A Solemn Vow

This will be my very last Trump post ever. No other words, no further breath is warranted for this flagrant con man, this congenital liar, this cauldron of debilitating vanity. The person who will be remembered for trafficking in the certifiably conspiratorial, in a web of half-truths based on quarter-truths that has saddled this country for a generation with the doctrine of relativism. The upside-down bible-holder. The 400 day golfer. The groper, rapist, gleeful philanderer. The utterly faithless hero of rube evangelicals. The Head Grifter of a family of grifting rats. The child-cager. The non-wall non-builder. The Covid-denier who cut health benefits for his own supporters before being airlifted to Walter Reed when he himself got Covid. The bleach-injector. The indiscriminate media-cudgel. The traitor, the money-launderer, the shill ridden by Putin bareback. The man who, in the end, governed by nothing but Tweet and whim and jagged illogic. If Trump weren't so morbidly hollow, if his utterances weren't so banal as to be without meaning, he might actually be cast as a tragic figure. To be so small, so fearful, so needy. To be so guided, in each possible move or decision, in every aspect of one's life, by the limitless desire for approval such that it denies one all other qualities: empathy, compassion, joy, humor, a sense of wonder and possibility, is the province of the most pathetic characters in all of literature. If he has accomplished nothing else over four years, in a case that even Rudy Giuliani couldn't botch, was to make clear that he is comprised entirely by greed, clotted lust, the need for acquiescence, acquisition, domination, fealty. He is a boy-tyrant of the type the Romans would immediately have recognized as broken and dangerous and tossed off the Tarpeian Rock. Even the Romans didn't want Trump Steaks. Well, as the ranting, corpulent King Lear of Mar-a-Lago is finally dragged from the White House on January 20th, I will not laugh or celebrate. I will close my eyes and reflect on the damage this country has suffered under his greasy thumb, to the point that we nearly became inured to it out of sheer intellectual and emotional survival, and how close we came to having to endure another four years. Donald Trump is the most successful hustler in the history of the world. We can only hope, as he becomes a civilian again, and his unwarranted protections fall away, that he suffers the fate of all hustlers in the end: being confronted with a debt that can never be repaid.