Justice is Nigh for Trump
His Cult Keeps the Fascist Faith
A promise of national catharsis in November
by Thomas Adcock
Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock
NEW YORK CITY, near America
I am happy to report that America’s most repulsive individual, Donald J. Trump, is not long for Washington. The current presidency—a circus of the tawdry, the pathetic, the crazy, the criminal, and the cruel—cannot sustain itself, no matter that its ringmaster is a virtuoso of ballyhoo and bullcrap.
He is also a ringmaster in a death spiral. Omens abound.
First and foremost—midterm Election Day, come the sixth of November. All national polling data predict a massive rebuke to Mr. Trump personally and his vomitous Republican Party régime of dullards, sycophants, and grifting comrades generally. Bring on the catharsis!
…Never mind true believers in the religio-political cult of Holy Trumpism. They will claim the vote was “rigged,” that a widespread ouster of their messiah’s bootlicks in the majority Republican Congress was “fake news.” The cultists have gone clean through the looking glass. They hold unwavering faith in what was revealed unto them only last month when Der strohköpfige Führer addressed a military veterans’ group in the Republican stronghold of Kansas: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading,” declareth The Lord Almighty Donald, “is not what’s happening.”
Secondly—As summer fades to autumn, the various criminal investigations, indictments, and trials involving Mr. Trump and/or accomplices advance toward justicial dénouements unlikely to please the nakedly guilty. Backstairs employees at the White House whisper to journalists of a panicky president unable to sleep through the night, of a muttering man roaming the residential corridors in his bathrobe at all hours.
…I am reliably informed that presidential staffers have established a wagering pool as to the date and precise hour of Dear Leader’s departure, voluntarily or otherwise; a bonus payout will accrue should the farewell event require a straightjacket.
Moreover—These past nine months have recorded dozens of once-inconceivable victories for the Democratic Party opposition over Republican incumbents in state and municipal political races from coast to coast, as well as special congressional elections in the Trump-loving Alabama and post-industrial Pennsylvania. To wit:
- Democrats have flipped more than forty long-held Republican legislative seats in all regions of the United States since Mr. Trump took office, more than half in states where the Trump campaign prevailed in 2016.
- Wilmot Collins, the Democratic mayor of the far West city of Helena, defeated four-term incumbent Republican James E. Smith, the Trumpanoidal scourge of dark-complexioned immigrants and refugees slowly making their way to the virtually all-white state of Montana. Mayor Collins, who now presides over a city that is ninety-four percent white, is a refugee from Liberia.
- In Alabama, home sweet home to numerous kluxers and cultists, the Republican candidate in a special election for a seat in the United States Senate—to replace Trump-appointed Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—was Trump-endorsed, credibly accused child molester Roy S. Moore. Mr. Moore was handily defeated by Democrat Doug Jones, who earlier in his career as a state prosecutor managed to revive charges against kluxers who escaped justice back in 1963 after they planted bombs in a Birmingham church, killing four little girls. Prosecutor Moore sent the murderous clique of Klansmen to prison.
- In a heavily Republican coal mining district of Pennsylvania that Mr. Trump carried by a twenty percent margin in 2016, Democrat Conor Lamb defeated Congressman Rick Saccone, the Republican contender loudly praised by the president, who personally campaigned for his man. Mr. Lamb was aided in his cause by a newly energized union movement opposed to Mr. Trump’s anti-union policies.
Regardless of the foregoing, it is apparent that Donald Trump continues to view his governmental rôle as that of a high-stepping, brass whistle-blowing drum major leading a ragtag band of tax-cut zealots, brainwashed cultists, plutocrats, sadists, corporatists, golfers, and white supremacists.
—Witness the racist “zero tolerance” immigration initiative, resulting in thousands of Latino children in lockdown at profit-making U.S. concentration camps: toddlers, infants, and teenagers kidnapped from parents seeking legal asylum after fleeing deadly violence in Central and South America. More on this ongoing horror later herein.
*
As an outgrowth of aforementioned panic, the daily presidential poop-tweets—so described by White House aides regrettably familiar with Mr. Trump’s habit of keeping his smartphone firmly in hand whilst (ahem!) laying his morning egg—become ever more conspiratorial, ever more splenetic, ever more revealing of a man whose orb of reality circles a planet unknown to the rest of humankind. Certain persons among his inner circle, and assuredly among mental health professionals, are concerned that Mr. Trump’s head may explode—figuratively, in the manner of a three-year-old at maxime tantrum; or literally, in the manner of a septuagenarian of exaggerated wealth and bluster, a lumpy old fellow accustomed to adulation given to sudden cerebrovascular rupture.
Even Republican allies worry about Mr. Trump’s observable cognitive diminution, first noted during a January press conference at the White House when the president exhibited a herald of mental illness: fragmented speech devoid of content and contextually adrift. Asked a question about corporate tax rates, Mr. Trump’s off-the-rails answer raised eyebrows: “You call places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and you say, you know, How many people do you have?” said the president. “And it’s pretty amazing how many people they have.”
During a Congressional hearing, Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine was caught endorsing the observable when a microphone was accidentally left live. During a sidebar exchange with a Democratic Party colleague who called the president “outright crazy,” Ms. Collins nodded her head in agreement, and responded, “I’m worried.”
—Just for fun: Of late, one Omorosa Manigault-Newman is flogging a tell-all book about her yearlong gig as the sole White House aide of African American persuasion. In an exposé titled “Unhinged,” the alluring author describes the president as a misogynistic racist in “mental decline.” She was known simply as Omorosa when co-starring with The Donald himself in the 2004-05 season of Mr. Trump’s “The Apprentice,” a popular reality TV show. Later in the spin-off TV series “Celebrity Big Brother,” Omorosa experienced a “wardrobe malfunction” that resulted in another sort of exposure. In December 2017, she was exposed to unemployment: Mr. Trump’s majordomo, John Kelly, ordered armed and burly security personnel to escort Omorosa off the White House grounds as she (allegedly) screamed obscenities.
*
The president vastly prefers the hurly-burly gatherings of his cult to the boring business of statecraft. He seems to love such gatherings more than golf itself.
Mr. Trump’s star turns at what has become an American circuit of hillbilly Nuremberg rallies are increasingly shambolic. Accordingly, his cultists are increasingly affected by the Dunning-Kruger effect, as psychologists have identified those rather like the president himself: people of inferior intellect who will unquestionably follow a leader exhibiting the illusion of superiority, even a laughable illusion, thereby believing themselves and their leader in possession of mental prowess far greater than it is.
In other words, Mr. Trump and his ardent supporters are too stupid to know they’re stupid. In a famous pair of poop-tweets from early this year, Mr. Trump exhibited the pathology:
All that a weirdly yellow-haired carnival barker with sanity-free syntax must do to win and maintain fierce loyalty—indeed, all Mr. Trump does—is promise every illusionary promise in the world to an audience ravenous for same; ravenous for affirmation that they, a redneck rabble, share common bonds with an (alleged) billionaire who mounted the summit of world power as president of the United States of America.
—The president is as honorable as he is powerful and brilliant and wise, is he not? (O Lord, we thank Thee for blessing America with a white male heterosexual Christian president, even if he is from Satan-soaked Manhattan.) If Mr. Trump seems to love us, reckon the rabble—ipso facto, y’all are cut from the same cloth, and y’all best listen ‘cause The Donald got ever’thing we want and need, boy!
Do you hear the fast-talking lyrics of “Step Right Up,” written and performed by the great Tom Waits? I do:
Step right up, step right up, step right up—
Everyone’s a winner, bargains galore.
…The quality goes on before the name goes on/
You need perfume? We got perfume. How ‘bout an
engagement ring?
Something for the little lady, something for the little lady, hmm—
We got a year-end clearance, we got a white sale
And smoke-damaged furniture…You can drive it away today.
Act now, act now!
No muss, no fuss, no spills…Everything must go/
Going out of business, going out of business—
Going out of business sale!
Now you’ve heard it advertised, don’t hesitate/
Don’t be caught with your drawers down!
…That’s right, it filets, it chops, it dices, slices/
Never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn…
And it picks up your kids from school.
It gets rid of unwanted facial hair, it gets rid of
embarrassing age spots.
It delivers a pizza, and it lengthens, and it strengthens
…And it’s only a dollar step right up.
Change your shorts, change your life,
Get rid of your wife.
It walks your dog, and it doubles on sax,
Doubles on sax, you can jump back Jack, see you later, alligator.
…It gets rid of your gambling debts, it quits smoking/
It’s a friend, it’s a companion
…And it’s the only product you will ever need.
It takes weight of hips, bust, thighs, chin, midriff,
Gives you dandruff, and finds you a job/
And gives you denture breath…and traveler’s checks.
It’s new, it’s improved, it’s old-fashioned—
Well, it takes care of business, never needs winding.
Gets rid of blackheads, the heartbreak of psoriasis/
‘Cause it’s effective, it’s defective, it creates household odors,
It disinfects, it sanitizes for your protection.
It gives you an erection, it wins the election.
Step right up, step right up, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon!
—Get away from me kid, you bother me.
Step right up, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon!
*
Some of my countrymen say it’s good to laugh at the absurd spectacles of Donald John Trump and his cult. Otherwise, we might drown in despair over what they are doing—and have done—to the nation. Indeed, the distraction of absurdity is tempting amidst the drumbeat of damages.
We are weary. As Charles Blow of the New York Times wrote in his column of July 2: “The constancy of the individual outrages reduces the psychic significance of the collective. Trump is exhausting our mental capacity for indignation.”
Congressman John Lewis—a Democrat from the Deep South state of Georgia, young trouble-maker with multiple arrests during the 1960s civil rights movement, nearly beaten to death by racist officers of the Alabama State Police—counsels us to remain “woke,” as civil rights activists of our time put it. In a statement issued on June 18, the day after journalists finally barged into one of Donald Trump’s numerous outrages—prison camps for children—Mr. Lewis gave counsel worthy of the lion that he is:
“…Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year. It is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
My granda Ben said as much when talking of great truths told to a listening lad: “Tommy,” he said, “the trouble with most people is that they are docile and obedient. Even the smart ones. But from time to time, they may rise to noble occasion.”
That time is now, and decent people are indeed roused to righteous disgust—a noble disgust, a necessary disgust.
Last month, in street demonstrations throughout the U.S., we shook our thunder over what has become the very last straw in Donald J. Trump’s house of straw. And we mean to blow it down.
We are rightly disgusted with Mr. Trump and his crimes against humanity: snatching children from the arms of their parents, including in at least one case an infant being nursed by his mother; consigning children to indeterminate periods in “baby prisons,” so-called; wholesale deportation of asylum seekers who have the right, under American and international law, to flee their countries for safe harbor elsewhere; operating concentration camps where guards are known to sexually abuse their charges.
Add to this the latest order from Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III: Claims of danger at the hands of murderous gangs are no longer grounds for U.S. asylum. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit against Mr. Sessions; for the moment, the attorney general’s order is unimplemented.
But wait, there’s more:
Stephen Miller, senior policy advisor to the president and darling of the alt-right universe of white supremacists and anti-Semites, has been tapped by Donald Trump to finalize plans that would make it difficult or impossible for legal immigrants already established in the U.S. to gain citizenship or to obtain documents necessary for employment if they have ever used a range of social welfare programs—including food assistance for low-income families, children’s health insurance, reduced-price school lunches, housing and/or public transit subsidies.
Mr. Miller is happy to oblige Der strohköpfige Führer with executing an anti-immigrant plan that requires no enabling legislation from Congress, or congressional oversight.
In New York alone, according to Bitta Mostofi, commissioner of immigration affairs, this plan of effective ethnic cleansing would ruin the lives of at least one million residents of the very city where Mr. Miller’s great-Grandfather Wolf Leib Glotzer and great-Grandmother Bessie, passed by the Statue of Liberty en route to asylum in America in 1903 after escaping roving gangs of Cossacks bent on killing Jews in what is now Belarus. Their worldly possessions were the clothes on their backs and the eight dollars between them. Undoubtedly, the late Mr. and Mrs. Glotzer were inspired by a poem etched on the statue’s pedestal, “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus:
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
In an August 2017 interview aired on CNN-Television, the Glotzers’ great-grandson dismissed the importance of the Lazarus verse. “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here,” he said, “[but] the poem was added later on [and] is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.” True, the statue was unveiled in New York Harbor in 1886. The poem was etched into the pedestal in the very year that Bessie and Wolf Leib Glotzer arrived as members of the wretched refuse of their day, only to work hard in sweatshops and eventually prosper as merchants. Contrary to what Mr. Trump said of Latino refugees in announcing his presidential candidacy in 2015—“They’re bringing drugs, and crime, they’re rapists”—today’s immigrant likewise work and prosper.
In a scathing editorial published this month in the online magazine Politico, Mr. Miller’s Uncle Davis Glosser—the surname is anglicized—said of his nephew’s mindset: “[If his] ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”
Elsewhere on the immigration front, consider the president’s current wife, Slovenian immigrant Melania Trump, née Melanija Knavs. On August 9, she attended a private naturalization ceremony in New York for her parents, Amalija and Viktor Knavs. The newest Slovenian-Americans were granted citizenship courtesy of a family unification clause in the federal immigration statute—a clause that her son in-law re-named in a poop-tweet denunciation of same.
Written last November, with characteristic all-capital emphases, Mr. Trump bellowed, “CHAIN MIGRATION must end now! Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!”
Mr. Glosser noted that Donald Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Drumpf, was a German migrant “on the run from military conscription to a new life in the U.S.A.” while his mother is reported to have “fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York.”
Mr. Glasser wrote further in his editorial:
“These facts are important, not only for their grim historical irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. …Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family would have [eventually] been murdered by the nazis, along with [the] two-thousand Jews who remained in Antopol [Belarus]. …[My nephew Stephen] should ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.
Almost every American family has an immigration story of its own based on flight from war, poverty, famine, persecution, fear, or hopelessness. These immigrants became the workers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and soldiers of America.
*
The evil that Donald Trump et al have committed against immigrant children and their parents, for the sake of coalescing a voter cult that holds dear to an orange-faced Führer and the fascist faith, is NOT ACCEPTABLE in my notion of America—the Emma Lazarus notion.
But what do I know? I am merely a mutt mix of Irish escapees from the Great Hunger of the 1840s, impoverished immigrants from England and France, and persecuted Ashkenazi Jews. Worse, by Mr. Trump’s wicked lights, I am a journalist, or as Mr. Trump says, an “enemy of the people.”
I have said this before, and now I’ll say it again, in the firm belief that I speak for millions more disgusted Americans: I hate this country as it is nowadays, and I am not leaving.
Justice is nigh, Mr. Trump.
—Thomas Adcock is America correspondent for CulturMag
—Thomas Adcock is America correspondent* for CulturMag
* Also, according to Donald Trump, ‘enemy of the people’
