Ramble On: Colossal Wreck (video)

Trump is so thirsty for prizes, so desperate for glory, he'd proudly accept the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.

Good morning! Hello, thank you, and welcome to my new subscribers. Here is today’s ramble:

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And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. As you’re watching this, it’s Friday morning, August 15th. I’m recording it at nine o’clock at night on Thursday, August 14th.

I guess right now Trump is probably nervous, anticipating his big summit meeting in Alaska with his overlord. And it will be interesting to see how that turns out. We’ll talk about that on the show tonight, which I hope everybody watches: The Five 8 at eight o’clock tonight. That’s where we’ll talk about the more heavy-duty things, but for now, I want to talk about something a little more light.

So I always had this running joke, when we used to do The Weeklings, which is my old arts and culture site that I did with some friends of mine—a blog, I guess you can call it. I used to joke that I wanted to win the MacArthur Genius Award. And I would say, “Another year goes by and I’ve not been recognized as a genius by the MacArthur people. Oh well.”

And you know, that was joke—a running joke. Although part of me likes the idea of this group of people, nobody even knows who they are, but they have MacArthur Powers, and they just decide that somebody is going to get money this year, and be acknowledged as a genius, for their body of work. Which struck me as probably the only way I would ever be able to win anything.

I’m still holding out hope for the MacArthur Award, but I’m not, like, lobbying for it. However, I did win a Genius Award, and I want to share it with you. This is the Electronic Football Genius Award, which I won because I won my Fantasy Football League, and this is what I got. I get to keep this for a whole year. It is a trophy, is an honor, it is a privilege, and it means that I did something. I went out and I beat eleven other guys at fake football. I did that!

Now, the reason I’m bringing this all up, of course, is because the President of the United States—among all the many other things that we’ve discussed on this website, on the show, on the podcast—is obsessed, Donald Trump is obsessed, with winning awards. He’s obsessed with this weird glory—you know, he wants the laurels. I think he fantasizes about that the time in old Rome when he could have the parade and literally get his flowers. I think that he fantasizes about that time, which doesn’t really exist anymore.

So he’s, like, inserting himself into these awards—lobbying for him to win awards. There was a report in The Guardian, which actually came from a report in the Norwegian press, that Trump last month called up the finance minister of Norway, just out of the blue one day, and was like, “Hey, yeah, tariff, tariff—hey, Jens, tell me about the Nobel Prizes because, I don’t know if you know, but I’ve been nominated for a Peace Prize,” blah, whatever he said.

There’s nothing more gauche than lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, it’s really next-level gauche. Who does something like that? I think you should be ineligible to receive that particular award just for cultivating it in the way that he’s cultivating it.

But it’s not just that. You know, it’s also the Kennedy Center Honors. He wants to host the damn thing. He wants to hand out the awards himself. He wants the thing to be named after him, probably.

This is a guy who basically spent his entire career putting his name on everything. He literally made money by licensing other people to put his name on things. So he’s big into this vainglory, right? This kind of “Me, me, me! I want to be the best. I want to be acknowledged as the greatest, as the genius, as the peacemaker, as the best supporting actor,” whatever. That’s what he wants.

And maybe Putin will give him the Lenin Medal or whatever the fuck it’s called in Alaska today. And he can have that too. But he wants these things. I guess it’s a strongman thing. These dictator types all have their stupid medals all over their jackets and stuff. But Trump doesn’t have any medals, Lord knows, because there’s no medal for bone spurs.

But he wants to win these awards so badly, he’s so thirsty to be acknowledged. He’s thirsty, and it’s the same kind of need that he had growing up in Queens and wanting to be accepted by the elite in Manhattan.

And even though he is the President of the United States for the second time, he’s never going to get the recognition that he wants—because he sucks, and everyone knows it. So what he’s going to do is, he’s going to use the presidency to build up his own legacy. He wants to put his name on things. You think Trump doesn’t want a monument in Washington named after him? I think he’d like to name the whole city after himself, honestly, and would if he could.

And it reminds me of a poem, one of my favorite poems, by Shelley, called “Ozymandias.” It’s a sonnet. It goes like this:

I met a traveler from an antique land who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things—the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal, these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

And that’s it. The decay of that colossal wreck. I can’t think of a more poetic descriptor of Donald Trump than that. He is a colossal wreck.

And he’s not going to win his damn awards. Nobody likes him. And he can commandeer stuff. He can take it over and award himself things all he wants. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s never going to fill the deep need that he has, the unscratchable itch he has, for people to actually think that he’s good, smart, artful, whatever it is.

It goes with the gold stuff in the Oval Office too. The whole place now looks like a bordello. It’s ridiculous—maybe appropriate, but ridiculous nonetheless, for the President of United States to be meeting with heads of state in a place that looks like it should smell of Lysol and cheap perfume.

So I think the words of the day are colossal wreck. And I hope that the Nobel Committee stands firm and does not award any of the Nobel prizes to this asshole. Which reminds me, and I’ll end with this, of another quote. And I can’t remember who said it. It was the filmmaker, I think, Luis Buñuel, who said, “Awards are like hemorrhoids. Sooner or later, every asshole gets one.”

And with that, have a great weekend everybody, if such things are possible, and remember: we shall prevail!

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TONIGHT! 8PM ET!

Join me and LB for a new episode of The Five 8, because: Alaska.

Photo credit: Rhett Miller. I preen with The Landry, because: I prevailed!

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