Songs of the Doomed

 “It was a loving crowd to by the way. There was a lot of love. I’ve heard that from everybody.” Former President Donald J. Trump on January 6. 

So, January 6, 2021 was a love fest. The Capitol police were ushering Trump’s people into the building, handing out cut flowers, bottles of water, canapes, wetnaps. It was like an outdoor picnic in the middle of winter, an outpouring of patriotic spirit, a red, white and blue day of celebration. And then Mike Pence fucked it all up.

Jesus Christ. I listened to some of Trump’s absolutely bat shit interview with Carol Leonning and Philip Rucker, Washington Post reporters and co-authors of I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year. I have no idea how Leonning and Rucker managed to keep looks of utter disbelief from taking over their faces. Trump’s rambling, fact-free, bullshit, completely-untethered-from-reality monologues are hard to listen to. Trump is every bloated, self-satisfied, stupid relative who gets tanked on Thanksgiving and subjects his entire family to outlandish tales of his own greatness. It’s just embarrassing that this malignant jackass was once the president of this beleaguered nation. Breathtaking mental illness. Never very bright to begin with, Trump has now slipped over the edge into total dementia. Trump actually makes Richard Nixon’s drunken midnight rants sound sane and rational. 

“Well, I heard,” Trump says. From who, Donald? The cheering throng inside your head? I imagine Hunter S. Thompson interviewing Trump, and in the first thirty seconds fixing the former president with a whiskey stare and saying, “Hey, what the fuck’s wrong with you? Are you really this fucked up, and without drugs? Sweet Jesus.” Leonning and Rucker spent more than two brain-withering hours with Trump. That’s a form of mental torture, like blasting the rankest heavy metal music into a bare prison cell for hours at a time in order to soften a prisoner up for interrogation. Did Leonning and Rucker head straight for the bar at Mar-A-Lago when they finished? Did they retreat to their rental car and fire up a fatty? To hear Trump talk about the Constitution, a document he’s never read and wouldn’t understand if he bothered to read it, and reference Thomas Jefferson, was perverse and disturbing. Dealing with nutters is never easy. But imagine the difficulty factor when the nutter is the ex-president of the most powerful military force on Earth. 

Don’t look into his eyes, never look into his eyes, it will melt your brain. 

I began this blog many years ago with the unshakeable belief that George W. Bush was the dumbest president in American history. Compared to Trump, Bush is like a member of Mensa or a Rhodes scholar. It’s hideous. Trump is Captain Ahab and Captain Queeg and Captain Bligh rolled into one fat ball. Monstrous, utterly monstrous. And millions of people believe this human piece of flotsam is the Second Coming. What the fuck is wrong with this country? Do we have dementia? Too much processed food, reality TV, opioids, booze, beer, weed, porn, and online shopping? Can an entire nation suffer cognitive decline? Maybe. You know how when we talk about great athletes who play team sports, like Michael Jordan, Tom Brady (fucking Trumper), Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, Lionel Messi, etc., we say one measure of their greatness is their ability to make their teammates better? We always say that because it’s true. Great players lift the level of play of those around them. Now, think about Trump and the motley collection of dickheads, sycophants, thieves, and miscreants who surround him. Unlike a Messi, Trump makes the people around him dumber, weaker, even more idiotic. I mean, if Trump told Kevin McCarthy to fall to his knees and howl like a dog, I have no doubt that McCarthy would do it. 

Listening to Trump ramble for less than five minutes made my heart pound and my blood pressure rise. I felt a strange tingling around my left temple. I had to pull a book by Hunter S. Thompson from my shelf and seek a quote to make me feel better, it being too early in the day for a shot of single-malt or a toke or an edible. I found this in Songs of the Doomed: “We are raising a whole generation in this country that will never know what it feels like to rise up together and flog a crooked president out of the White House.” No, doc, it’s so bad now a generation of meatheads rises up to put a deranged and crooked president BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE. 

We’re all singing songs of the doomed now, folks...