Trump-Drunk

‘End Times’ for ‘Pipsqueak Putin’

Bigots, boobs & bible bullies—Aus! Weg mit Dir!

by Thomas Adcock

Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock

NEW YORK CITY, near America

Sadly for the United States and beyond, a degenerate fraudster, mendacious vulgarian, misogynistic swine, and all-round scrofulous lout occupies the White House—from whence he reigns as the racist godhead of a fascistic religio-political cult.

The reasons for this plague of the moment are murky, debatable, and pathetic. Among them: Hillary Clinton’s stunningly inept presidential campaign of 2016; a cyber-attack of Russian disinformation redounding to Ms. Clinton’s opponent, a certain orange-faced Kremlin supplicant; racial and sexual anxieties of the hateful; and a national Weltschmerz in which millions of voters confused celebrity with human worth, and felt a false hunger for the simplicity of authoritarian order and certitude.

That was the zeitgeist of two years ago.

But as I now write, the American mood shows improvement. Soon enough, His Orangeness shall be gone with the wind. Leaving behind only bewildered klatches of hung-over Trump-drunk suckers, wallowing in a know-nothing haze of zombie devotion to Dear Leader.

And who or what is behind this heartening news?

Certainly not the sclerotic Congress, which refuses to oust the tutti di capi of a kleptocratic ship of fools he has empowered. Nor does Congress so much as draft a resolution of censure against a president who has disrespected traditional U.S. allies and world opinion by withdrawing America from the Trans-Pacific  Partnership trade pact, the Paris Climate Agreement, and now the Iran Nuclear Armaments Deal. (Perhaps next he will next withdraw from the U.S. Constitution and declare himself the reincarnation of the sun king Louis XIV.)

Instead, credit for what appears to be the early stages of a genuine “morning in America” are we ordinary Joes and Janes.

Indeed, We the People are on the march—toward justice for the unjust, toward civility and decency and mercy. We of a beautifully expanding demography are united in national self-respect: Our country of strivers and inventors and revolutionists is the world’s oldest continuing democracy, and we damn well insist on keeping it that way—in spite of Donald J. Trump.

The whole wide world hears our determination in the roar of a patriotic chant from tens of millions of us who for the past seventeen months of an obscene presidency have demonstrated our resistance in the streets of cities throughout the land:

“This-is-what-democracy-looks-like!”

To borrow a locution from radical Christianists loyal unto death to the sinner-in-chief, we of sound mind happily prepare for the End Times: the imminent departure of Mr. Trump, and a fitting coda for the clumsy troupe of danseurs and danseuses performing a shoddy ballet of incompetence, cruelty, and corruption that defines his regime.

An unholy number of my landsmen made a mistake in November 2016, though it is fairly said that the election of Donald Trump—a “sexist pig,” as MSNBC Television host Mika Brzezinski clocks him—is among the least of entries in our nation’s crime blotter. For perspective, we remember the slaughter of Native Americans in the name of European civilization, more than two centuries of African enslavement in the cause of agrarian prosperity for Dixie plutocrats, the torture of captured enemies during the “war on terror,” and the ongoing madness of gun fanaticism.

In any case, the election of Mr. Trump is an eminently atoneable sin. We the People are busily setting the redemptive course.

Day by day, thanks to robust journalism, we recognize the president as a pipsqueak Putin—a yellow-haired man with all the bravado and threat of his Russian idol, though not a whit of his cunning brain. By his words and deeds, Donald Trump is hoisting himself with his own petard.

Even some of the president’s natural allies are fleeing a lost cause. For example, veteran party strategist Steve Schmidt recently said of the president’s team: “We’ve never quite seen the assemblage of crooks, just outright weirdoes, wife beaters, drunk drivers, complete and total incompetents.”

Time draws nigh when the double-dealing house of cards that is Mr. Trump’s squalid existence will collapse.

At first, we Americans were amused by the sexual hijinks of an oafish, 71-year-old, flabby-chested narcissist who buys hair restoration products by the crate in order to maintain a startling pompadour—one frequently cited as the male equivalent of a push-up bra. Ultimately, however, Donald Trump made us nauseous. Especially so upon learning that he cheated on Wife #2 (certifiably) and Wife #3 (allegedly, as my lawyer advises) during and shortly after their respective pregnancies. In legal filings related to their 1992 divorce, Wife #1 accused “The Donald” of marital rape.

In the month prior to his election, The Donald said of his conquests, “When you’re a star, they let you do it…You can do anything…Grab ‘em by the pussy…You can do anything.” In 2004, the star sat for an interview with prurient radio host Howard Stern, he of an equally absurd hairdo. According to an account in Politico magazine:

Trump tells the host, “My daughter Ivanka [then 34 years old] is beautiful.” To which Stern interjects, “By the way, your daughter—” Trump finishes Stern’s sentence by repeating, “She’s beautiful.”

“Can I say this?” Stern says. “A piece of ass!“

“Yeah,” Trump replies.

To date, nineteen women have formally accused Mr. Trump of sexual aggression; the president declared he would sue them all for defamation, but has yet to do so. Of late, there is now the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, and her most capable attorney, Michael Avenatti.

Mr. Avenatti leveraged what began as a titillating bit of commonplace contract law into what is now an explosive cause célèbre of widening scope: A growing body of legal evidence, arising from L’affaire Stormy, showing how the rat’s nest of Donald Trump’s business “empire” renders him compromised by Russian oligarchs who gladly capitalize him in lieu of U.S. banks that will not lend him a dime for the very good reason that he is a deadbeat.

Ms. Daniels, seeks freedom from a nondisclosure agreement related to her claim that she and Mr. Trump engaged in carnal knowledge in Las Vegas back in 2006—a tryst Mr. Trump says never occurred. (After all, future First Lady Melania Trump had just given birth to their son, Barron.) Per agreement between pseudonymous parties to said passion—Peggy Peterson (Stormy) and David Dennison (The Donald)—the buxom porn queen was to be paid hush money in the amount of $130,000 (€109,200).

The confidential bargain was struck ten years ago, brokered by the man who invented relevant noms de guerre—Michael Cohen, the presidential consigliere whose professional bona fides were earned at a law school located in a strip mall outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. But it was not until practically Election Eve 2016 that Mr. Cohen came across with actual loot, funneled through a dummy corporation recently discovered to have also received dubious deposits from corporations seeking entrée to the White House, including Columbus Nova of New York—a “multi-strategy investment firm,” according to its website, headed by the American cousin of Russian oligarch Victor Vekselberg, who indirectly pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Trump campaign and inauguration.

A fly in the ointment: Crack attorney Michael Cohen failed to have Donald Trump, alias David Dennison, affix either signature to the 2006 nondisclosure agreement. Thus, the crux of Ms. Daniel’s proposition as party of the first part in her lawsuit against the president: Absent a signature by the party of the second part, the agreement is null and void. Anyhow, in the decade between ‘06 and 2016 she essentially told her story—regardless of a half-signed agreement to keep quiet. With not a trace of irony, or a basic understanding of farce, Mr. Cohen put on his trademark jeer and declared he would counter Ms. Daniels with breach of contract litigation, based on the underlying assignation that Mr. Trump, alias Mr. Dennison, asserts did not happen. Follow?

Damages sought by Mr. Cohen on behalf of Stormy/Peggy would amount to $20 million (€16.88 million), he further declared. So far, the countersuit has not materialized, likely because Mr. Cohen has an overriding concern: His office and home were raided last month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose agents seized trunk loads of recordings and documents related to his greasy work for The Donald.

It seems the federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who ordered the April raid, smells serious funny business—a stink that might well implicate the president in clearly impeachable activity. To wit: conspiracy between the Trump campaign of 2016 and Russian government operatives to thwart Hillary Clinton in favor of the Kremlin’s favorite debtor.

The Michael Cohen episode now playing out in New York—inspired by Stormy Daniels and her disclosures: among them, how Mr. Trump presented his buttocks to her for discipline, hence “Spanky” as the current presidential moniker, and likening Mr. Trump’s swaying coif at peak coital frenzy to that of “a drunken cockatoo”—is the latest chapter in a head-spinning book of criminal investigation into the down-low seediness of the aforementioned capo di tutti capi. Meantime in Washington, special counsel Robert Mueller has racked up criminal indictments and/or guilty pleas from four Trump operatives, three Moscow-based corporations, and thirteen Russian oligarchs.

Wherever he might be—eyes glued to his favorite right-wing television “news” programs, at golf courses where fully one-quarter of his time in office has been spent, or seated upon a White House toilet whilst attending to what aides reference as his morning “poop-tweets”—Donald Trump fusses and fumes. At some level, he must surely understand his fate.

And the beat goes on.

What Mr. Trump may never grasp is this: The American legal system—and in large measure our democracy—depends on citizens’ believing in the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God. At this juncture, we believe that a porn queen personifies the truth that shall set us free of a pipsqueak Putin.

Moving on:

After the sorry result of Election Day 2016,voters sobered up. As a result, We the People have sent to state and municipal offices those candidates who stood in disagreement with Donald Trump and his ilk: the bigots, boobs, and bible bullies who constitute his base of political support—both within official Washington under the chokehold of a Republican Party prostituted by Mr. Trump, and among the polity of pretenders to the cause of Jesus. The latter group has excused Mr. Trump’s sexual predation, ignored his untruthfulness, basked in the darkness of his ignorance, and cheered his uncharitable impulses. Impulses that remind us of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.

We have had our fill of this gang of deplorables, and have begun a righteous chorus of Auf! Weg mit Dir! (Out! Be gone with you!) In all but a handful of post-2016 political contests, men and women of good heart triumphed over Mr. Trump and retrograde Republicans. They overcame the homophobic intolerance, white racism, and idiocy that Mr. Trump and his partisans encourage.

Voters around the country have now flipped some forty state legislative seats long held by Republicans, representing communities that preferred Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton in 2016, mostly by lopsided margins. The backlash against Trumpism has further produced two liberal mayors in contests tinged with racism, added a U.S. Senate seat for the Democratic Party in the bedrock Republican state of Alabama, and won a congressional House seat in a decades-long Republican district of Pennsylvania.

Such triumphs portend further progress in this upcoming elections this November, projected by every opinion poll there is to be a Democratic tsunami that will wrest control of Congress from the Republicans.

Consider my seven favorite victories:

Danica Roem, a 33-year-old openly transgender journalist in conservative southern Virginia, was elected to her state’s House of Delegates. She campaigned on the kitchen-table issue of public infrastructure investment as a means of job creation. In doing so, she handily defeated Republican incumbent Bob Marshall, the state’s self-proclaimed “chief homophobe” of the Virginia legislature.

Wilmot Collins, a 54-year-old Liberian-born refugee, was elected the first African American mayor of Helena, Montana—where 93.47 percent of the 77,414 residents are homegrown Caucasians. Statewide, the population is 90 percent white.

A federal social worker by profession, Mr. Collins conducted a door-to-door shoe leather campaign in every neighborhood of the city to defeat four-term Republican incumbent James E. Smith—an ally of the nazi-friendly, anti-immigrant organization ACT for America.

Doug Jones is a 64-year-old former federal prosecutor from 1997 to 2001 who brought long delayed justice to a pair of Ku Klux Klansmen for their despicable roles in the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young girls. His upset win for a U.S. Senate seat ended the chequered political career of Roy S. Moore, chief judge of the Alabama Supreme Court and ardent Christianist Republican.

Several women accused Mr. Moore, 71, of inappropriate sexual conduct when they were teenage girls. Like the president he admires, Mr. Moore denied the charges and threatened to sue for character defamation—but never did.

Last year, Mr. Moore was declared persona non grata by the management of an Alabama shopping mall he allegedly cruised for teenage girls.

Jenny Durkan, 59, is the first woman since the 1920s and the second consecutive open lesbian to become mayor of Seattle, a west coast metropolis in the state of Washington. Like Mr. Jones, she is a former federal prosecutor, appointed by President Barack Obama. She defeated Carol Consuela Moon, an urban planner and that rarest of political creatures nowaday—an old-fashioned moderate Republican.

Ravinder Bhalla, a 44-year-old civil rights lawyer who shows religious devotion by wearing a turban, is the first Sikh mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey. He won office despite a racist whispering campaign, capped by a notorious flier linked to his opponent, Councilman Michael DeFusco. The flier pictured Mr. Bhalla and headwear not customarily seen in Hoboken, and read: “Don’t let TERRORISM take over our Town!”

Andrea Jenkins is the first transgender black woman elected to the city council of Minneapolis, Minnesota. A 56-year-old poet and community activist, Ms. Jenkins won a whopping seventy-three percent of the vote in her ward.

In her victory speech, she said, “I know firsthand the feeling of being marginalized, left out, thrown under the bus. Those days are over. We don’t just want a seat at the table, we want to set the table.”

Conor Lamb, a 33-year-old lawyer and ex-Marine became a Democratic congressman in a special election last March. He will represent a deeply conservative region of southwest Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump bested Hillary Clinton in 2016 by twenty points. Mr. Lamb decided on his candidacy when Republican incumbent Tim “I was Trump before Trump” Murphy resigned in disgrace amid revelations that he had urged his extramarital paramour to have an abortion, never mind his staunch anti-abortion legislative record.

Mr. Lamb prevailed over Republican Rick Saccone, the beneficiary of $9 million (€7.54 million) in campaign funds from his party’s national organization—five times the Lamb campaign budget.

The Republican National Committee rightly saw the Lamb-Saccone race as a referendum on Trumpism. Both the president and his son, Donald Trump Jr., flew to Pennsylvania to stump for Mr. Saccone.

In a raucous Saccone rally, Trump père turned to his hapless Republican comrade and said, “I don’t want to put pressure on you, Rick, but the world is watching.”

A sure sign The Donald is panicky: First Lady Melania Trump gets trotted out to the Rose Garden to make nice with the “fake news media,” as her husband puts it. Mrs. Trump’s most recent appearance was Tuesday, May 8, when she delivered an oh-so-motherly address on the need to regard children as precious little folk deserving of attention and love and protection from the very sort of schoolyard bullies that the president was in his short pants days.

The title of her talk, theoretically meant to spark a compassionate movement in the interest of our little ones, was “Be Best.”

We tend to give a pass to Mrs. Trump, feeling badly for her due to the seat moistener of a husband she must endure (at least for now). We are charmed by her elegant appearance and seductive Eastern European accent. We forget that she is a liar.

Upon arrival in America, Melania Trump, née Melanija Knavs, advertised herself as having earned a degree in architecture and design from the University of Ljubljana, capital of her native Slovenia. But in July of 2016, as Mrs. Trump prepared to address the Republican National Convention, journalists back in Ljubljana reported that no one at the university had ever heard of Melanija Knavs, presumably the name by which she would register as a student. Her claim of architectural studies was promptly scrubbed from Mrs. Trump’s website.

Her convention address, too, was a lie. Major portions of it were plagiarized from a speech delivered by former First Lady Michelle Obama.

And finally, Mrs. Trump distributed a booklet to journalists during her “Be Best” show. She intimated authorship. Hours later, however, the booklet was discovered to have been published by the Federal Trade Commission during the Obama administration. Even “Be Best” was a theft: As it turns out, Mrs. Obama used those very words as a tagline for her own sentiments on childrearing.

In addition to her Rose Garden performance as a useful distraction from the president’s embarrassments, Mrs. Trump’s speech was likely intended to mask two anti-child actions undertaken the very same day by officials of her husband’s odious administration:

• In California, U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions vowed to continue the Trump policy of yanking children from the arms of desperately poor and frightened parents who slip across the southern border in the interest of protecting their young from violence and poverty.
• The Department of Health and Human Services made good on its promise of severe budget cuts, accordingly slashing billions of dollars from federal programs that assist needy children and their struggling families.

Which brings me to the subject of inscrutable support for Donald J. Trump within the evangelical Christian community, whose members seem not have read the Holy Scriptures on the topics of welcoming strangers as their religious duty—folks like Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus back in the day—and their  responsibility for the economically disadvantaged. To wit:

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me…”—Matthew 25:35

“He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God”—Proverbs 14:31

As I said, I find this community inscrutable. They are mostly the same people who thought Barack Obama was a Muslim. Now they think The Donald is a Christian. Perhaps the First Lady was thinking of them when she spoke of bullies. I wish them luck on the glorious day they’re raptured to Heaven.

Stormy Daniels, as it turns out, seems not to be your skank of yesteryear. In fact, she is smart and funny and dead-on accurate in speaking of goings-on in this dreadful era of Trump. “Politics,” she has opined, “is no dirtier a job than the one I’m in.”

—Thomas Adcock is America correspondent for CulturMag