I'm not sure what more I can say about the astounding descent into howling madness that is Trump 47 than what I've already said over and over and over again.
Except that the scum in the GriftSkyBlue Reflecting Pool is the least-toxic scum currently associated with this Administration.
It's difficult for me, who lived through Nixon criming and Reagan selling missiles to the mullahs and Dubya getting GIs waxed in Southwest Asia and Felony Fats 45 helping kill millions with a preventable pandemic disease, to really get my mind around how utterly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously awful the Second Coming of Tubby has been and will be.
Except this evening it's all going to be there. As Jim Wright sums it up:
"Jumping dirt bikes. UFC cage fights. Roaring 4-wheelers. Gratuitous military displays. Way too loud redneck music. Port-O-Potties and overflowing trashcans full of Taco Bell and McDonalds. All it needs is a Donut Burger stand and a 4-H cowbarn."
Words alone don't begin to describe the white trash tackiness of the Orange Fuhrer's Führergeburtstag. Here's the visual:
I...I...fuck. Words fail me.
All this lacks is a sagging couch on the West Portico and a rusted-out Oldsmobile up on blocks where the Rose Garden used to be.
Why is this a problem?
Because, frankly, I know that the world is full of people who love this grubby low-rent shit. The point is that the people who are supposed to be "leaders", the people We the People elect to do the hard work of governance, are supposed to be better than that.
I don't want to have some redneck goober in the Oval Office. In the Senate. Fuck, I don't want to have them in my local county commission.
Yet here we are.
And Trump being Trump - which is to say, a liar and thief - of course there's a grift:
"The Ultimate Fighting Championship announced on Friday that it will pay bonuses to fighters in a form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial at the heavily publicized White House mixed martial arts event on Sunday."
Sweet Baby Jesus. If you wrote this as part of a crime novel not even the most credulous reader would buy it.
There's no bottom to this cesspit. And no visible realistic way to fight free of it, because 1) somewhere between 25% and 40% of the U.S. public love and want it, and 2) the Constitutional framework we have now makes it entirely too easy for that toxic minority to tear the country down to the level of this ignorant crap and difficult to shove it back down into the shithole where it belongs.
I have no idea what comes After Trump.
But I don't think it's going to be good.
The brightest promise of this nation, the lofty aspiration of Liberty and Justice For All, of Equal Justice Under Law, of true republican equity, has always been more of a hope and ideal than a real thing.
Founded by wealthy white men, many of whom were slaveowners, it's hardly surprising that in the history of this nation the wealthy have always taken more than their share.
The Rest of Us have had to fight over the scraps, and those of us even further on the margins, whether from birth or gender or color or belief or...well, all the other "other" things that have set us apart from the rich, the well-born, and the able...have been driven even further down and out, harassed and punished for the crime of not being rich or white or male or "Christian" and every other thing the wingnut horde hates.
That those plutocrats have managed to convince a critical minority of the "rest of us" that, as one of the characters in the awful musical 1776 says, “...most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.”
Or of being on top for being male, or het, or "conservative" or every other damn thing this Administration represents.
The United States has had two immense upheavals where the original white plutocracy was challenged.
One was a civil war.
In theory it was "won" by the foundation of a Second Republic that pulled the people the First Republic had locked into slavery into the body politic.
The "Civil Rights Era" of the late Fifties and Sixties tried to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction (and the social revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties tried to continue that, to do the same for other pushed-down minorities such as women and people who didn't match the conventional stereotypes of gender, sexuality...).
The other was a depression that so threatened the nation with the specter of popular revolution that it forced the wealthy to cede a portion of their wealth and power to the masses.
The original thrones and dominations of 1789 haaaated both of these, and have worked tirelessly to reverse and destroy them.
Much of the Second Republic was undone by the end of the 19th Century. We're now in the process of undoing the New Deal as well as whatever remains of the Civil Rights acts and the individual liberties won between then and 2016.
Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning.
And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.
(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)
