@_aliabbasi_) October 23, 2024
It failed, which means we all get to see the dramatisation of Trump’s earlier life, including gruesome scenes of hair transplants and liposuction, amphetamine use, and — most repulsively — his alleged sexual assault of the first Mrs Trump, Ivana.
The real monster of Abbasi’s film, however, is Roy Cohn, the vampiric lawyer who instilled Little Donnie with three rules for ‘success’.
- Rule 1 — attack and keep attacking.
- Rule 2 — admit nothing, deny everything.
- Rule 3 — always claim victory, never admit defeat.
And that the truth is as malleable and easy to manipulate as the damaged psyche of his young apprentice.
Psychologist Mary Trump’s book on her uncle’s loveless upbringing and the impact on his character reads like Mary Shelley’s .
Monstrous.
We have the ghost of Cohn to thank for the up-is-down, lies-are-truth, fake-is-real Orwellian hellscape in which we currently find ourselves.
Roy Cohn may be long dead, but the horror lives on as his unhinged apprentice continues to base his entire political career around those three rules.
Trump comes from a cauldron of masculinity so toxic it glows in the dark.
Aside from his belittling, sociopathic father Fred, he was a keen mentee of the monster-making Cohn, who himself had quite the career before getting his claws into the future president.
Cohn was known in the 1950s for hounding gay men out of their government jobs during the so-called Lavender Scare... despite being a gay man himself.
The significance of Cohn is brought to light by the screenwriter of Abbasi’s film, political journalist Gabriel Sherman and long-term observer of Trump and the malevolent forces which formed him.
Major studios and distributors were reluctant to touch the film, prompting Sherman to comment in interview how “Hollywood fashions itself as a community of truth tellers, but here they were running from a movie to prepare for a Trump presidency”.
Censorship doesn’t just happen in China.
In a comedy-horror aside, one billionaire investor, a Trump supporter, was appalled that the film he’d backed was not a fawning hagiography of Trump, but — in the words of Trump himself — “a hatchet job made by human scum”. Which is about as five-star a review as you could hope for.
I’m off to the cinema to savour the scariest horror unleashed this Halloween... while praying it doesn’t come to life on November 5.
