Chicken Little's Revenge

Reflections on the sad -- okay, not really -- decline of Donald Trump

To everything there is a season. Yes, even this shit.

It’s always worse when Chicken Little thinks he’s the bearer of good news. Every time.

Trump had his Big Beautiful Bill. In 1988, presidential candidate George H.W. Bush exulted in Big Mo, as in momentum. The Brits will always have Big Ben.

During the First World War, when young Maureen Dowd was only mildly pre-menopausal, the U.S. First Infantry Division became the Big Red One. People who hate Big Pharma have, well, Big Pharma, because nobody who likes Big Pharma ever calls it that or anything at all when they can avoid it.

Dolly Parton has pretty big gazongas. Jay McInerney still thinks he’s hot stuff because he wrote Bright Lights, Big City the year of Louis XIII’s coronation. To go somewhat off topic, comedian Milton Berle reputedly rejoiced in having a freakin’ huge portable stegosaurus.

WKRP Radio’s Les Nessman, so help him God, honestly thought turkeys could fly. Anti-MAGA America has Big Chicken. Big Chicken’s been telling us Trump is done for since October 7, 2016.

Try to remember the kind of Decembrists. Buck, buck, buck: Trump’s falling apart, his chewy Tootsie Roll center cannot hold. He’s no longer Pol Potable and he really doesn’t travel well. Ask the late Queen Elizabeth and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il for dueling views of the downsides and upsides (and insides) of Trump’s laddish, caddish jet lag.

Long ago, comic-strip cartoonist Chester Gould drew Dick Tracy looking panic-stricken as a giant eraser bore down on his Constructivist-origami profile. Speech balloon: “This time, Gould, you have gone too far.” The detective survived. So has Trump, every time.

So far, yes, but. . . this time? Can it be, Charlie Brown? Say it is so, Joe? Will Bill Murray escape Andie McDowell’s gummy grin just this goddam once? Suppose Big Chicken’s “Buck, buck, buck” has stopped here at last.

Let’s try not to get all tongue-tied about the boldness of our jittery “Maybe.” If Donald Trump isn’t rotting before our eyes this spring, his makeup and prosthetics teams have definitely gone over to the enemy. Welcome to the fight, Comrade Harryhausen: This time I know our side will win. Dazed and confused, we’re watching a Foreign Legion movie where a handful of survivors have heaved their dead comrades’ slumped corpses up onto the parapet. Their empty rifles now stick out haphazardly in the general direction where a living Legionnaire might point them.

Trump’s deterioration is working on all fronts to a misleadingly familiar kaleidoscopic effect. But since the myriad ways he’s taken us back to the Middle Ages include a renewed superstition that corporeal deformity and decay mirror the bearer’s mental and moral state, let’s start with how he’s grown physically disgusting.

Logic tells us even Trumpism can’t altogether dodge unpleasant truths about the irreconcilable properties of animate and inanimate objects. That’s why we can be confident his portraits at Mar-a-Lago remain as youthful, idealized and waxily lifeless as ever. Somebody sure got the premise of Dorian Gray ass-backwards this time around.

Is it reprehensible to dwell on someone’s gruesome decline in appearance, power of speech, overall motion-capture skills? The fact that Patient No. Air Force 1 looks, sounds, behaves and moves like an unholy mess? Oh, sure, probably, but fuck him. Let’s not even trot out the old razzmatazz about our obese Pustule-in-Chief’s access to nuclear codes. Trump makes blowing up the world look like a temptation we’d owe to his last pimple of sanity.

He slurs like an alkie in a burlesque show. He honest-to-gosh can’t stand up for falling down. He gets briskly mangled every time he tries to tie himself to the veering tracks of his own errant train of thought. Even his once Ozymandian coif now resembles a dandelion that’s mistaken itself for a daiquiri in a blender, and we’re supposed to be alarmed because this shambling and bewildered man in whom bewilderment invariably spawns truculence is President of the United States.

Uh-uh. Think again, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy, and Vera, Chuck and Dave. It’s alarming because any group of ostensible intimates who’d let someone so mentally and materially incoherent out in public at all consists of strangers to the concept of pity.

The bottom line? It’s not working anymore. He’s become the Great And Powerful Cousin It. The banshee crap about the Strait of Hormuz, the threats to turn Cuber into a pinã -tur, his frigging Fortress of Solitude Ballroom (note paradox there), the readiness to spend sleepless jam-packed hours on Truth Social as a nation rolls its lonely eyes ceilingward demolishing, yeah! demolishing Kimmel or Colbert. Ah, how The Gong Show beckons like the Ghost of Chuck Barris Past, Present and Future.

His satraps’ latest sitreps aren’t doing so well either. Lindsey Graham babbling that the Nobel Peace Prize ought to be renamed the Trump Prize is an insult to Lindsey Graham’s surviving intellect by Lindsey Graham’s own remaining standards. Official White House Battered Spokesperson Karolyn Leavitt is urgently asking her ob/gyn as we speak whether any extant pill can let her get pregnant and give birth every Tuesday.

Once again, I must repeat: there is no truth to the rumor that “Hegseth” is an Indian word meaning He Who Sucks The Penises of True Warriors.

Meanwhile, her Stone Age predecessor, Kellyanne Conway – who’s such a hardened pro that she was shopping her resume in The New Yorker two weeks before Election Day 2016 – is reflecting, as she often does, on how much smarter she and George are than Mary Matalin and James Carville. The proof’s that Matalin and Carville are still together, not that anyone else would have either of those bozos even for a mercy fuck.

Pete Hegseth – has ever a man or G.I. Joe doll taken such relish in being so smugly and cockily bone-stupid, in his “Whatcha gonna do about it?” way? – has plans (he always does) to tell us that Clint Eastwood swiped “’Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” from Revelation 19:21. Too bad it’s always bunglingly translated as “Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, ‘Thus with violence the great city Babylon shall be thrown down.’”

Skipping the violence part, are our Babylon’s days numbered? Legally, sure. As of this writing, we’re 968 of those away from January 20, 2029. But the semi-legit concern Trump might try to seize a third term, something his judicial nominees refuse to say can’t be done and which he stoked again earlier this month – ‘When I get out of office, in, let’s say, eight or nine years from now” – has given way to an increasingly unalarmed hunch he won’t make it through his second.

Agreed: no one’s going to buy the idea that Trump lusts for more time with his family. Not this family, chum – are you non compos praying mantis or something? He probably hates every miserable second he’s got to spend sharing an elevator with any of those assholes; the feeling assuredly runs both ways. Even firmly setting aside any scenario involving another savage attack on his right ear, picture a health crisis too dramatic to be successfully concealed, a successful impeachment (third time’s the charm), or a flat-out refusal to carry on in the face of the humiliation and worse coming for POTUS’s capacious keester in the midterms. Any of those could easily snip short the man’s redecoration plans in the not-quite-bud.

In other words, once again ruling violence out, traumatized anti-MAGA Americans can wonder if they’ve got permission at last to sing along with Big Chicken: One way or another, we’re gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha. Debbie Harry, as we all know, swiped that one from Roger K. LeGuin’s Byrds, who swiped it from Ecclesiastes 3:3: “A time to kill, and a time to heal.” That must explain why it suddenly feels like America’s just killing time.