Back in April, Glenn Beck thought it would be hilarious if he and his radio co-hosts smeared crushed-up Cheetos all over their faces in an attempt to mock Donald Trump. And since Beck runs his own network where, apparently, nobody was willing to tell him that that was a terrible idea, he went ahead and did it:
Six months later, in a new profile in Rolling Stone, Beck has admitted that, in retrospect, this was probably not a good idea because the stunt “wasn’t funny” and, in fact, “it sucked”:
If his world is about to collapse around him, however, you sure wouldn’t know it by how he appears today. His eyes are startlingly blue and clear, and, as usual, they seem swollen with sincerity; his beige trousers are primly pressed and creased; his forehead is more lightly ruffled with concerns than deeply corrugated; withal, he’s possessed of a kindly, grandfatherly, Mr. Rogers-like quality that’s wrapped around him like a goose-down quilt, which during his Fox years made even his more loopy if not insane comments seem almost reasonable, enabling him to become one of the Tea Party’s top voices and to have, in 2010, a Gallup poll reveal that Americans admired him more than they did the pope.
With those days well past, he uncrosses his legs and leans forward. Worst-case scenario, he says, here’s how his demise after the election might come to pass.
“I could see us going into a greater depression,” he says, “a collapse of the Western economy, chaos, shootings on the street from Islamic terrorism, shortages, bank failures, and in that kind of situation, as any strongman knows, the first thing you have to do is get a hold of the media. So, how do you think that ends for someone like me, because I am not shutting up?”
He’s told his kids, jokingly, he says, that no matter who the new president is, they shouldn’t be surprised if their dad winds up behind bars, but it’s not Hillary he’s worried about in this regard so much as it is Trump.
“Hillary is big-government, fundamentally unable to tell the truth and, I mean, she’s just criminal, but Donald is a pathological liar, possibly a sociopath, and a vengeful, bitter man if he feels he’s been betrayed at all.” Or slighted in any way, which puts Beck right in the crosshairs. He has equated Trump with Mussolini and Hitler. Earlier this year, to simulate Trump’s grotesque golden skin, he donned a pair of swim goggles and plopped his face into a bowl of ground-up Cheetos, which led to universal ridicule, much concern, facetious and otherwise, about his mental health, and to him saying today, “Oh, my gosh, the biggest mistake I’ve made in five years. It just wasn’t funny. Wow. It sucked.”
Beck thinks this was “the biggest mistake he’s made in the last five years? Has he forgotten the hour long special he ran at the end of 2014 in which 90-year-old Beck reminisced about the collapse of the entire world from the year 2054?
