Arnold Böcklin, The Plague

I hesitate to admit it, but searching for telltale signs of Donald Trump’s imminent demise, I squandered way too much time last weekend following threads on X as I obsessively pored over grainy telephoto shots and videos of that shambling wreck of a human being.  

Oh, yay, his mouth is drooping, look his foot’s dragging, that’s hand’s bruised, his eyes unfocused, his speech slurred––unmistakable signs of life’s impending cessation! C’mon, Grim Reaper, get it on! Deport the bastard to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns!

But alas and alack, on Tuesday Trump reappeared in his cartoon character’s red, white, and blue outfit flanked by toadies to announce that he’s transferring his sci-fi-ish Space Command from Colorado to Alabama because Colorado allows mail-in voting.

Why, you may wonder, would a lapsed Buddhist like I-and-I misdirect his karmic energy in wishing that a fellow human would cast off his mortal coil?

My answer is “duh.”  Wouldn’t it have been peachy keen if Hitler had croaked before he implemented the Holocaust?^[1]

Trump is evil.  Yesterday, for example, wasting tax payer money and Defense Department jet fuel, he ordered a flyover to drown out the voices of ten of Epstein’s victims as they pleaded for Congress to expose the names of pedophiles to help appease the horrible wrongs they have suffered.  

Trump’s flyover demonstrated peak bully behavior.  Here’s an adjudicated rapist who has bragged that his celebrity status allows him to “grab pussies” and to enter beauty pageant dressing rooms to ogle teenaged contestants, etc., etc., etc. to lord his testosteronic power over the powerless.

Then immediately, after the press conference, he called the Epstein affair “a Democratic hoax.”

Oh, and the cowardice of the Republican Congress who have jilted the Founding Fathers for this putrid attention whore so they can cling to their power and its accompanying perks.

Perhaps these self-proclaimed Christians, these hollow men, like Mike Johnson, should pause for a moment from thumping their Bibles and open them to Mark 8:36:

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Again, alas and alack.

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^[1] By the way, the Smithsonian has now closed an exhibit that showed how the US turned away Jewish refugees during WW2.