Humpty Drumpfty
Perhaps it was bound to happen sooner or later, but so-called reality TV has finally become so-called real life: a professional con-man is the president-elect of the Untidy States of America. Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” have rared back and kicked her onto history’s dust-heap, and there is wailing and gnashing of teeth throughout the Democratic Party. Confusion reigns among the progressive punditry, and the mainstream media is scrambling to find excuses for why they dismissed Drumpf’s candidacy as a publicity stunt. It was, of course, but the television and print peddlers of infotainment gave it so much coverage that it acquired a life of its own, like Doctor Frankenstein’s monster after the lightning struck it. And the Gilded Grifter seems just as inept at handling his immense power as was Mary Shelley’s animated corpse. Indeed, he appears to be totally confused, like a dog who chased a car and actually caught it.
The “mango Mussolini,” as Larry Wilmore nicknamed him in The New New Yorker’s November 21st issue, never really expected to win. He had a ball during his campaign, holding enormous rallies at which he spewed racist, xenophobic, sexist and misogynistic sewage which his audiences of white Yahoos lapped up like free beer. Those rallies bore a horrible resemblance to the Nazi mass meeting at Nuremburg in 1935, as recorded by Leni Riefenstahl’s cameras. But in 2016 the cameras belonged to the mainstream American media, not to a German propagandist who worshipped her subject. It makes little difference, however: what the viewer saw was indeed propaganda, thinly disguised as “fair and balanced” reporting.
Yes, I know that’s the slogan of right-wingnut Fox News, but CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN, desperate to boost their dwindling viewership in the age of internet news and social media, covered Humpty Drumpfty as if he were a rock star doing arena concerts. Les Moonves, President and CEO of CBS remarked, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for our ratings.”
There’s been a lot of hot air vented about the plight of white working-class men and women who are underemployed and feel that minorities got preferential treatment by the political elite during President Obama’s two terms, despite the fact that Obama ran as a reformer, not an elitist defender of the status quo. The gasbags fail to mention that Obama’s reforms were systematically blocked by the Repulsivan majorities in the House and Senate. Some of these obstructionists were and remain obdurate racists who loathed the very notion of a black man in the White House. Under Drumpf, these empowered troglodytes will try to set the clock back to the 1950s, when Negroes knew their place; Hispanics worked as underpaid migrant agricultural workers, tended the gardens of rich whites, or looked after their cossetted children as nannies, and Muslims were nothing but exotic characters out of The Arabian Nights.
I must also mention that the angry white lower-middle classes aren’t as badly off economically as the Repulsivans claim. Employment is rising again, even in the Rust Belt, as new enterprises begin to replace the heavy industry that has vanished. Admittedly, these enterprises generally call for skilled workers, but even in red states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennslyvania, there are vocational schools that teach the required skills both to teenagers and to adult workers who lost their jobs in the old industries. These schools are color-blind; blacks enjoy no preferential treatment whatsoever.
So there’s no substance to back up the grievances of the bloc that voted for The Dumpster. Its real motives were racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and a dollop of misogyny tossed in to make the mix completely toxic. These vicious knuckleheads are today’s version of the Know-Nothings, the party of “Native-Born Americans” that arose during the 1840s to protest the influx of Irish workers to New York after the potato famine. Back then, there were bloody riots in the streets in which some people died. In the coming months and years, the outbreaks of violence might be much worse: during his campaign, the Billionaire Buffoon encouraged the rabid crowds at his rallies to use their Second Amendment rights and “do something” about his opponent and her supporters.
Chris Cox, the Executive Director of the National Rifle Association, which eggs on armed militia groups who believe all their woes are the fault of minorities and the federal government that supports them, was among the first people to endorse Drumpfty’s presidential run. Another early endorser was David Duke, head of the Ku Klux Klan. Der Pumpkinfuhrer, as the Daily Kos calls him, has made noises about distancing himself from this pretty pair, but since he changes his mind from hour to hour, depending on the state of his prickly temper (or perhaps his costive bowels), they might still return to his list of Likes. Bear in mind that he has the emotional maturity and the attention span of a three-year old who hates a playmate one day and loves him the next, for no reason that makes sense to an adult.
However, the Shootist and the Lyncher should beware of making any statement that might hurt Orange Julius Caesar’s widdle feewings – recently he tweeted a rant against the Boeing aircraft company’s plan to replace Air Force One with a new plane, since the current one is getting a little creaky. It seems someone at Boeing said something that trod on his pudgy toes. But he doesn’t want to travel in Air Force One anyway. He prefers his own jetliner, just as he prefers his suite in Trump Tower (his trophy wife Melania is already esconced there, and doesn’t plan to move) to the presidential residence in the White House. That his whims present a security nightmare that will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars to deal with concerns him not a whit. But then, nothing concerns him except feeding his bottomless appetite for self-aggrandizement.
Poe’s Imp of the Perverse, the demon who lures people into self-destruction, is briskly at work on a scale unimagined even by the master of the macabre, tempting large numbers of Americans, through Harrumph’s ill-considered and malignant rants, to act against their own interests. He has made all manner of promises to them that he can’t possibly fulfill, and wouldn’t, even if he could, because now that he’s elected, he’s too busy trying to use the Presidency as a means to extend his business interests. Already, it seems, many Drumpf voters are suffering from buyer’s remorse. Tough shit, suckers. You bought a pig in a poke, and you’re stuck with the rancid bacon.
Or with nothing at all. “Donald Trump” hasn’t existed as a real person for a very long time. As Gertrude Stein remarked of Oakland, California, “There is no there there.” The Dumpster is nothing but posturing and bloviating, a façade with only a tissue of lies to hold it up. Even his vaunted billions are a sham, since the man who sold himself to the credulous as someone who would run the country on sound business methods is a perfectly terrible businessman who has lost far more money than he’s ever made. He’s even bragged about his bankruptcies, claiming that they never hurt him, because he left his business partners holding the bag. The man is actually proud of being a cheater and a thief.
As of this writing (December, 2016), there are 75 outstanding lawsuits against him, an all-time record for a President-Elect, so perhaps he’ll start bragging about that, too. Or he’ll make all his pesky little problems – such as possible impeachment for violating Article One, Section 9, clause 8 of the Constitution for accepting emoluments from foreign powers, or even a trial for treason because he may have colluded with Vladimir Putin in the Russian attempt to hack the election – simply go away by evoking the phrase made famous by Richard (“I Am Not A Crook”) Nixon, the second-worst president (after Smirk Bush) in American history so far. In an interview with David Frost after the Watergate burglary was revealed, RMN said, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” DJT’s version went, “When the president does something, it’s legal.” Tricky Dicky found out differently, to his chagrin. Tweetin’ Trumpy’s cruising for the same fall.
The people he has chosen for his Cabinet and for other vital positions are all from the ultra-right lunatic fringe of the Repulsivan Party, but once again, the Dumpster is as capricious as a cranky child, and those on his current list might be off it by Inauguration Day. Already, Mitt Romney, mentioned as a possible Secretary of State, is gone, replaced by Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Bros. LLC, and a crony of Russia’s Vlad the Invader. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, an open racist, is in line for Attorney General. Kansas Representative Mike Pompeo, the conspiracy theorist behind the baseless Benghazi rumors leveled against Hillary Clinton, has been tapped to head the CIA.
For national security advisor, there’s Retired General Michael Flynn, an Islamophobe who maintains that Islam “is not a religion, but a political ideology,” and is also a pal of Putin. Bankster Steven Mnuchin, who helped bring on the Crash of 2008, will become Secretary of the Treasury (talk about the fox guarding the henhouse!). Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, a rabid climate change denier in thrall to the fossil fuel industry, is of course the King of Conspicuous Consumption’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency; Pruitt has already promised to undo the Paris Accords. Grumpf has named Dr. Ben Carson – the looney-tunes Biblical fundamentalist who thinks the Pyramids are Joseph’s grain silos – to lead the Department of Health and Human Development. Carson doesn’t seem to want the job, so the Golden Goofball will have to appoint someone else from Cloud Cuckoo Land. After all, Drumpfty himself lives in his own delusionary world; among other firsts, he’s our first openly psychotic President.
Whether his mental disease is paranoid schizophrenia, regressive infantilism, pathological mendacity, or sociopathic narcissism depends on which dismayed psychologist’s published warnings you read. As he stated in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal (ghost-written by Tony Schwartz, who recently expressed profound regret for creating the Trump myth, mainly because Humpty stiffed him on his payment), “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies… I call [my technique] truthful hyperbole.” You can tell someone else wrote that last sentence; Drumpf wouldn’t know a hyperbole from a hippopotamus. To update the mordant old joke about Nixon, if you see The Trumpeter on TV with the sound off, how can you tell when he’s lying? If his lips are moving.
Trumplestiltskin, who promised to spin the straw of his followers’ frustrations into golden fulfillment, has no intention of making good on his word, but the faithful still turn out for his “Victory Rallies,” which threaten to go on throughout the holiday season and possibly well after his inauguration, when he will raise one pudgy hand, put the other on a Bible, and solemnly lie about upholding the Constitution. Inauguration Day promises to be a thoroughly tawdry spectacle in general, for he’s hired Mark Barnett, who produced “The Apprentice”, to fly him to the Capitol steps aboard his own flashy helicopter, perhaps to the accompaniment of fireworks. He’d originally planned a simultaneous march of his supporters down Fifth Avenue in New York, but the city’s sensible Mayor de Blasio put the kibosh on that display of vainglory. De Blasio knows what Drumpf refuses to believe: New Yorkers have known and despised him ever since he first started using his daddy’s money to befoul the Manhattan skyline with hideous high-rises.
His domestic policy is a hot, stinking mess; his foreign policy is even worse. He’s already shattered American-Chinese relations by contacting the leader of Taiwan, which the mainland Chinese consider part of their country. His bromance with Putin is fraying, because Vlad hasn’t offered him sufficient respect. Since the big baby’s default reaction to anyone who disses him is to lash out with every means at his disposal, it should terrify every sentient being to remember that he has wondered what good our stockpile of nuclear weapons is, if we don’t use it. Drop the big one on Moscow, see what happens. Shades of Doctor Strangelove, and welcome to World War Three. Schoolchildren in the Crump administration will doubtless be taught to practice duck and cover in their classrooms, not that hiding under your desk would do you a damn bit of good if the mushroom clouds began to spring up. Like Hitler or Stalin, The Orange Oligarch is fully prepared to destroy the world if he doesn’t get his own way.
His plan to round up all “illegal immigrants,” an umbrella classification which includes naturalized Latino citizens who have so much as a minor misdemeanor – a speeding ticket, say, or a childhood shoplifting charge – on their records, would require a “yuge” expansion of the prison system to hold those he rounds up pending their deportation. Yet he’s pledged to cut the federal budget by billions. No problem: he’ll bring back the for-profit private lock-ups that were banned by the Obama administration because so many inmates died of various kinds of brutality and neglect while incarcerated in them. He’ll use one of his companies to build the new slammers, and pocket the profits.
His latest use of the Big Lie is to claim that he would have won the popular vote, but voter fraud initiated by Crooked Hillary rigged it against him. In fact, the only vote tampering was on the Repulsivan side, where dirty tricks like minimizing the number of polling places and disallowing drivers’ licences as valid IDs kept large numbers of minority voters from casting their ballots. The Marmalade Miscreant’s accusations that his opponent cheated have always been cases of forestalling valid criticism of his own sleazy tactics by claiming the other side used them first.
In fact Drumpfty’s victory is a sham, like everything else about him. It’s a quirk of the undemocratic, antiquated Electoral College system, initiated by Alexander Hamilton to ensure that the will of the people could be overridden if it threatened the hegemony of a wealthy élite. It’s high time to get rid of the ugly institution, but with Tromp in the White House and a kakistocracy governing the legislature and, soon, the judiciary, that isn’t going to happen for four long, dark years.
To call the Donald pond-slime is an insult to innocent algae. He’s actively evil, bound and determined to destroy our fragile planet and all its creatures in the name of Mammon. He’s too stupid to understand that he, his family, and all his greedy enterprises will go down with the rest of us if he continues to insist that human-caused global warming is Chinese propaganda. Even the Chinese know better, and are taking active measures to curb their carbon and methane emissions.
So what can sentient human beings do to resist the Trumpian dictatorship? First, continue to organize and participate in mass, non-violent protests wherever the fat fool with the dead yellow bird on his head is apt to show up, and be prepared to be arrested, the way the civil-rights marchers were when Reverend King led them into the bastions of the Jim Crow south. If you are too old, infirm, or understandably daunted by the prospect of bodily harm inflicted upon you by howling mobs with guns, use the written word, either through a blog like this one, disseminated to everyone you know, or via social media, to discredit the unelected occupant of the White House, and above all, mock him unmercifully. Twist his tweets around, rewrite them, and twitter them back at him. The one thing bullies can’t bear is being laughed at.
Try to be of good cheer during the holiday season. It’s the darkest, coldest time of the year, but the hard weather is alleviated by the light and warmth of gatherings with friends and family. Remember the old bromide that the night is always darkest just before the dawn. Humpty Drumpfty is already sowing the seeds of his own destruction, and when the tangling weeds grow tall enough, they will trip him up and take him down.