We have 20 mins until the terrible fuckopotamus ascends to the dais for his #MtRushmore pep rally.

Let’s buckle in.

Per my earlier posts, I have now consumed a bag of vodka.

I am also wearing a child’s bicycle helmet to protect from the concussive effects of a Trump speech.
1

I will be following tonight’s cavalcade of buffoonery on Fox News.

I will be accompanied by as many as six Lagunitas IPAs.

I have done various calisthenics and am as prepared as one can be for this assault on grammar and decency.

2/

Tonight’s event is ostensibly an Independence Day celebration at the foot of Mt. Rushmore.

In reality, it is a garish public masturbation by America’s fragile eggshell president.

3/

Oh, and there will be fireworks.

Now, bear in mind, Mt. Rushmore sits on the eastern flank of a vast wilderness known as the Black Hills.

In other words, a forest. Which has not been raked. And tends to catch fire.

Shooting incendiary devices into a tinder box. Great idea.

4/

Fun-fact:

The third largest forest fire in South Dakota history, the Logan Lake Fire, tore through 54,000 acres of forest only 10 miles north of Mt. Rushmore.

Two years ago.

Only an idiot would host fireworks there.

5/

Trump is, of course, a profound idiot. A towering dunce.

A man who repels knowledge like a Gortex jacket of stupidity.

The man can not grasp that trees grow on mountains... or in forests... or in South Dakota.

This may end badly.

6/

I have had Fox News on for 10 minutes. However much you may think FN is brainwashing, it is vastly worse.

It is like North Korean state television. Truly.

Whoever this asshat is sitting in for Laura Ingraham, he has gone on a 10-minute stemwinder of straight racism.

7/

One bag of vodka was not enough.

I am questioning all of my life choices.

8/

Okay, I am going to try to tune out whatever hot mess of white supremacist horseshit is occurring on screen and add some more context for tonight's gathering.

Mt. Rushmore was carved by a KKK-sympathizer on unceded Lakota land.

It's basically a monument to trespassing.

9/

Here we go... pray for me. I am already pre-miserable.

Commander Babyfingers and Melania now take to the stage.

Trump inexplicably saluting at nothing in particular as the national anthem plays.

The man understands nothing. He is a clay pot filled only with ignorance.

10/

To Trump, this setting is what passes as patriotism.

An oversized set of busts randomly carved in a cliff face absent any logical reason for that place or those presidents.

This is a simpleton's idea of majesty.

A small man impressed by scale.

11/

The Mt. Rushmore amphitheater has allegedly disbursed 7,500 tickets for tonight.

Yet, a full house at a prior event had a bit closer to 4,000 attendees.

So, either Trump's camp is lying or they're packing in people like sardines during a pandemic.

12/

I am already one Lagunitas down.

My soul is tearing at the fabric of my earthly form irate at what it is being forced to witness.

This better start soon. I am dying inside.

13/

While I go to get a refreshment, let me subtly drop in a link to my beer fund.

If you are inclined to fill my glass, I'll love you for at least 4-6 weeks. Your kindness alone is why I may again emerge from the darkness of this soul-crushing torment.
https://ko-fi.com/hoarsewhisperer 

14/

Okay, I'm back.

As I walked out of the room, a man in an American flag shirt was saying "We have a tremendous amount of explosives up there..."

And as I walked back in, he was saying "and it is all environmentally friendly."

I kid you not. Dry forest. Explosives. Very green.

And now some woman whose name I would have already scrubbed from my brain by brute force if I had caught it just said:

"35 minutes of sunlight deactivates the virus."

I swear to fucking god, this is Dante's inferno. This is the crucible of the damned.

Inexplicably, Fox News just cut to the South Dakota Governor who handed it off to the Secretary of Interior before Fox cut back to the studio to interview some dude in a straw hat with a Scottish accent on a beach in L.A. complaining about the mayor.

This channel is madness.

I did not make that up.

I swear that just happened.

I didn't even have a chance to post a picture of SD Gov Kristi Noem before Fox kicked it to some angry Scotsman on a beach in Santa Monica super mad at L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti.

This channel kickboxes the brain. It pummels.

Okay, now some alleged actor named Robert Davi is ranting about the craziest shit I have ever heard.

Someone needs to find this segment.

Seriously, this guy is weapons grade crazy. He just rolled straight from "the negroes" to NYC Mayor De Blasio to statues in... Santa Monica.

Guys, someone find that segment please.

That dude made Rudy Giuliani sound like Winston Churchill.

That was... my lord, I had only three beers last time... I have six this time. How can that not be enough? It is not going to be enough.

I am not a quitter. But, jeez.

Okaaaaay...

The great and terrible Fuckopotamus has now ambled out onto the stage.

Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" is playing.

I hate that song. It is aural waterboarding. Cloying and saccharine. It is pandering dreck. Vomitous faux patriotism.

Trump now speaking.

I am two beers down.

Trump looks slightly less orange than usual. He looks more like a well cooked turkey than a pumpkin pie.

Still very Thanksgiving-esque... just a main course rather than a dessert.

Trump now awkwardly reading off the names of the presidents on Mt. Rushmore.

Rolls straight into some weird-ass authoritarian shit about how he will never allow Mt. Rushmore to be descrated.

Dude, it's in South Dakota. Ain't nobody caravaning to the Black Hills for that.

Trump is doing his usual stilted, uncomfortable reading off the teleprompter.

He is amazingly bad at it. As soon as he looks away, he loses the script.

"We will allow... no one... to take away... ever."

I'm sorry, sir. I don't speak gibberish.

Trump now launching into some vaguely Antifa rant.

This is almost comical. The crowd has no idea what the hell he is talking about so they keep missing the cues.

He had to pause to give them time to realize they were supposed to boo there.

Guys, this is... really comically bad

"To-tal-it-tar-i-tar-i...tar-i...-a...nism."

Whatever he just spit out had about 247 syllables and was very much not a word.

Dude, stick to "bigly" and "huge". Two syllables is pushing your luck.

Okay, I have now homed in on what is going wrong here tonight...

If you read my live-tweet of Trump's Tulsa debacle, the summary at the end hit on how Trump rally's are just quaint throwbacks now. Lynyrd Skynyrd shows at the county fair.

Play the hits. Free Bird encore. Done.

Tonight, Trump is very badly and awkwardly reading a new script nearly entirely off the teleprompter.

He is butchering the lines in a clumsy, slurring cascade of mispronunciations and verbal gaffes.

He is one of the worst deliverers of prepared remarks to ever hold the office.

He has no idea where to emphasize and enunciate.

It is a droning prattle.

It is supposed to be a stirring speech and instead it sounds about as exciting as the announcements on an airport monorail.

Next stop: Terminal C.

And he hasn't wandered off speech once.

They must have shoved a fistful of Xanax into his hot dog.

He seems to have thought this speech was going to be soaring and presidential. A State Speech.

Guys, he sounds half asleep.

I have watched many of these. This is soporific.

"scholars-esss-esss'

That's, like, the super plural of scholars. A lot of scholars.

I am on to my 3rd Lagunitas IPA.

I am very pleased with my decision to both drink a bag of vodka and purchase a six-pack of beer.

That was wise. I am not without learnings from my prior sojourns into this dark sulfuric pit of despair.

Trump is so terrible at reading from the prompter that it is all just a monotonous drone.

He has all the inflection of a GPS voice. "In 100 feet, turn left."

The crowd has no idea when they're supposed to clap.

This was supposed to be an incendiary speech. The Trump Team billed this as a bold, aggressive shot across the bow by the Law and Order President.

The guy sounds about as fiery as the teacher in Ferris Buehler... "D-O-O economics... Anyone... anyone... Voodoo economics."

Trump trying to rev it up with some inflection.

2nd amendment, American flag, we only kneel to almighty God, yadda yadda.

Crowd trying to get into it but it just isn't there. Applause dies the second the line ends.

This feels like a shitty sitcom with a bored studio audience.

Trump throwing out the bait... tearing down our heritage... statues... blah blah blah.

The crowd has no idea what the fuck he's talking about though and only knows to clap when he awkwardly shuts his gaping cakehole and waits for applause.

And, I mean no disrespect to the good people of South Dakota but the small slice of the SD pop that has shown up tonight has proven itself capable of only one chant - U.S.A - and yet, they can't get in synch for even that.

It's like row-row-row-your boat in the round.

This is by far the worst Trump speech I have ever watched.

It is abjectly terrible.

I worked with a person once who would turn his back to the audience and mumble toward the screen.

He was JFK compared to Trump tonight.

Notable in this vast terribleness: Trump is reading entirely off the prompter. No riffing at all.

Wild that his team made a big deal of tonight's speech given that he is about as compelling as a subway station announcer when reading off the prompter.

"I am announcing the creation of a new monument to the giants of our past."

Trump just sort of vaguely announced that he is allegedly creating some new park with statues of American heroes.

I have no idea what that was. That was supposed to be a big payoff. The moneyline.

His team undoubtedly cooked up some stunt they absolutely believed was genius.

"They're tearing down statues. OMG, let's BUILD statues."

These are fucking children. Prattling, oppositional toddlers.

This feels like a Kushner deluxe. Simplistic, pandering stupidity.

And with that, Trump wraps it up.

Man, that was a zero. On a scale of one to ten, that was a freaking zero.

The delivery was shit. It was as dynamic as an elevator narration. Next stop: womenswear

It wasn't the script. Reagan would have animated that hateful dreck. It was him.

The speech could have been soaring in at least a terrible sort of way. It could have been jingoistic and faux-patriotic in a way that works, sadly, like a damn charm.

Instead, it was a drowsy old man's sleepwalk through words read off of plastic squares left and right of center.

That was terrible.

I am just going to lay this down here and then go outside and stare up at the night sky to cleanse my brain:

This presidency is over. It is finished.

Trump is empty.

His old shtick is over. He has no new shtick.

He is beaten. It's over.

Trump is done. He is finished. It is over.

His old sway, it is never coming back.

He has deteriorated in his abilities AND he is facing a moment beyond even his old abilities.

Guys, he is done.

Finished.

Over.

Thanks for riding along... and thanks for any kind souls who threw a beer in my jar.

The lead up on Fox News was horrifying. I am flat-out scarred from that.

The bag of vodka helped...

...and with that, we adjourn.