David Roth on what the Trump aesthetic tells us about the Trump:

As with most things about Trump, there’s not a lot to unpack here. Unrelenting artlessness has been Trump’s signature for as long as he has been a public figure, and that is something that cannot and will not change. The man himself cultivates and inhabits a world of luxury that’s frozen in the 1980s, and he’s spent most of his life doing the same things over and over again. They’re things that, as a friend once put it to me, are what a child thinks a rich person would do, like take a limo to McDonald’s or wear a suit to a baseball game.

Or have a living room FULL OF GOLDY STUFF. We learned that about him three years ago, while bracing ourselves for the start of the real horror.

Trump’s version of Citizen Kane’s Rosebud would not be a child’s sled—it would be a tufted settee that somehow has shoulder pads, or a photo of himself with two Cincinnati Bengals cheerleaders taken at Joe Piscopo’s 40th birthday party…

I love this guy. Love him.

Melania did another Xmas video.

Melania strides through the White House’s halls in an overcoat and high heels, unaccompanied but observed at a respectful distance by various staffers. Meanwhile, the sort of music that usually plays in television commercials under the words Toyota’s Year End Sales Event twinkles determinedly on the soundtrack. At the end of this year’s, she personally seasons some ornaments with fake snow…

Even though Melania is also a cipher whose relationship to her powerful husband has for years seemed tragicomically ceremonial, her Christmas video delivers an insight into a crucial mystery of the Trump aesthetic: Why is all this always so shitty? How is it possible for something so fancified to feel so repellent and cheap?…

The blank and baffling overstatement of it—the First Lady personally sifting plastic dandruff onto a spruce, as one does, the simultaneous clutter and emptiness, the combination of voluminousness and absence—might be poignant under other circumstances. There’s no fun in it, of course, because Trump and his family are not people who are into fun. What’s spooky about it goes beyond Melania’s personal uncanniness or Trump’s world-historic tastelessness or the built-in stiltedness of White House ritual. The pure anhedonic cheerlessness of it all points back to a deeper psychic deficit: an inability to understand what any of this might even be for, if not to spite or defeat someone else. Of course there’s too much of it. They don’t know when to stop—they never have known when to stop, they do not know how to stop—because they have never really understood why they got started in the first place.

I keep calling him empty; I think Roth is talking about the same thing. Trump is the emptiest person I’ve ever seen. He all but rattles.