One Gaping A*Hole

My wife came into the kitchen this morning, alarmed. “I think fucking Donald Trump could be the next president,” she said.

I nodded.

“Fucking fuck fuck,” she said. (I’m paraphrasing a much longer monologue)

Like many of you, I’ve been reading the doomsday predictions of another Trump administration from all the newspaper prophets. They all agree that we’re in for some form of “dictatorship,” although I’m not sure what that would actually look like in an American context. I’m having a hard time imagining the National Guard rounding up the so-called “vermin” Trump targeted in a recent speech. The new Muslim ban, invading Mexico, arresting political enemies. All of it seems a bit hazy to me in terms of coming to pass. At the same time, as Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins memorably said, “I’m sure I’d feel a lot worse if I weren’t under such heavy sedation.”

The other thing that gives me comfort is that the newspaper prophets are almost always wrong.

On the other hand, I agree that Trump stand a good shot of barging back into the White House with a kettle of flapping vultures at his side. Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, Mike Flynn, Matt Gaetz; a rogue’s gallery of self-aggrandizing, oily white foreheads bungling through the White House with their loyalty oaths and Christian purity tests and the spittle flying hot and heavy. It will be government served cold, a smorgasbord of vengeance, cruelty, Christofascism, and corruption. An open trough for those who kiss the fat ring on the small fingers. It will be another four years of barbarians inside the gates. And that’s just on the domestic side. The foreign affairs side will likely be just as bad. Get ready to rename the Lincoln Bedroom for the dude currently sitting in the Kremlin. Get ready for more beautiful letters from Kim Jong-Un. Get ready for Bibi and Orban and Assad, oh my!

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

It's maddening that the American memory is so short that, less than four years after he left Washington with the Capitol Building still glittering with broken glass, about half of the country is willing to welcome back the twice-impeached, currently indicted Trump back with open arms. How is such a thing possible? How does anybody compare him favorably with the competent, never-indicted, never-impeached Biden? Are we blinkered or bored? Or are we so addled with ADHD that we just want whoever will throw as much shit at us as we can possibly take? To paraphrase Dr. Ruth Westheimer: “What is our fucking problem?”

I have no idea what a second Trump presidency will look like. Or, rather, I know what it’s supposed to look like but I don’t know whether he’ll be able to actually do the things he says he want to do, like fire tens of thousands of federal workers. Yes, I assume he will be better at bending the bureaucracy to his will than during his first four years, but I also wonder the bureaucracy will be better at defiance, slow-walking, and yessing his directives to death. Nor do I know how the military will respond to questionable orders or the invocation of the Insurgency Act (provided such a thing happens.) I don’t know how any of this will play out, including whether he’ll wind up indicted before the election. Will they have to spring him for jail to give him a ride to his inauguration?

One silver lining is that people continually underestimate Joe Biden. I certainly did. I remember the primaries a few years ago when it looked like Biden was just going to flop around on debate stages for a while before eventually dropping out. Instead, he’s the guy sitting in the Oval Office right now instead of running around Iowa like a ringmaster in search of a circus.

Meanwhile, Biden’s liver-spotted hand remains on the till. Despite everything, we’re doing ok with Ol’ Joe in charge. Nobody outside his administration would argue we’re doing great, but in the wake of a pandemic and in the midst of two wars, we’re doing better than simply hanging on. Would things be better with an erratic narcissist and his band of ghouls at the helm? Would you rather have Laura Loomer fielding questions from the press every day? Do you want Marjorie Taylor Greene setting education policy? What about Jim Jordan heading up the Department of Justice? How are we feeling about Supreme Court Justice Ted Cruz?

Why is half of the nation in thrall with bullies and nincompoops? What is it about hate that so excites the American imagination? Maybe it’s simply a fault of the human species writ large. History is obviously littered with charismatic leaders who promise glory and deliver ruin. The difference between those guys and ours is that we saw the effects of a Trump presidency already: we saw the incompetence, the anger, the diffidence, mendacity, and blatant corruption.  We saw the way he cleaved the country in two, sullied our relationships with our allies while coddling the despotic. We saw the bungling of a medical emergency: first, the denial, then the mismanagement. We saw lives lost that needn’t have been lost. We suffered through scandal after scandal after scandal. We lived through “I really don’t care, do you?” We saw all the barking seals at his hate rallies. We saw the resignations, the firings, the daily soap opera of who was in and who was out, and we were supposed to somehow believe that all of this normal. It wasn’t. Those who worked for the man have testified at his inadequacy for the job. Think about that: the people who ought to be most indebted to Trump for giving them the opportunity of a lifetime are the ones warning him off us in the loudest possible terms. How big of a gaping asshole do you have to be for that to be case? And yet, here we are, less than a year away from, perhaps, installing him back into an office he has “joked” about never leaving.

Fucking fuck fuck, indeed.