New York
On a winter’s morning four years hence, citizens of the United States and the world beyond shall know a date that will live in boldface ecstasy: Saturday, 20 January 2029. For at high noon on that blessed day, the fascistic Washington regime goes poof! as we Americans inaugurate a new president—a man or woman certain to restore national decency by merely showing up.
In the weeks leading up to Inauguration ‘29, the Flatulent Führer, as he is known by those trapped in his vapor trail, will take time to fatefully stink up the Oval Office for auld lang syne. At such moment, he will mutter “Uh, pardon me…” as he uses his fast-fading executive authority to ink a document absolving himself of the stunning array of crimes he committed.
Dawns the boldface day of ‘29: Unacquainted with social graces, Donald J. Trump will absent himself from Washington’s quadrennial pomp and pageantry, thus shirking traditional handshakes and so forth between the outgoing and incoming president. (And why not skip ceremony? The focus of attention will be on someone else, which is simply too much for a pathological narcissist to bear.)
Instead, Mr. Trump will head for the gaudy glitz of Mar-a-Lago aboard the Boeing 747-200B jumbo jet known as Air Force One, his farewell flight out of the nation’s capital courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Once landed at his Florida Xanadu, citizen Trump will commence doing that for which he is singularly qualified: He will moisten a chair wide enough to accommodate his adiposity, set the television dial to rightwing fever dreams of Fox “News” presenters, and gobble hamburger sandwiches imported from McDonalds—hamberders, as he calls them whilst chewing, noisily.
—NOTE: The foregoing scenario presumes that Donald Trump’s presidential life might extend to his last day in office, at which time he would be 83 years old. By the looks of him, however, one could doubt his ever becoming an octonegarian; he appears to be one hamberder away from a major coronary event.
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Soon after the boldface date, we shall be left with the injustice of Donald Trump’s physical freedom despite his openly corrupt presidency and his squalid personal conduct. That we have been unable or unwilling to incarcerate him, or to simply shun him, is a stain on the American character.
As a nation, we have countenanced the foremost purpose of Mr. Trump’s White House ambition: immunity from being frog-marched to jail. We’ve become blind to his rap sheet of criminal convictions, civil violations, pending lawsuits for nonpayment of contracted labor, multi-million dollar legal settlements, and multi-billion dollar gains that seemingly flout the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
Not to mention a daily Niagara of lies and vulgarity and scandal that camouflage Mr. Trump’s rank incompetence, in keeping with a game plan that has served him well: “Flood the zone with shit,” as articulated by Steve Bannon, his political strategist.
We have had cynical presidents in the recent past, viz. a defiant Richard Nixon who said of the 1972 burglary he directed at the Washington headquarters of his political opposition, “I’m not a crook.” How quaint that sounds today compared to a bellicose Donald Trump having declared, in effect, “I am a crook and who the hell cares.”
On May 17, Senator Adam Schiff of California took to the floor of the upper house of Congress and outlined what he called Mr. Trump’s “graft on full display.” He presented colleagues with a catalogue of the “best deals for Donald Trump and the worst deals for the American people.” Included on the Schiff list:
• DEALS ON WHEELS. With nosediving U.S. and European sales of Elon Musk’s sporty Tesla cars, Mr. Trump stepped out of the Oval Office for a March 14 photo stunt on the White House lawn. There, the president surveyed a bumper-to-bumper line-up of Mr. Musk’s electric vehicles. He advised the common folk to purchase the vehicles despite Mr. Musk’s widespread unpopularity; for his own driving pleasure, the president chose a candy apple red Tesla Model-S. In turn, Mr. Musk gifted the Trump political apparatus with $100 million (€88.61 million).
• ACTION! Filming is underway for a pop-biography of the president’s current bride, the former nude model Melania Trump, née Melanija Knavs of Slovenia. The film’s production company, Amazon, made a direct cash payment to the Trump family of $40 million (€35.45). Film sponsorships, at $10 million each (€8.86 million), are available to the usual corporate fat cats with budgets for such baksheesh. Fat cats will be given film credits and “free” invitations to the documentary’s gala premier.
• WHAT’S THE PASSWORD, FAT FELLA? Donald Trump and sons Eric and Don Junior are currently scouting a Washington location for “The Executive Branch,” a whimsical name for their planned members-only saloon—where presidential supplicants must pony up a half-million dollar cover charge for the privilege of boozing with the First Brood, as it were. Brisk business is reasonably expected.
• GOING UP & “FORE!” During his May presidential tour of authoritarian states in the Middle East, Mr. Trump took time out from being flattered and fêted to wrap up a pair of personal matters: 1) construction of an 80-storey luxury hotel and residential tower in the artificial city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where apartments start at $2 million (€0.89 million), rising to tens of millions for lofty penthouses; and 2) business partnership between Mr. Trump’s corporate entity and the government of Qatar for golf course construction in Doha at an estimated cost of $5.5 billion (€4.89 billion).
• BIG BIRD. Speaking of Qatar, the most egregious of late is his acceptance of that country’s Boeing 747-8i jet, the largest and most modern of the 747 series—a so-called “palace in the sky” with interior decor in the Arabian Nights architectural style. Valued at $400 million (€356 million), the immense plane was previously used by King Abdullah II of Jordan. Ostensibly for use as a temporary substitute for America’s Air Force One, the Qatari craft would revert to ownership by the putative Trump Library upon its namesake’s departure from public office.
To say that the president’s lucrative extracurricular activities are national embarrassments—or should be—is felony understatement. He has attached yet more hypocrisy to his MAGA slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Were he a fully evolved primate, Donald Trump should be ashamed of himself.
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Greed, graft, and gluttony constitute the lighter side of Donald Trump’s soul. His dark side is one of mindless cruelty; call it moral criminality.
Criminal cruelty best exemplified by an immigration policy driven by racism; a policy largely affecting those seeking the international right of refuge from poverty and lethal violence in their home countries—at present in the failed or failing states of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central Africa.
Such dark-complexioned migrants are routinely described by Mr. Trump as an “invasion force” of “rapists, murderers, and escapees from lunatic asylums.” Screeds of this nature are just as routinely free of supporting evidence.
During his presidential election campaign of last year, Mr. Trump singled out a community of Haitian expatriates in the small city of Springfield, Ohio, to showcase his racist fantasies: With the usual absence of evidence, and notwithstanding the welcome given to industrious black newcomers by the city’s white mayor and majority white citizenry, Donald Trump claimed the following in a nationally televised debate:
“In Springfield, they [Haitians] are eating the dogs. The people that (sic) came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating. They are eating the pets of the people that (sic) live there.”
Elsewhere in moral criminality, these latest matters:
• HEIL, GESTAPO! On May 8 in Worcester, Massachusetts, a woman was lured out of her home on Eureka Street by agents of Donald Trump’s favorite national police unit—the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known by the chilling acronym ICE. The federales, aided by Worcester cops despite municipal sanctuary law that prohibits exactly such local-federal coöperation, arrested the woman and began dragging her off to an unmarked car as her teenage daughter ran screaming into the street. Neighbors then resisted, assembling quickly to surround agents and cops. Chaos ensued as federales responded by grabbing an infant from the arms of a young neighborhood woman and slammed the teenage daughter face down onto a sidewalk, slapped her in handcuffs, and arrested as well. All was caught on video recovered from police body cameras.
• THAT IS THE QUESTION. On May 21 here in New York City, a 20-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker was arrested by ICE agents in the lobby of an immigration courthouse in lower Manhattan—immediately after appearing before a judge, a mandatory step in accordance with the U.S. asylum process. His first name is Dylan; he asks that reporters withhold his last name. Dylan has not so much as a jaywalking ticket on his record. Nevertheless, he was whisked off to a detention center for “illegal aliens,” as Mr. Trump calls them. On the day of his arrest, Dylan dealt with a hard question: Knowing that ICE agents have begun prowling about the corridors of immigration courts throughout the country, do I appear before the judge as required or do I not? That is the question. The answer now affects those Dylan left behind in a Bronx shelter for migrants—two young siblings and his mother, for whom he is sole support. It is not known when, or if, Dylan will see his family again.
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There is an easy way (maybe) to gain legal status as a non-citizen U.S. resident, and then there is the not-so-easy way. Or actually, either route might be considered not-so-easy. Those qualified may take their pick:
OPTION #1 – easy way:
Back in February, a very excited president convened the White House press corps to announce his newest brainchild—the “Gold Card” visa for permanent U.S. residency and a pathway to American citizenship.
A steal at only $5 million (€4.4 million), the card comes with an embossed likeness of a grinning Mr. Trump, who promised to commence sale of the visas “in about two weeks.”
As I write, more than twelve weeks after Mr. Trump’s hot new pledge, the Gold Card appears to be going the way of Trump Steaks, Trump Water, Trump Suits, Trump Casinos, Trump University, Trump World magazine, Trump Vodka…et cetera, et cetera.
“The challenges are daunting to be able to actually pull this off,” said longtime Wall Street investment counselor Nuri Katz in an interview with Forbes magazine. “Congress would need to create new immigration and tax laws to regulate the Trump Gold Card.”
Mr. Katz added, “Right now, there is no real program and no details…and there’s no law. There’s just a lot of marketing and warming up the market.”
But beneath the yellow fluff of Donald Trump’s elaborate hairdo, is a mind forever churning over ways of persuading the morbidly wealthy to part with their purses. Stay tuned, the $5 million Gold Card may eventually take hold.
OPTION #2 – not-so-easy way:
As everyone knows, television folks out in Hollywood will entertain any idea at any time, the more crackbrained the better. I myself once pitched “The Assassination Show,” in which gangsters with expertise in the wicked art of whacking gather in a studio to plot the bloody end of a world leader whose identity is to be guessed by the viewing audience—in the nick of time.
Not so wild an idea, yes?
Imagine the pitch session for “Squid Game,” the wildly successful survival series written and produced by the South Korean filmmaker Hwang Dong-hyuk and streamed worldwide via Netflix (with a third season to begin June 27). In “Squid,” desperate contestants in serious financial straits bet their lives in Herculean competition with one another for a gigantic ball of cash sure to settle their debts.
Imagine if desperate migrants—dirt poor and fearing the realistic chance of being murdered or tortured or enslaved in some horrid Third World backwater; desperados yearning to breathe free in the vaunted Land of Liberty—were able to sign up as contestants in a reality-TV show with U.S. citizenship as the prize. Naturally, they would be put through some horrid paces along the way; one man’s horror, after all, is another man’s prime time TV entertainment. This concept goes back to Roman Coliseum days.
Not so wild an idea, yes?
No. And why no? Because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is contemplating a rôle in production of “The America Show,” based on a pitch by Canadian TV writer-producer Rob Worsoff. The concept: Real life immigrants in desperate straits compete for American citizenship by demonstrating how they can be as American as apple pie and baseball and puppy dogs.
I foresee one hitch. Homeland Security is headed by the empty-headed, Trump-appointed Kristi Noem, who famously acknowledged the day she took a troublesome puppy dog down into a gravel pit in her home state of South Dakota and shot it to death.
As someone comfortable about such a thing, someone who is often posed with heavy-duty guns for government photo-ops, Ms. Noem is quite interested in Mr. Worsoff’s notions for serial elimination of contestants selected for “The America Show.”
My counsel to potential contestants: Keep in mind that there is nothing more American than a gun, a nice big loud gun. Incorporating this reality into your adventure in television will bolster your chance at becoming a real live, gun totin’ Yankee Doodle type. Always remember, there are more guns than people in America, population 340 million. Further counsel: Since Donald Trump is cozy with captains of the gun industry, try to get him in on your act. You can let him brag about his big achievement last month, wherein he struck a deal with the gun industry to effectively allow the return of rapid-fire machine guns to the American scene—weapons effectively banned by the National Firearms Act of 1934—by way of legalizing a “forced trigger reset” device that attaches to semi-automatic rifles.
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No matter how distasteful, the name Donald Trump will be in our mouths until he’s at long last dead and buried. No matter which evening we’re at home watching the television news programs, there he is with the visage of a rancid kumquat.
He is the quotable Page One mainstay who commands our daily attention, the barking buffoon who attracts our ridicule, the déclassé plutocrat who gobbles down illicit millions as a player in the incomprehensible game of crypto currency.
It’s all so—what?—cheesy. It’s all so boring, yet somehow rather fascinating. Mr. Trump is the master entertainer of a three-ring circus, we are his popcorn munching audience.
Next up at center ring shall come a Trumpian lollapalooza.
Be there in Washington on June 14!
Otherwise, sit hypnotized before television for live coverage of a Soviet-style parade of deadly power rolling along Constitution Avenue in commemoration of the two-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of America’s military establishment…
…and lest we forget, Donald Trump’s seventy-ninth birthday.
As birthday boy and legally prescribed commander-in-chief of U.S. fighting forces, the president and would-be king shall preside over the show as nearly seven thousand soldiers troop by, accompanied by twenty-eight M1A1 Abrams tanks, twenty-eight Stryker armored personnel carriers, a World War 2-era B-52 bomber secured on a flatbed truck, fifty helicopters in overhead flight, thirty-four horses clopping below, two mules, and one Belgian Malinois army dog.
Estimated cost of the lollapalooza: $45 million (€39.72 million), not counting a million or so for clean-up and post-parade repairs to Constitution Avenue.
The extravagance of the commander-in-chief’s birthday bash in Washington contrasts with the spareness of a burial site he provided for his first of three wives—Czech-born Ivana Marie Trump, née Zelnícková (1949-2022). Here she lies, along the first fairway of Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, a forty-nine minute drive from Manhattan—
The fairway venue pictured above enabled Mr. Trump to claim a tax exemption for cemetery property. The late Ms. Trump’s coffin is seen here with white flowers set atop the soil. Adjacent is a nearly bare patch of dying grass that may be covering what I imagine to be a companion burial plot—likely ready and waiting for the man she married.
I often think of that plot, in tandem with my plan to outlive Donald Trump in order to relieve myself there one glorious day when he too lies beneath the soil.
Alas, public urination is illegal. But dancing is not.
