A 78-year-old man says he hates a woman less than half his age. I am talking about former President Donald Trump, 78, and current pop superstar Taylor Swift, 34.
He said on his social media platform Truth Social "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!" He said it in all caps which means he must mean it. Also, he added the American punctuation obsession--the dreadfully superfluous exclamation point in case it was lost on you that he really HATES Taylor Swift. It seems as if it is not bad enough for him to hate someone who is younger than his daughter Ivanka, he has to do so in the upper case with the exclamation point.
Where is Sigmund Freud when you need him? There is clearly a deeper pathology here which is not really hate but profound attraction. But then who am I to psychoanalyze? I am just a hack.
Love in this case is spelled Hate. Imagine a scenario where Swift had endorsed him instead of Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump would have been pirouetting on cloud nine.
On a separate note, this election season continues to out-crazy itself. Trump's post was at 10.44 a.m. on September 15. Less than three hours later in a wholly unrelated development an apparent second assassination attempt against him was thwarted. This was less than three months after the first one.
If as a novelist I created a plot where a 78-year-old former US president says he HATES perhaps the world's most beloved pop superstar and then faces a second assassination attempt publishers would have thrown me out of their offices for being ridiculous. And yet, this is going on in real life.
I don't know what Swift might have felt when she heard about it. Perhaps she chuckled at the sophomoric moronity of it.
It is because the two people involved here are improbably famous that this becomes news. Otherwise, minus the fame, I wonder anyone would have paid attention a random 78-year-old saying he hates a random 34-year-old would have made any news at all. Fame is the fuel that fires up our flames.