Garbage People

Italian people are garbage. Same with the Dutch. And those Cubans - chuck them right in the trashcan. As for the Japanese? Garbage people all. Same with anybody from Papua New Guinea or hailing from any of the Micronesian atolls! (I have no idea if one can “hail” from an atoll because I only have a vague sense of what an atoll even is, but, yes, Micronesia has them.) Ditto for Haitians and Hungarians and any remaining Huguenots. Garbage, garbage, garbage.

The absurdity of anybody – particularly somebody as (allegedly) foul-smelling as our current Commander-in-Chief – demeaning any nationality of people as “garbage,” as he did yesterday during a cabinet meeting regarding Somalians, escapes the boundaries of garden-variety xenophobia and rockets into the rarefied atmosphere of “so-racist-it’s-pitiable”.

Somalia “stinks,” he said. “We don’t them in our country.” He said, “We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” he said, referring to all Somalis as the Vice President “banged the table in encouragement,” according to the New York Times.

Garbage people.

The rank ugliness of such comments erupting from an American president has to be without precedent in modern American history, no? Sure, we had Teddy Roosevelt saying in a speech that, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are,” but he uttered that genocidal bon mot 13 years before he became President.

While Trump’s internal regulation was never great, the guardrails have now rotted into dust. Trump’s body is failing and his mind is gone. At this point, he’s no different than a lunatic running around the asylum convinced he’s Napoleon. Except our Napoleon’s asylum is the White House and while his actual authority does not rival that of the little man in the bicorne hat, it comes pretty close.

Perhaps the blood pooling in his wrists has leaked from his brain. I don’t know. But the fact that his coterie of sycophants supports this behavior alarms me far more than anything that falls out of his sphincteresque mouth hole. Nobody in the room objected to the characterization of their fellow American citizens. “An epic moment,” was how Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described the racist presidential rant. Titanic is an epic, too, but it doesn’t well for most of the passengers.

I can’t even say I’m outraged anymore. Not when every day offers another presidential nadir. In the past few months, we’ve seen Trump’s hand-written birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, which included a reference to a “wonderful secret.” Emails from Epstein implicating Trump. We’ve seen the literal desecration of the White House. We’ve seen him run roughshod over the Constitution, illegally install US Attorneys, persecute his political enemies, make degrading and offensive remarks to female journalists, nod off repeatedly during meetings, maniacally hyper-post to his social media account bizarre conspiracy theories, issue ludicrous executive orders, such as yesterday’s nonsensical nullification of Biden pardons (he has no authority to do so), etc. etc. etc. I mean, I’m not even researching this – you all could probably think of 50 more examples of dysregulated behavior I haven’t even thought of.

The dude is gone.

Which is why, at this point, his words are more pitiable than offensive. When Grandpa wakes up in his Lay-Z-Boy to yell at the television, we don’t get too upset, do we? We just cover him with a throw. Can’t somebody cover this dumb fucker with a throw? Preferably over his stupid, smirking face?

Representative Ilhan Omar, the Somali Congresswoman who has found special purchase as a Trump foil, apparently feels similarly regarding Trump’s state of mind, saying “His obsession with me is creepy. I hope he gets the help he so desperately needs.”

She’s more generous than myself. I don’t care if he gets help. I just want him gone from public life. Gone to South Florida where he can wander around his gilded ballroom in his bathrobe accepting congratulations from burly men with tears in their eyes who might be there or might just be figments of his rotted imagination. “Thank you, sir,” they will say to him. “Thank you for making America great again.”