Golden Idol, Empty Soul: Trump’s Real-Time Failure of Humanity

Cameras rolled, a man fell, and the self-anointed savior of America didn’t even blink — proving you can gild rot, but it still stinks.

Cliff Schecter

and

Blue Amp

Nov 09, 2025

✨✨Our Victory Celebration Sale Ends At Midnight!✨✨

In nearly 250 years of the American experiment, the United States has endured a bevy of political tyrants, scoundrels, and traitors, from Benedict Arnold to Jefferson Davis to Joseph McCarthy.

Yet, even among this rogue’s gallery of starters on Satan’s softball team, Donald Trump has found a way to stand out—and stand back and stand by. Chiefly, it is through his absolute disregard for the life or health of every other human being on Earth, and perhaps especially those in close proximity to him.

Trump is so content in his obliviousness to all hominids not named Donald Trump that last week, during his little look-at-me press conference on Big Pharma’s new discount for weight-loss drugs, the man even got in some quality shut-eye.

While slumped in, as Trent Reznor called it, his “liar’s chair.”

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar’s chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair

Johnny Cash (version) “Hurt”

Yet, it’s Trump’s malignant narcissism, with a side of sociopathy, that’s what really shone through. There is no sense of duty, no honor, no morality or character. Just needy, petty, constant spasms of self-pity unworthy of a playground squabble, much less the Oval Office.

But seemingly nobody ever told this to Donald J. Trump. So when he was done with his doze—one assumes in service of resting his girlish figure and stumpy, dwarfish digits—he unlatched his large, dumbfounded eyes to see an actual live press event still transpiring around him.

Just as suddenly, Novo Nordisk representative Gordon Findlay, one of the guest speakers there to hail his company’s weight-loss drugs, or perhaps Caesar, collapsed. Everyone in the room immediately rushed towards him to make sure he was ok.

Everyone except two people present, that is.

One, RFK Jr., rushed out like he’d just been told there was a two-for-one Ivermectin sale being provided by his former heroine dealer. And, look, if there’s one person who truly needs a de-wormer, as we know from his own tales of his former cranial bunkmate, it’s that guy.

The second nonplussed numb nuts in the room, who showed the same kinda interest in Findlay’s well-being as Nick Fuentes would if handed the Talmud, was Trump.

The man barely changed expression.

A blank look blanketed that carrot-cake visage that only changed long enough for him to show perturbance at the audacity of this fainter to step on his big moment. He may have glanced for 0.2 seconds in Findlay’s direction. Then Trump promptly readjusted that large watermelon resting on his shoulders in the exact opposite direction.

The cameras, of course, kept rolling. And still Trump couldn’t be bothered to show the slightest affectation, profess the mildest pretense he possessed an ounce of empathy or a care in the world whether Findlay would spend another minute on our planet.

✨✨Our Victory Celebration Sale Ends At Midnight!✨✨

Trump didn’t see a human in crisis; he saw a footnote in “Trump Today” coverage. And who the hell was this guy to steal all the TV attention from President Donald J. Trump of Celebrity Apprentice?

Anyhow, Trump had more important things to vibe on, like subsequent opportunities to commit war crimes in international waters. Or whatever he might choose to have air-dropped into his two Wendy’s $5 Biggie Bags for dinner after the mess behind him was removed.

It’s kind of amazing that even grifty, sh*ty supplement hawker, Dr. Oz, reacted quickly in an attempt to assist Findlay (though, 50-50 whether he ransacked his pockets for loose change).

But not Trump.

Trump’s indifference was as subtle as walking into Stephen Miller’s bedroom to catch him sleeping while hanging from the ceiling. It had all the hallmarks of the diagnosis by over 200 health professionals that he’s a malignant narcissist.

You can’t argue that Trump’s brand didn’t meet the moment. He delivered spectacle over substance. Image over empathy. It was quite up for the challenge.

Hell, I half expected him to grab a microphone a la Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. Say in a perfect St. Petersburg dialect, mirrored during nightly Zoom lessons with Putin, “if he dies, he dies.”

His reaction to Findlay was the best metaphor possible for all we’ve seen of Trump’s presidency and personality, all the consequences of electing pure immorality in gaseous and fluid form.

Yes, we granted almost unlimited power to the single worst human in America, someone you wouldn’t let watch your new iPhone, much less 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

That’s how you end up with a human sweat-gland as President who defies a court to purposely try and starve over 40 million hungry Americans—including over 20 million children.

And it’s not that he doesn’t have the funds, which one would be forgiven for postulating, as Trump runs our government with the same hard-nosed planning and reality-based budgeting that highlighted his tenure at The Trump Taj Mahal.

Again: He has the funds. He has been ordered by a judge to disperse them. But the self-loathing lummox with the leisure suit chic wants to starve people.

So he responded to the judge’s order by doubling down on withholding aid. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a food-stamp lifeline for millions, is still being deliberately delayed and partially unfunded.

But, not one to pass up a fun time while depriving tens of millions of nutrition, while starving Americans, he threw himself a Great Gatsby party. Yes, a book whose main characters were described in this manner:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made

Because this is our dead-eyed, Dusky Shark President. A foul, necrotic wench who should be indicted again, this time for blowing irony’s head off with a shotgun. The type of man who’s vexed by someone keeling over in his office, showing all the compassion of a hyena with its leg caught in a trap. Or an Elon Musk.

A human goiter who surrounds himself with similarly sick individuals who shoot puppies in the face, and whose moms write them un-fan mail about how they allegedly abuse women.

And a guy who covers everything with gold because he thinks it will somehow imbue him with importance and elite status. And who uses food funds to build a Second Estate ballroom. “His top priority,” per his twenty-something mouthpiece married to a Social Security recipient.

The office of the presidency now resembles the worst after-party you skipped because you had to work in the morning. Walls turned golden, moldings fattened, sign slapped beside the “Oval Office” label so no one misses the bling, as Americans watch their food and health care vanish, their workers deported and their jobs disappear.

There’s so much gold-generated gaudiness in the Oval Office that, if Goldfinger himself wandered in and looked around, he’d pause, tilt his head, and mutter: “What the f*k is wrong with this guy?”

At the end of the day, this isn’t just a “bad look” moment—it’s the crystallization of a presidency more preoccupied with the appearance of power than the exercise of responsibility.

Yet, a president who watches a man collapse and is bemused, then disgusted, is the perfect wretch to run the rancid Republican Party and its MAGA movement. A Cult of Cruelty that’s brought our teetering democracy to the edge.

One that claims to be anti-trans, but has somehow transitioned Jesus Christ into Ayn Rand.

Americans are going hungry, and a classless jack-in-the-box is gilding everything. A narcissistic dunce whose sociopathic shrug in the White House is the best single moment to explain everything that’s wrong with our rotting republic.

There must be Romans peering across the ocean, a knowing look in their eyes. They’re surrounded by the remnants of their own Trump Era that tossed their great experiment into the large compost heap of history.

Unless we move forward with a boldness and determination they lacked two millennia ago, they know what’s coming.