Getting to the Bottom of Trump’s Recent Antics

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

 

The season of Republican discontent draws near. The size of the approaching Democratic swell is difficult to fully project, but it looks likely to swamp large parts of the Midwest. To weave metaphors: Republicans are double-checking the filters on their gas masks as they prepare to sink into the political morass and fight two years of bitter political trench warfare behind their leader Donald Trump. I’m told the Battle of Passchendaele was legendarily muddy; prepare for its legislative equivalent.

 

Which is not to say that Donald Trump seems particularly focused on pushing the GOP over the top, even as he’s out campaigning, invoking his own name and fortunes. Trump has no need for a Republican Congress save as a shield from investigation and impeachment; his second term has been quasi-imperial in its ideology and public presentation. With that imperial mindset comes imperial decadence — at least Trump’s farcical, pantomime-horse imitation of it. So two nights ago, instead of fiddling while Ohio burned, Trump took the time to dash off a 1,300-word Truth Social rant about the real issue troubling undecided voters: the lack of respect the president gets from Bill Maher.

 

The other day he interrupted a Michigan rally for Mike Rogers to denounce Norway as a “s***house country” whose immigrants were no longer welcome in America — not for some entirely understandable reason like the creation of lutefisk, but rather “because I didn’t get the Nobel Prize.” (Those who insist that he’s only kidding are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of “kidding on the square.”)

 

But most of all, our commander in chief has made it a point to spend these last few weeks before the election staking out a daringly forward ideological position as a proud assman. I’m sorry to have to be so vulgar, dear readers, but these are pretty much Trump’s own words, so I can hardly be faulted for covering the doings of the Leader of the Free World.

 

And anyway, at some point even Bill Buckley’s august institution must take note of Donald Trump’s increasingly Pacino-like obsession with the human posterior. Helen Lewis, who beat us to the punch over at The Atlantic, clearly had a ball discussing the odd but undeniable truth: Trump has begun riffing more and more on the physical attractiveness and virility of the men surrounding him, in ways that end up sounding rather remarkably “camp.” (By his own account, he assessed Ohio Senator Jon Husted thus: “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline.”) He is an equal opportunity offender: In Michigan on Sunday, he saluted supporter Nicki Minaj: “By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj. That’s hard to miss. Stand up. That’s hard to miss.”

 

What in God’s name is going on here? The election is a week away, voters are concerned about the economy, angry about the price of gas, and worried about world war, and somewhere along the way Trump’s closing argument turned into “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” Why such weird vulgarity? Why such blatantly sexualized disrespect for the dignity of the co-author of the hit single “Anaconda”?

 

For one obvious reason: It gets headlines, and in Trump’s reptile brain, self-generated headlines are always good. Furthermore, Trump is correct that the crowds eat up his antics, and so he responds exactly as a showman would to an appreciative audience. The new material is killing, so why stow it?

 

But on another level, Trump is yet again giving away too much about himself. This pattern of comments is by no means unique to Trump; rather, to anyone with enough life experience, it is immediately recognizable as a thinly sublimated old man’s lament. Trump has long flattered himself — in both his self-fashioned public iconography and endless self-praise — as the quintessence of male power and virility in all fields: business, entertainment, and now politics. And now it’s coming to an end.

 

His obsession with youthful virility — especially its physical aspects — isn’t veiled homoeroticism so much as it is a redirected expression of his own regret at his advancing age. Recall that Trump’s true lodestar has always been his reflection: He sees the chiseled jaws and bottle blondes of his administration as an echo of his own faded youth, and wishes to be surrounded and comforted by exemplars of comeliness and vigor in his final years, just as Moammar Qaddafi once insisted on a bodyguard of statuesque supermodels to remind the people of his manliness. I have long contended that Trump is the most psychologically transparent president we have ever known, and as he advances into dotage his insecurities have begun to show in ever greater sharpness. It would almost be poignant, were it not for the fact that I expect the worst after he is publicly rejected at the ballot box.

 

Sibling Rivalry of the Week

 

One imagines the Sununu clan of New Hampshire to be a fairly thick-skinned bunch, given that the family profession is Republican electoral politics. Patriarch John H. was governor during the Reagan era and later George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, mother Nancy was once chair of the state GOP, and the two sons are veteran politicians in the state. Younger son Chris stepped down after four successful terms as governor, handing the job over to Kelly Ayotte, the only person in these paragraphs not related to everyone else here by either marriage or blood.

 

And then there’s older son John E., once a senator during the younger Bush’s administration, now seeking a return to the office from which he was bounced in 2008 by Jeanne Shaheen. It’s a forbiddingly tough race, for reasons I’ve already addressed at the Carnival — right candidate, wrong time — and it only gets harder when your younger brother is there to dunk on you. Chris — who supports his older brother, obviously, but is not actively campaigning with him — was asked by CNN the other day whether he thought John’s yard signs and advertisements were deceptively emphasizing their shared last name, to capitalize on Chris’s popularity as governor.

 

And Chris rattled off a response to remember, one that could only come from brothers long accustomed to hazing one another: “Look, if people thought they were voting for me, my brother would be up by 30 points. Come on.”

 

Forget about politics for a moment: That, right there, is a classic younger brother move, and I speak as an authority on this subject, having spent my entire life as one.