“The poor dope. He always wanted a pool.”
Here’s Trump 1.0 to reporters in the Rose Garden, October 2018, musing about then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s unquenchable fondness for the gilded bat piss Americans call beer: “I never had a glass of alcohol. I never had alcohol, for whatever reason. Can you imagine if I had? What a mess I would be.”
We don’t have to imagine it anymore. Not that I think POTUS has started hitting the sauce at age 80, but the behavior is identical. The slurred speech and uncertain gait, the frequent confusion about his own location, the baffled hunt for common words – “video” was the most recent to elude his T-Rex thesaurus. “Tapes like moving cameras” was what his coiffed (not quaffed) cranial residue coughed up instead.
More to the point, in happier times, Trump’s off-the-cuff divagations were divagations from something – some agreed-on point of origin the planet was familiar with, however vaguely. Now he wanders from crabapples to blood oranges according to no recognizable treasure map of the orchard.
His ad hominem attacks on perceived enemies always ranged from bizarre – wind turbines, which he’s now gone full-on Donald J. Quixote and calls “windmills” all the time – to petulant (Rosie O’Donnell, the “fake news,” Colbert). But at least we could more or less suss out why they peeved him. No more.
It’s terrifying to think the Trump Americans knew before this January was a Trump lashed to the mast by icy self-control and rhetorical filters up the gumstump. Not only figuratively but, it appears, literally, the adage that you don’t crap where you eat – or do anything else, for that matter – is an adage for good reason seems to have escaped his notice.
Why January? I dunno, maybe because that’s when we smashed Venezuela into submission and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado retaliated at a time and place of her own choosing, as George W. Bush used to say, by gifting Trump with his very own (actually her) Nobel Peace Prize, a sort of monkey’s paw disguised as a handshake. That kind of heartfelt encomium can really go to a guy’s head if it finds its way past his Distant Early Warning hair, and talk about your gilded bat piss. Don’t ever tell Trump all glory is fleeting.
Some alcoholics – and some mental patients, too – exhibit completely altered personalities when the fit is on them. In many cases, though, we get an unhinged exaggeration of what they were like all along. That’s Trump’s crass cross to bear. Always prone to focus on inessentials, he now has a drunk’s fixation on them, seemingly for the same reason: an escape from reality.
He can barely muster interest in his war with Iran even when it comes to figuring out how to conceal that we’ve lost it. (The Pentagon recently invited any interested military personnel to chip in with inventive ideas.) But don’t get him started on Reflecting Pool “vandalism” or his idiot ballroom or how do you solve a problem like Melania or how he got cheated in 2020 or how he might run again in 2028. He’ll talk his own wounded-warrior ear off.
Has any President, even Jimmy Carter micromanaging the White House tennis court, ever driveled away so much time on vanity-goaded trivialities? If Trump were honest with us – I know, I know, it’ll happen when ICE agents fly – he’d admit that he doesn’t have anything better to do. Not anymore.
Proof AI can produce terrific porn. Trump himself posted this image on social media.
If The DJT seems on the verge of abbreviating his monogram to the plain old d.t.’s, the Republican party – hey, remember them? Trump doesn’t – is behaving like a pack of late-born lushes who can’t quite face it’s AA time. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy verged on tears as he confessed he’d vote for 101 Dalmatians yegg Todd Blanche for Attorney General because Trump might pick someone even worse. That was about as close as a Senator can get to brokenly mumbling “My name is Bill C, and I’m a Trumpaholic.” It’s enough to make you miss the austere dignity Mitch McConnell brought to the job of acknowledging he’s got no principles or ethics whatsoever.
Even if he survives in office until January 2029 – an increasingly dubious position if you ask me – we’re witnessing the last days of Donald Trump and the GOP knows it. They just can’t disenthrall themselves, as Lincoln once advised Americans to do, because they don’t have a clue what comes next. That has to rattle them to the point of gibbering.
What does it tell them that the nearest thing to a rising Republican star these days is Thomas Massie, the vigilante caped crusader to Trump’s Penguin? As we all know, the Penguin wouldn’t be much without his monocle (decor!), his suave cigarette holder (how antiwoke!), and a gift of gab considerably more elegant than DJT’s. If you don’t think Massie is hoping to lead a de-Penguined GOP, let us note he’s joined the pack baying for Fauci’s head on a stick: a MAGA priority, not a White House one. Me, I’m betting Trump will end up getting blamed for being Fauci’s enabler, and Liz Cheney shoulda been so lucky.
Meanwhile, out in Zipper-Over country, an increasing minority (so far) of stout-hearted MAGANs (get ‘em by the heart and their brains will follow) are following Lincoln’s advice and disenthralling themselves like gangbusters. Not only are they fed up with Trump, they’re manning and womaning up to admit they got conned.
That’s exactly what snots like me thought they’d never do, and we-a culpa. Does a day go by without more social-media video of dismayed Trump voters voicing existential buyer’s remorse? As liberals learned in 2016 and Trump is discovering now, getting these people pissed off is no recipe for placidity.
Besides being, whatchacallit, against the Constitution – i.e., illegal, even if Samuel Alito is sure to go down on any ship he knows he won’t go down with – Trump’s fetish about getting a third term is growing more hallucinatory thanks to one helluva inconvenient truth. If he ran, he’d lose, and not like Gerald Ford and then Jimmy Carter did. More like Herbert Hoover did, or Andrew Johnson (who did madly try for the 1868 Democratic – not Republican – nomination) would’ve.
What’ll Trump leave behind? Not a ballroom, that’s for sure. Not his triumphal arch. I suspect the Kennedy Center will survive him too; if the Reichstag could be gotten back into respectable shape by the Germans, restoring the KC should be child’s play. The last completed renovation of the Trump era may well be the $ 5.1 million worth of gold he slapped onto the massive equine statues abutting the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Trump’s new Gilded Age has turned into a gelded one, even if so far only the frightened horses know the difference for sure. Just say neigh?