lurid

Abbasi is addressing “capitalism, truth and justice,” but he is emphasizing how lurid the American Dream is.

That is, of course, until I walk outside, where I am reminded of my lifelong discomfort with the more lurid aspects of Halloween.

And yet, behind the lurid carnival barkery of Hulk Hogan and Rudy Giuliani and BeDazzled Alina Habba and the ghoulish malevolence of Stephen Miller and Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, perhaps the enduring message here was not the blatant “banality of evil,” or even that “the cruelty is the point,” but the ease with which the enshittification of democracy itself is the real endgame of the Trump campaign.

Flash forward 92-plus years to Donald Trump’s rally Sunday at New York’s Madison Square Garden, a bleak, lurid festival of racist hate and profane vituperation so vile that even fellow Republicans, who have turned a blind eye to Trump’s character for years, are distancing themselves from the event.

Davis stumbled on a text chain on Richardson’s phone showing him exchanging lurid texts with another woman, putting his by-the-by remarks about his uncontrollable tumescence into eye-opening context.