Evelyn Waugh; "A tiny bit of a man..."
Time again to post this quote about Rex Mottram from Brideshead Revisited.
It presciently describes Trump to a T.
He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed: something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was whole.
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about the priesthood and how it ended up accumulating such deficient human beings. Deficient in so many ways: they cannot express the joy of life; they are often cruel people (how much crueler can you get than destroying peoples' health insurance and separating children from their parents?); people who prey upon others, always putting their own needs first.
I'm going to go back over that article and see if I can find a few quotes that are also applicable to Trump.
I enjoyed this quote; would like to have more discussions like this.
But even before Julia knows the real Rex, as readers we suspect that something’s up. Waugh is careful not to let us like this guy too much. First of all, he’s irritating. He’s that super-capable but obnoxiously-loud guy who will bail you out of jail in the middle of the night but "rejoice in his efficiency" while doing so. Even Charles feels that "in his kindest moments Rex display[s] a kind of hectoring zeal as if he were thrusting a vacuum cleaner on an unwilling housewife." Rex also seems to have no shame about carrying on an affair with the married socialite Brenda Champion, even while he’s wooing Julia. He also treats his potential marriage as a business arrangement. As Charles says of Rex, "He wanted a woman; he wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her cheap; that was what it amounted to."
And it’s all downhill after the engagement. Rex treats Julia’s religion without respect, converting without thought or effort and trying to replace sincerity with money ("All right then, I'll get an annulment. What does it cost? Who do I get it from? Has Father Mowbray got one?"
. We hear the tragic tale of their marriage only years after the wedding (which Julia calls a "gruesome affair" in itself). As she explains, Rex started up again with Brenda Champion only months after their honeymoon. Charles notes that his political welfare has gone downhill considerably, too, as he made some questionable friends, "flirt[ed] with communists and fascists," and was all around a "vaguely suspect" character.
But most disconcerting is Julia’s repeated claim that "Rex isn’t anybody at all. […] He just doesn’t exist." In a way, Rex suffers from the same lack of people skills that so define Julia’s brother Brideshead (see his "Character Analysis" for more). He has "the faculties of a man highly developed," as Julia says, but he doesn’t understand human emotions. This explains why he is able to treat proposing to Julia as a business arrangement, why he doesn’t care that their baby was born dead simply because she was a daughter and not a son, why he doesn’t understand why his wife is upset at his affair with Brenda, and why he seems to not really care that his wife is cheating on him. He’s not even angry with Charles for the affair! All he says is, "If I've been around too much, just tell me, I shan't mind." Even when Julia is readying to divorce him, Rex is concerned with politics, not love. With casual annoyance he tells Charles that "there's too much going on altogether at the moment […] and I've got a lot on my mind. […] If Julia insists on a divorce, I suppose she must have it. […] But she couldn't have chosen a worse time. Tell her to hang on a bit, Charles, there's a good fellow." It looks like Julia’s assessment is largely correct: "Rex isn’t a real person at all."
https://www.shmoop.com/brideshead-revisited/rex-mottram.html