Cringe of the Week! Donald Trump dances on a stage for four minutes

Cringe: part of you wants to laugh but what you’re seeing is uncomfortable. It makes your skin crawl. It’s embarrassing, it’s awkward, and like a motorway pile-up, you can’t take your eyes off it, even though you want to. This is Cringe of The Week. 

That time Donald Trump danced awkwardly on a stage with Dr. Ben Carson while a man with long hair sang for them:

 

Now I don’t know about you, but for about seven months my consciousness has been terrorised by Donald Trump, plagued by Donald Trump and his speeches made entirely out of anonymous right-wing YouTube comments. The idea of a Donald Trump presidency, the kind of presidency where you pray time travellers would come back in time and take the Donald out before it even starts, fills me with The Fear. Trump has gone from a joke to a powerful, malevolent force, the id of backwards America unstoppably rampaging to an Abu Ghraib future of high walls and barbed wire.

So it’s nice to see that Donald is actually an awkward fucking bellend like everyone else.

How was watching him off-beat nod, off-beat foot tap for you? I’ll tell you how it was for me: it was excellent. What’s perfect is election campaigns are these highly scripted, elaborately doctored, forensically stage managed events and there is Donald on a stage he does not want to be on anymore, awkwardly swaying his chest, arms so limp and useless they may as well not exist, thinking:

If this goes on for another ten seconds I’m going to drop out and endorse Hillary. If this Owen Wilson look-alike sings “Oh Donald” with his below end of the pier entertainment voice one more time I’m going to kill him, myself and everyone else in the room. 

And can we stop and ask just what the fuck Dr. Ben Carson is doing? Dr. Ben Carson is dancing to a rhythm that only exists in his own head, clapping on the 1s and 3s. Dr. Ben Carson, a highly respected neurosurgeon and until recently a candidate for the most powerful, important office in the entire world – Dr. Ben Carson – proof that even the dumbest people can get very, very far.

But if we’re taking anything from this it’s the very start of the clip. We are taking the moment when Donald thinks he’s safely ticked off another routine butt-licking from some obsequious local Republican Party apparatchik when in fact, no, plot twist, he’s going back up the stage, internal monologue a stream of fuck this fuck this fuck this fuck this as he realises he’s going to have to awkwardly sway, awkwardly stretch that face with the complexion of a crumpled tenner into an awkward smile as he’s serenaded for all the world to see.

Thank you Donald, for making awkwardness great again.