Trump

Hurry Up, Grim Reaper, Do Your Blankety-Blank Job, Dammit!

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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.

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

A Confederacy of Doofuses

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In the first quarter of the 21st Century, there was an imperial president so exceedingly fond of adulation that he appointed his cabinet officials based, not on experience and competence, but on their television chops and their talent for groveling and abasing themselves. This president cared nothing about the welfare of US citizens who weren’t millionaires but rather spent his days playing golf or monitoring his presence on television and social media.  

For example, in the wee hours Wednesday last, as the Russian Ukrainian war raged and disease and starvation racked Gaza, the imperial president complained on his favorite social media platform that “There is a sick rumor going around that Fake News NBC extended the contract of one of the least talented Late Night television hosts out there, Seth Meyers [. . .] [who] has no Ratings, Talent, or Intelligence, and the Personality of an insecure child. So, why would Fake News NBC extend this dope’s contract. I don’t know, but I’ll definitely be finding out!!!”

So, he spent most of his days bragging about himself or castigating his enemies on his favorite platform, Truth Social, an Orwellian name if there ever was one! Unlike most presidents, who might devote their time in office analyzing budgets or conferring with world leaders, the imperial president squandered almost all of his time on Truth Social making preposterous claims like he’d reduce drug prices by 14,000%.  Otherwise, when not posting on social media, at great expense to US taxpayers, he rode around golf courses, hopping on and off of carts, taking mulligan after mulligan.

But what the imperial president really loved the most were cabinet meetings where his obsequious department heads heaped upon him praise so hyperbolic that it might very well cause Kim Jong-un’s plump cheeks to blush.

For example, at the most recent cabinet meeting, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told the imperial president, referring to a three-story banner of his visage hanging from the facade of the Labor Department. “Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker.”

The Imperial President’s Big Beautiful Face

Not to be undone, the imperial president’s special envoy to the Middle East and Russia, Steve Witkoff, gushed, “There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about.”

Wow, the only thing that Witkoff wishes for isn’t world peace or a cure for cancer but that the imperial president, who famously fomented a riot on 6 January 2021, receives a prize for peace.

And although these cabinet ministers were every adept at praising their leader, they were also very inept at running their agencies. The Pentagon and the CDC were both in shambles, and many of the imperial president’s subjects were growing increasingly unhappy as farm workers were deported, crops rotted in the fields, and grocery prices continued to rise.

To make matters worse, the imperial president was not only mentally unwell, but he also suffered physical ailments.  His “big, beautiful face” was in fact, despite the inch-thick orange make-up he wore, puffy and haggard, his ankles grotesquely swollen, and his hands bruised from IV punctures.  If Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer were more honest, she might have very well called him “a fat, decrepit fuck.”

Many of his subjects speculated that the imperial president was suffering from dementia as well, as he obsessed about non-existent gigantic water faucets and, like Don Quixote himself, tilted at windmills. Increasingly, his observations devolved into rambles so disjointed that the reporters covering the president put their fingers in their ears so they wouldn’t have to quote him.

Although the president continues to rule, it seems that his days may be numbered, which is especially bad news for him because he can’t sue or denigrate Death, which is his favorite way of dealing with adversaries. 

After the imperial president’s demise, what will become of his cabinet members is anyone’s guess. 

Neo Nazi Swag

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In 1983, before we had children, Judy Birdsong and I spent two months galivanting around Europe.  We prebooked only three hotels – one in London, one in Paris, and one in Athens.  In between these destinations, we idly roamed. We climbed white cliffs in Dover, spent a week in Arles as a base camp for excursions to Nice and Cannes, rode a sea-tossed vomit-splashed boat to Mykonos, etc.

On the trip back to Hamburg, where we departed for home, we hung out in Munich for a couple of days and made a day trip to Dachau where we toured the infamous concentration camp. It was an appropriately gray day with leaden clouds misting rain.  On the train, a recording disconcertingly announced, “Next stop, concentration camp.”

I remember that the outdoor spaces of the barbed-wire enclosure featured gravel that crunched beneath our shoes.  We walked through the sleeping quarters with their raw claustrophobic wooden bunks. I also remember an American soldier yanking his four year old son by the arm and swatting him on his butt for some misdeed.

I thought to myself, “Man, I can’t believe he did that here in all places – a concentration camp.”

Of course, back then I never dreamed that my native country forty years later would be constructing concentration camps to imprison minorities.

We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

WB Yeats “Nineteen-Hundred-and-Nineteen”

Not only are we building concentration camps, but the President and his lackies are touting them, paying official visits, sadistically branding them. This one’s called Alligator Alcatraz.

The Republican Party of Florida is obscenely selling  Alligator Alcatraz merch.  

No doubt the Evangelicals are ecstatic, babbling in tongues praises to the Almighty.

Again, Yeats:

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.

Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.

Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked—and where are they?

Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.

Little Baby Blues: 1953 Edition

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Little Baby Blues: 1953 Edition

On 14 December 1952, a rare snowy day in Summerville, South Carolina, Dr. Howard Snyder, aided and abbeted by forceps, yanked me from my mother’s womb into a world of relative woe.  The procedure flattened my head, which resulted in cephalohematoma, a condition in which blood pools under a newborn’s scalp. My father had to leave that afternoon to return to Clemson via a Greyhound bus.  When the lady sitting next to him asked why he looked so sad, he replied, “My wife just gave birth to a seven pound, eight ounce monkey.”  

As a child and teenager, I heard this anecdote on more than one occasion, which would elicit a cackle from my mother, who in so many words agreed that indeed I was a hideous newborn. However, she was quick to assure me that in a couple of weeks I was so beautiful that when she pushed my stroller around Colonial Lake, strangers stopped her to admire my beauty. 

I took solace in my mom’s stroller story as a child, not realizing that praising a baby’s looks is a common practice of adults when they run across almost any infant. On Facebook, I often encounter the red puffy yet wrinkled faces of newborns who are deemed “beautiful” or “adorable” by scores of friends of the parents. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg sat in a courtroom being grilled by Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor.  My first full year, 1953, marked the feverous height of the Red Scare, back when the Russians were our enemies rather than our friends (or at least our President’s friend).[1] This collective commiephobia spread, appropriately enough, during an epidemic of polio. 

Trump and Cohn

In 1953, R&B had not made it to the mainstream, and rock-n-roll was in utero.  Every artist but one in Billboard’s top 30 singles of 1953 is white, mostly male crooners and female sopranos. Overly orchestrated instrumentals were also popular. The number one hit that year is “The Song from the Moulin Rouge” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra, a song so saccharine sounding that your ears might develop diabetes if you listen to more than twice. 

I’ve never heard of loads of these hitmakers like Pee Wee Hunt, Frank Chacksfield, Richard Hayman, Joni James. By far, the coolest song in that top 30 is from the one Black performer, South Carolina’s own Eartha Kitt, singing and purring “C’est si Bon” en francais.  She later was cast as Cat Woman in the Batman TV series. 

On the other hand, I have not only heard of but seen all of the top movies of ‘53, except for The Naked Spur. I’ve seen From Here to Eternity and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at least twice, I’ve also watched Roman Holiday and Stalag 17.  Disney’s Peter Pan was one of my favorite movies in childhood, especially because the leader of the Lost Boys was, like me, a red head.

Nevertheless, despite the general awfulness of 1953, being born around then ended up being a propitious time to begin life’s journey. My parents, who had grown up during the Great Depression, wanted my siblings and me to have a better life than they suffered yet didn’t monitor our every move, allowing us to roam freely, unencumbered with water bottles or walkie talkies, the ’60’s equivalent cell phones. 

And by our adolescence in the mid ’60s, the music got ridiculously good, though we feared getting drafted and going to Nam, but by then the war was winding down and a draft lottery was in force. Compared today, college tuitions were dirt cheap. I could earn enough money in the summers to cover tuition.

However, I must say, for me at least, it’s a melancholy situation in my twilight years to witness the spectacle of lawlessness and corruption foisted on the Republic by Roy Cohn’s mentee, who obviously, as far as Machiavellianism is concerned, was an A+ student. 

C’est la vie, as Eartha might sing.

I’ll leave you with the number 1 hit of 1953.

[1] Fun facts to know as share: Roy Cohn, who in addition to being one of the prosecutors at the Rosenberg trial, also served as chief counsel for Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, a term Donald Trump appropriated during his first term to describe investigations targeting him for such acts of malfeasance like storing stolen classified documents in bathrooms and paying hush money to porn stars. 

Take a Peek Through My Rose-Tinted Spectacles

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view from my bedroom window

As I’ve grown older – and I doubt if this is typical – my opinion of my fellow Americans has improved, which makes me somewhat optimistic about the long term prospects for our democracy. 

Of course, I could be wrong, as I often am. One MAGA juror could lynch each of the Trump trials.[1] Thanks to the Electoral College, the Petulant One could be reelected, and then, aided and abbeted by right wing SCOTUS justices, pardon himself and his cronies, transform the nation into a full-on Kleptocracy, a fascistic regime that bans public libraries and reconfigures them into massage parlors run under the auspices of the Kushner crime family.

But I really doubt Trump will be reelected. 

I suspect most Americans care about, rather than hate, each other. Most people believe in the credo live and let live. Most accept gays and biracial marriages and haven’t amassed an armory of assault weapons in preparation for a second civil war. Even my acquaintances who voted for Trump shy away from admitting they’d vote for him now. Of course, the voting booth is private and all that jazz, but why would a rational person cast a ballot for a venom-spitting narcissistic whiner who buries a former wife on his golf course to save money and then doesn’t bother to tend to her grave. 

His megalomania knows no bounds, whether he’s shilling trading cards that depict him as a superhero or idiotically claiming that Hawai’i’s wildfires would not have occurred if he – the Climate-Change-Denier-in-Chief – had been president. If he were in office, the Ukraine war would not have occurred, and if reelected, he’ll end it overnight. 

As they say in Queens, “yeah right.”

Although millions of people worship Trump, they make up approximately 30% of the population. The problem lies, of course, in the primary nominating system where fanatics of both parties have a greater say because harried citizens who don’t spend their evenings watching Fox News or MSNBC don’t vote in primaries. Many can’t take off work on a Tuesday, not to mention that fighting traffic after eight hours of labor to stand in line at an elementary school isn’t nearly as pleasant as dropping into a neighborhood bar and having a couple before heading home. 

Image on the right by Jenny Kroik of The New Yorker

The general election, on the other hand, is a different story.

For example, the Dodd decision has riled up women, young people, and those of us who disdain forced birth, especially for children impregnated via rape, victims of incest, mothers facing difficult choices with fetuses with severe birth defects, and women whose health could be harmed because of unusual medical situations. When free choice referenda have appeared on ballots, even in the reddest of states voters have opted for choice rather than forced birth. This is a problem up-and-down the ballot for Republicans outside the hinterlands.

Like I say, I could be wrong. Joe Biden isn’t popular, and we have RFK, Jr. and Cornel West siphoning votes, and perhaps a third party a la Nader and Jill Stine could gum up the works, but I suspect Nader voters who aided and abetted the election of W. Bush and those Stine voters who were sure that Hillary was a shoo-in regret their decisions.

At least I hope they do.

PS. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the insurrection, the illegal possession of top secret documents and his refusal to turn them over, and his paying hush money to a porn star. It’s downright exhausting. 

[1] If you feel you need to explain your jokes – lynch = hung, a hung jury ha-ha ­– perhaps the jokes suck. 

Lock Him Up – Let the Great Axe Fall 

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Obviously, Donald Trump considers himself above the law, thinks that whatever he wishes can be conjured by the genie of his entitlement to become immediately manifest. If he, the Mighty Wizard of Oz Mar-a-Lago, wants documents declassified – presto – they’re his to keep.

According to an audio tape in the possession of prosecutor Jack Smith, Trump has shared the contents of a top-secret document concerning a proposed invasion of Iran with people without security clearances, which is patently illegal. Why be bothered by petty little procedures like institutional declassification if you’re Donald J Trump? Sheltered by his wealth, he routinely has gotten away with ignoring inconvenient laws, and obviously he became complacent about not being taken to task. However, now that has been indicted for stealing classified documents, he is, according to his own paranoid estimation, the most persecuted president in history, more wronged than Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy.[1]

Instead of “Macho Man,” they should play “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” at his rallies.

I admit to being old and hard-hearted. I grew reading Hemingway in neighborhoods where dads who had fought hand-to-hand in the Pacific eschewed self-pity and kept their mouths shut when it came to their own personal suffering. They didn’t whine about their travails on the beaches of Normandy or in the jungles of Korea. For them it was blood – literally in some cases – under the bridge. That was the price you paid for freedom.

Of course, Donald Trump avoided the draft via bone spurs so didn’t get the chance to employ his reform school military training in Viet Nam. He learned from his father Fred that rules were made to be broken. What he didn’t receive from Fred was affection. It’s not at all surprising that an unloved scion of a real estate fortune would grow up to be needy. 

What does surprise me, though, is that so many self-proclaimed red-blooded males, especially Southern males, have not only embraced, but in some cases deified, this crybaby. Donald Trump is the absolute antithesis of the caricature of Robert E Lee that Southerners of my generation had been groomed to revere. 

Despite his vulgar bluster, Trump is no John Wayne, no James Bond. no Hamlet the Dane. Rather, he’s Michael Henchard from the Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (though that’s a little unfair to Henchard who was capable of self-recrimination and regret).

JOEY MACALLE 

Like Henchard, Trump’s a self-pitying blowhard who somehow PT Barnum-ed his way into elected office.  Unlike Henchard, though, Trump has become a cult figure, a demigod. His deification among gun-toting, drag-queen-hating outdoorsmen is beyond counter-intuitive, especially given his copious application of make-up, his platinum comb over, his gut-concealing girdle. Why do evangelicals see him as Christlike, even though he’s incapable of feeling empathy for anyone but himself?

I don’t know, but I say where offence is – and espionage is a great offence – let the great axe fall. 

[1] Bonus question: Can you name their assassins? 

Loose Cadences for Loose Cannons: The Capitol Insurgent Doggerel Taxonomic Commode Ode

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The fever swamps of the radical right
Teem with an abundance of exotic wildlife,

A vast array of various species
Thriving on a regimen of bovine feces.

Look! A QAnon Shaman, bare-chested, toting a spear,
Sporting a smile instead of a sneer,

Stomping around the Capitol wreaking havoc
Fueled by a diet that’s 100% organic.

Then there’s the less colorful Klete Keller,
Who looks to be a regular sort of fellow,

Tall, wholesome-looking, clean-cut, strong of jaw,
A gold-medal winner on the wrong side of the law.

Off duty cops, insurance agents, adjunct professors
Among the herd of headweak aggressors,

A motley crew: CEOs, politicians, welders, sailors,
Some dwelling in mansions, others in trailers,

And militia men galore, bearded, cosplaying Rambo,
Their lingua franca crazy batshit mumbo jumbo,

All exhibiting a disdain for natural selection,
Maskless as they swarm to overthrow the election,

Recording their crimes with selfies and live streams
Taking self-incrimination to ridiculous extremes.

Yet when the FBI arrives to initiate their torment,
They whine and say, “I was just caught up in the moment.”

Like I said, the fever swamps of the radical right
Teem with an abundance of exotic wildlife.

His Own Worst Enemy

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tossing red meat

 

Despite his bluster about one of the greatest landslides in American electoral history, Donald Trump actually squeaked out a narrow Electoral College victory (a flip of 80,000 votes collectively in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan would have resulted in a Madame President Clinton).  As far was the popular vote went, Trump lost the election by 2,864,974 votes.

Given those numbers, it would have been judicious for Trump to try to expand his base rather than consistently bending over backwards to accommodate its xenophobic inclinations, which aren’t shared by a majority of Americans.  For example, he could have cut taxes for the middle, rather than the donor class, and worked on infrastructure, but he remained and remains fixated on immigration.

Let’s look at some numbers.  

On the week of 16 December  2018, according to Gallup, Trump’s approval level stood at 38%

Here’s a recent Pew poll on Americans’ views on immigration:

 

 

Present level Increased Decreased No opinion
% % % %
2018 Jun 1-13 # 39 28 29 4
2017 Jun 7-11 38 24 35 3
2016 Jun 7-Jul 1 ^ 38 21 38 3

Of course, we’re talking about legal immigration here.  Nevertheless, the most recent number is that only 29% want to see immigration decreased, which is nine points lower than the number of voters who approve of Trump.  

Trump’s making illegal immigration the cornerstone of his midterm election rally blitz in the campaign’s last days didn’t work out very well for him.  Although Republicans kept control of Senate, in fact increasing the majority by two seats, they did so by winning in red states.  The Democrats, on the other hand, took over the House by flipping forty Republican seats as suburbanite Republicans abandoned their party and Independents went heavily blue .  

So what does Trump do?  Doubles down by rejecting a budget deal passed by both the House and Senate and shutting down the government.

Why?  Because Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter got their panties in a knot, assailing his manhood.*   

Trump’s pathological need for attention and adulation is his worst enemy.  These rallies, populated by fanatical and inchoately angry rural white people must satisfy some atavistic tribal need in him.  The fact that they need to be under-educated and misinformed doesn’t seem to matter to him.  

 

 

He’s his own very worst enemy.

Meanwhile, our government is rudderless.  We have an acting chief of staff, and acting attorney general, and an acting secretary of defense.

I’ll resist the urge to quote from Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” which has become almost a cliché.  Instead, I’ll leave you with a snippet of his “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

 

Come let us mock at the great 

That had such burdens on the mind 

And toiled so hard and late 

To leave some monument behind,

Nor thought of the levelling wind.  

 

Come let us mock at the wise;

With all those calendars whereon 

They fixed old aching eyes, 

They never saw how seasons run, 

 

And now but gape at the sun.  

Come let us mock at the good 

That fancied goodness might be gay, 

And sick of solitude 

Might proclaim a holiday: 

Wind shrieked — and where are they?  

 

Mock mockers after that 

That would not lift a hand maybe 

To help good, wise or great 

To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.

* I concede forcing you to picture Rush Limbaugh in panties isn’t in keeping with the holiday spirit. Sorry about that.

The Physiognomy of Trump’s Inner Circle

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looking_wrong_way_900x506

Over her lifetime, my mother, bless her soul, accumulated an abundance of spurious wisdom based on a combination of unscientific observation and intuition. Sometimes she’d have forebodings and forbid me from doing rather pedestrian things like riding my bike home from the gas station where a flat tire had been patched. “No, I just have this awful, awful feeling,” she’d say. “Something’s bad’s going to happen if you ride that bike.” In other words, I was doomed to be flattened by an 18-wheeler or smack into a tree and spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. So we’d cram the bike in the back seat and drive on home.

Undoubtedly, her sense of doom has contributed to my rather pessimistic view of the world. You know, irrational thoughts like thinking your team’s going to lose the Super Bowl even though they’ve racked up in the third quarter an insurmountable lead the likes of which has never been overcome in a half-century of Super Bowls.

Sometimes, though, I think Mama did hit the mark with her unscientific conclusions — for example, her contention that time etches people’s ultimate personalities onto their faces by their habitually assuming certain telltale expressions, e.g., the angry, scowling malcontent’s mouth carving a perpetual frown, the bland sweet matron’s pleasant expression blanking away wrinkles —  the equivalent of the warning I received as a young child that my “face was going to stick like that” if I kept making grotesque faces.

[Warning: Neck-breaking Segue]

Just for the hell of it let’s take my mother’s theory and apply it to President Trump’s closest advisors.

Ladies, first. Kellyanne Conway.

Okay, I know I’m pulling a Trump here, criticizing a woman’s looks, but I’m not saying Kellyanne’s unattractive, just that she looks mean.  She’s a brittle-looking 49 to me, and no doubt being the target of so much ridicule will only harden her more, turning sinister those ersatz smiles aimed at the cameras of MSNBC.  Perhaps once she possessed a “sunny disposition” but something has soured it.  Working for Trump can’t be good for your soul.

To me she looks like she could be the illegitimate daughter of Phyllis Diller, though without Diller’s self-deprecating wit – a commodity that seems to be lacking across the board among Trump and his staff.

phyllis-conway

I’d cast Kellyanne as the wicked stepmother in the Snow Whites of New Jersey.

As far as looks go, I think Steve Bannon comes off as the coolest.  I like the way his abundant whipped-back hair sometimes falls in his eyes.  He’d, make a great character in a Tennessee Williams play, the rugged terrain of his face blotted with gin-blossoms, his eyes puffy, his spinal fluid pumping white supremacy.

 

CLEVELAND, OH - JULY 20: Stephen K. Bannon looks at his computer to see who will be the next caller he will talk to while hosting Brietbart News Daily on SiriusXM Patriot at Quicken Loans Arena on July 20, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Kirk Irwin/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

Banner’s the absolute opposite of Mitt Romney – disheveled, disorganized, paunchy, atheistic, hungover.*  Sure, he’s evil, but if I had to have 10 beers with one of these dark apostles, he’s be the one I’d choose.

nosferatu-1922-003-max-schreck-00m-kgk

Would definitely choose him over Steven Miller.  I don’t know a thing about Steven Miller, who supposedly works hand on hand with Bannon, but certainly he and Nosterafu share a common ancestor.  His vulture-like demeanor precludes the possibility of empathy.

miller

Then there’s Reince Preibus.

Reince Priebus

I predict he’ll age in warp speed like Abe Lincoln.  Like, I say, working for Trump’s toxic.

*Full disclosure:  *Psychologically it could be that I’m projecting my own self-description on Bannon the way that Trump kept calling Hillary crooked.

3 Contrasting Visions of the Trump Presidency

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trum-piss

Boy, I really didn’t realize how dark Trump’s vision the US is until I read his inaugural address:

Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge . . .

I first thought Trump may have actually written this himself. I couldn’t think of a professional speechwriter who would come up with a simile so imagistically clunky as “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”  But it turns out Miller and Bannon are to blame.

Anyway, are you visualizing the image?

Florida National Cemetery, Headstones, war heroes

tombstones

rusted-out factory

rusted-out factory

 

scattered

scattered

Perhaps there are more than a few rusted-out factories in Michigan, but down here in South Carolina where I live I couldn’t locate one to save my life. I asked my son who drove up from Orlando yesterday how many rusted-out factories he’d seen during the seven hour trip, and he said that the only factory he saw had smoke coming out of the smokestacks.

Also – and I’ll move on – the children in South Carolina suffering from poverty aren’t huddled in inner cities but eking out their existence without Medicaid expansion in shacks that litter the landscape like, um, shacks.

Okay, now that I got that off my chest, I’d like to offer brief synopses of how three thoughtful pundits perceive the Trump presidency, and I’ll go from darkest to brightest for sanity’s sake.

Sarah Kendzior

skSarah Kendzior, the author of The View from Flyover Country, is an anthropologist who specializes in authoritarian states and writes for various newspapers. She considers the accession of Trump as nothing less than catastrophic. She foresees a coming kleptocracy as a fragile democracy succumbs to fascistic institution-gutting by Trump and his mob-like nationalistic white-supremacist cronies.

In 2014 she served as an expert witness for an Uzbek refugee. Here is her account:

My job was to tell the judge about Uzbekistan: a country ruled by a dictator who abuses executive power to obtain personal wealth, threatens independent media and protesters, spies on real and perceived enemies, packs his administration with lackeys and relatives, refuses to disclose his financial holdings, molds public opinion through media domination, persecutes innocent Muslims under the pretext of fighting terrorism, and distracts the citizenry with pageants and spectacle, often proclaiming that he is making Uzbekistan great again.

She goes on to note

American authoritarianism will not be a carbon copy of other states. Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism will exploit pre-existing vulnerabilities – corporate corruption, institutional rot, systemic racism, a weakened economy, a struggling media, celebrity worship – and exacerbate them until our nation is no longer recognizable.

Should this occur, it may look like home, but it will not feel like home. What may be wrenched from us is a fundamental sense of security and sovereignty. When cable outlets are not promoting white supremacists or debating the humanity of Jews – yes, this is what our media airs now – they occasionally document Mr. Trump’s kleptocratic behaviour.

It’s almost dark enough to drive me to the nearest burnt-out strip mall to see if I can score some smack; however, Dr. Kendzior preaches resistance, not submission, and yesterday’s massive protests offer some hope that we’ll not take Trump lying down.

But we are still here, we the people, the inconvenient background players in Donald Trump’s self-serving shakedown of the American dream. We the people have been calling our representatives, demanding to know what is going on. We the people never did form that more perfect union, but we are not about to trade in the red, white and blue for the gold-plated facade of a tyrant tycoon.

We the people look out for each other – even when no one looks out for us.

David Brooks

brooksChances are you’re familiar with David Brooks, the affable guy-next-door conservative columnist for the NY Times and frequent contributor to the soon-to-be privatized PBS.

Brooks is considerably more upbeat about the survival of our democracy:

Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.

He sees hope in the possibility that the polarization Republicans and Democrats will end as the two join forces to quell the megalomaniacal maelstrom that will be Trump’s governing style:

We’ve wondered if there is some opponent out there that could force us to unite and work together. Well, that opponent is being inaugurated, not in the form of Trump the man, but in the form of the chaos and incompetence that will likely radiate from him, month after month.

Brooks ends his most recent column with this Panglossian hope:

With Trump it’s not the ideology, it’s the disorder. Containing that could be the patriotic cause that brings us together.

Peter Leyden

d6qgkbh_400x400According to his by-line, Peter Leyden “is the founder and CEO of Reinvent, a media company.” He sees Trump’s inauguration not as “the beginning of an era – but the end.”

He posits that Trump’s atavistic wish to flip the calendar back to the USA’s manufacturing heyday is doomed because of the evolution of technology into an ever-increasing interconnectedness of digital technologies, which “will be totally global and operate on a planetary scale.”

Whereas Brooks sees Trump uniting the Right and Left, Leyden foresees him being the “vehicle that will finally take down right-wing conservative politics for a generation or two” by “completely and irrevocably alienat[ing] all the growing political constituencies of the 21st century: the Millennial Generation, people of color, educated professionals, women.”

He goes on to say suggest that it’s actually ultimately fortunate that Hillary lost because she “would not have been able to finally bring down the conservative movement and its archaic ideology.”

Wesley Moore

meWesley Moore is a very confused and woebegone blogger. He has no earthly idea what’s going to happen. You can find him at any number of Folly Beach drinking establishments or loitering in the parking lots of burnt-out strip malls.