"It makes a weird kind of sense that 'The Apprentice' is arriving in theaters Friday, a week after 'Joker: Folie à Deux.'"

"Both movies are set in New York in the 1970s and/or ’80s. Both are about larger-than-life antiheroes perceived as monsters by many and lionized by others. And both seem perversely designed to disappoint audiences on either side of the aisle...."

Wrote Ty Burr, in "Trump biopic ‘The Apprentice’ avoids taking sides. Good luck with that. Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong star as the young Don and his soulless mentor, Roy Cohn" (WaPo)(published last Tuesday).

There may be no hidden self in Donald Trump. What we see is what we get. Because the film’s only storyline is that the man became the monster (or, for some, the messiah) he seemed destined to be, there’s no dramatic tension to push the movie forward. For any sense of tragedy, there would have to be at least a glimmer of self-knowledge, and the film’s Trump — just like, one suspects, the actual man — remains profoundly incurious about himself or anything outside himself....

That doesn’t stop Stan’s Trump from slowly amassing bits of behavior and an arsenal of gestures over the course of “The Apprentice,” until he’s suddenly there in the fullness of his muchness — the reviled, adored, hollow man of our moment.... ...Trump subtly metastasizes into something both bigger and more superficial — a man losing himself to self-caricature. A pursed lip, a sidelong glance, a flashed thumb’s-up and always — always — attention to the mane of hair. Then he’s slouching to Washington to be born.

Sorry, I'm taking the exit ramp marked "Slouching." We ought to recognize the connection to the the William Butler Yeat's poem "The Second Coming." The poem ends "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" It's slouching towards, not slouching to, as the Washington Post critic has it. And the Joan Didion title "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is quite familiar. But "slouching towards" has become a cliché that has outrun familiarity with Yeats.

Why does "slouching toward [place name]" have such legs? 

Fortunately, I subscribe to The Paris Review and can read "No Slouch" by Nick Tabor (from 2015 (the verge of the Trump era!)):

A recent Russia Today headline suggests that Europe is “slouching towards anxiety and war.” According to... Robert Bork... the United States is Slouching Towards Gomorrah. A new book by W. C. Harris, an English professor, claims we’re Slouching Towards Gaytheism. A casual reader might wonder why the nations of the world have such terrible posture.....

The only thing not doing any slouching these days is the “rough beast” in W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”... [It] isn’t deteriorating or dying in its slouching, as the many references to the phrase would have you believe; rather, it slouches in steady, dedicated progress toward a goal. It’s actually a terrifying sight: the poem’s narrator intuits that the beast is coming to wreak some untold havoc. (At least one blog got this subtlety right in a headline about the 2012 election cycle: “Romney slouching toward GOP nomination.”)...

But... Yeats’s lines work outside their context because the word pairings are brilliant in and of themselves.... We’d expect the rough beast to “plod,” like a limping monster in a horror movie or the killer in No Country for Old Men (which itself, of course, takes its title from another of Yeats’s lines, in “Sailing to Byzantium”). But plodding is a conscious action; slouching is not. We can’t even tell whether the beast has a will of its own. The verb heightens the mystery and dread.

Even if no one reads poetry anymore, “The Second Coming” is proof that a perfect poem can still go viral in a distinctly predigital way: that it’s become a part of the culture’s water supply. Slouchy though they may be, the misapplications amount to a tribute.

Was Ty Burr getting Yeats right when he wrote that Trump was "slouching to Washington to be born"? Here's where the movie ends (to quote Wikipedia (unlike some people, I cite and use quotation marks when I quote Wikipedia)):

Trump has liposuction and scalp-reduction surgery, and tells the ghostwriter of his biography, The Art of the Deal, Cohn's three rules, which Trump has adopted. Trump muses about becoming President, talks about the genetic superiority of winners, and expatiates about his own greatness while envisioning the New York skyline.

I think Trump moves from that point "in steady, dedicated progress toward a goal," to use Tabor's words, which would mean the Washington Post critic got it right. Or did he just mindlessly move toward the presidency? In Burr's opinion? In yours?

By the way, I love Tabor's last line: "Slouchy though they may be, the misapplications amount to a tribute."

I looked "slouchy" up in the OED and was pleased to see it goes back to the 17th century, to a translation of the works of Rabelais — and I have a "Rabelais" tag! — "What meaneth this... wagging of her slouchy Chaps?"

"Chaps" is the same as "chops." It means mouth — in the contemptuous way that "wagging" and "slouchy" make obvious. You may feel free to say "What meaneth this wagging of her slouchy Chaps?" when what you meaneth is What on earth is that woman saying? or some such thing.

What the hell is this woman blogging? The movie came out last week, the Paris Review article is nearly a decade old, Trump had his scalp surgery in 1990, Yates's poem is more than a century old, and Rabelais died in the 1500s. Meanwhile, it's precisely 3 weeks to Election Day, and, in the betting odds, Donald Trump is almost up to 11.