New York
Apologies, dear readers. Last month’s contribution to this space was an optimistic prediction on the outcome of November’s presidential election here in the United that went horribly wrong. The improbable victory of Donald J. Trump in 2024 was even more improbable than his winning a first four-year term back in 2016.
Along with virtually every other journalist, I thought too highly of my countrymen this second time around. Having lost their senses, a tick more than half the American electorate returned Mr. Trump to the White House, which he’d thoroughly soiled and shamed until being ousted in the election of 2020—a refreshing defeat, albeit one followed by an attempted coup d’état led by three battalions of Trump-crazed devotees. The insurrection achieved five deaths and damages to the Capitol building in Washington amounting to $3 million (€2.84 million).
—NOTE: To date, nearly a thousand of Mr. Trump’s fascist bully-boys have been incarcerated following convictions ranging from vandalism and assault to seditious conspiracy.
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Chagrinned as I am by unfulfilled prediction, America writ large owes a greater apology to the world—for Donald Trump himself. Sound of mind and otherwise, we Americans are now responsible for his upcoming second act. Never mind damning evidence that he is unworthy of public trust or personal respect.
He has never hidden his loathsome proclivities. And he has never faced a male opponent; both times, he has run against highly credentialed and competent women—Senator and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024. In both his campaigns, Donald Trump has slimed the women; this year, he referred to Ms. Harris as “that bitch.”
In his first act as president, Mr. Trump immediately proved himself a sexual degenerate. Days before his 2016 election triumph, he engaged in a tape recorded conversation with a Hollywood television personality on the subject of his masculine charm, shall we say.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he blustered. “You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy…”
Over the ensuing years, we read media accounts of some eighteen women who have filed legal claims against Mr. Trump for sexual harassment and assault.
Accusers included the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll, who won a multi-million dollar judgement against him for shoving her against a wall in the women’s changing room of a Manhattan department store, then tearing through her underwear to jam his fingers into her vagina.
Ms. Carroll has yet to receive so much as a dime of that judgement. The deadbeat “star” who essentially raped her (as Federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan d common defined as common understanding of the case) is a master at using appellate courts to delay justice.
As a people, we Americans have decided, by a however slim majority, to look away from the noxious spectacle that is Donald J. Trump. We have decided to normalize his crude behavior; in fact, to reward it with the highest office in the land.
Between 2016 and the violent insurrection a mere three years ago, in which armed thugs attacked and vandalized the Capitol for the first time since British soldiers set it afire during the War of 1812, we survived four exhausting years of Mr. Trump’s outrageous behavior.
By November of this year, we were undeniably aware of his cruelty, pathological dishonesty, bigotry, brutal misogyny, invincible ignorance, administrative failures and corruption, and his lack of rational thought.
—Not to mention his utter disregard for what founding father Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) revered as “the decent opinion of mankind.”
One might think we Americans came to learn something from all this. Instead, we have adopted a manner of forever forgiving the sins of a vile man—as he knew we would.
For as Mr. Trump famously boasted during his 2016 campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
Indeed. As incredible as his foulest achievement: the death of decency.
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Slowly now, and maybe surely, a fair hunk of Trump voters might undergo the ancillary transactional process called buyers’ remorse. A phenomenon that develops as the Trump regime prepares to commence in January.
Thus far assembled for duty in the New Year is a crazytown of Trump nominees, tasked to head major segments of a federal government, a gigantic enterprise that spent $6.2 trillion (€ 5.86 trillion) during the past fiscal year. Crazytown nominees include—
• Kristi Noem, governor of the midwestern state of South Dakota, whom Mr. Trump picked for secretary of the chillingly named Department of Homeland Security. Best known for taking her disobedient pet dog to a gravel pit and shooting the poor thing to death, Ms. Noem possesses no qualifications for the job she’s been assigned—beyond her blind support for Mr. Trump’s draconian plan to round up more than ten million undocumented workers and deporting them en masse.
• Stephen Miller, a racist policy aide during Trump I responsible for removing young children from their immigrant parents and sending them off to fenced concentration camps where many were sexually abused by armed guards. Naturally, Mr. Miller is slated to become deputy director of policy in Trump Act II.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading anti-vaccine kook and conspiracy theorist whose distinguished family has largely disowned him. During his own brief campaign for the presidency earlier this year, he revealed a pair of odd encounters with nature: 1) The time he lopped off the head of a beached whale with a chainsaw and strapped it to the top of his automobile for a five-hour drive home; 2) The time he retrieved a bear carcass from a highway and likewise trundled it by car under darkness of night to unload it in New York’s Central Park, as a prank.
Mr. Kennedy, who has undergone surgery to remove worms that ate parts of his brain, also disclosed how he once maintained a stock of roadkill in his home freezer, presumably to thaw out for meals. Donald Trump has selected him to lead—what else?—the Department of Health & Human Services.
And by the way, Mr. Kennedy was credibly accused of fondling a young female babysitter in his employ.
• Linda McMahon, a retired professional wrestler tapped to head the Department of Education, an agency that several members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle aim to abolish. As chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment in the 1980s, Ms. McMahon turned a blind eye to locker room sexual exploitation of so-called ring boys, according to a recently filed lawsuit. The defendant denies the charge.
• Viveck Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who ran for president in Republican Party preliminary contests earlier this year, only to withdraw in favor of Mr. Trump. That withdrawal was followed by another: He took himself out of contention for gubernatorial appointment to a U.S. Senate seat vacated when JD Vance of Ohio became Mr. Trump’s vice presidential running mate. Of note, however, Mr. Ramaswamy was never thought to be in consideration by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Mr. Trump now invites Mr. Ramaswamy to team up with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, in efforts to drastically reduce federal employment rolls as co-director of an imaginary agency named D.O.G.E. (Department of Government Efficiency). Prior to Mr. Ramaswamy’s exit from his party’s presidential consideration, Mr. Trump said, “A vote for Viveck is a wasted vote.”
• Tulsi Gabbard, a military veteran and commentator for the rightwing Fox Television network, Ms. Gabbard was a one-time congresswoman from Hawaii described by a hefty swath of her former colleagues as a Kremlin “asset,” the polite term for spy. Nevertheless, she is Mr. Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, despite having zero background in America’s top-secret matters, and no serious support for taking charge in such a critical role.
Pete Hegseth, also a veteran and Fox TV commentator, was chosen by Mr. Trump to head the Department of Defense. Like his sponsor, Mr. Hegseth is credibly accused of character flaws and sexual improprieties. In an email six years ago to a New York Times reporter, his own mother, Penelope Hegseth, wrote of how she counseled her son: “Get some help and take an honest look at yourself [after] all the women—and I know it’s many—you have abused in some way [by being a man who] belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.”
As for U.S. military policy, Mr. Hegseth wrote in “American Crusade,” a book he published in 2020: “[The United Nations is] aggressively advances an anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-freedom agenda.” Further, Mr. Hegseth described the North American Treaty Organization as a “relic that should be scrapped.”
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Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire pioneer in electric car manufacturing and outer space exploration with a business empire heavily dependent on government contracts seems lately to be more Donald Trump’s son than any of his own male spawn—Don Jr., Eric, and Barron.
Mr. Musk, who has practically taken up full-time residence at Mar-a-Lago, is on deck as Mr. Ramaswamy’s comrade in axing government professionals who oversee contractual matters with tycoons such as himself. Career employees would be replaced with advocates of corporate interests, such as the Musk empire, in keeping with the rightwing manifesto “Project 2025”—described in a previous essay published here as a “fast track to fascism.”
Shortly before the foregoing list of loyalists was established as the best and brightest for Trump Act II, the name Matthew Louis “Matt” Gaetz was Mr. Controversy in the Washington-New York enclave of political punditry.
All in the fraternity of rectitude played their parts in a mass denunciation of the young Florida congressman and child of nepotism, portraying him as a naïve sex pervert bragging about his participation in drug-fueled orgies even as he was touted by Donald Trump as the nation’s next chief law enforcement officer—Attorney General of the United States. Accustomed to deference accorded to offspring of the wealthy, a confident Matt Gaetz sauntered about the floor of the Capitol’s House of Representatives to circulate photographs of his romantic liaisons, shall we say, with disturbingly young female conquests.
None in the clubby congressional brotherhood, and certainly not himself, understood that Matt Gaetz was little more than distractive gaslighting in the cause of smoothly advancing the nominations of others wise enough to show their own dishonorable ways as more—ahem!—acceptable than those of the brash Floridian, whose cheeks and forehead are stretched to a glow courtesy of Botox.
In Washington, marginal acceptability accounts for quite a lot. So, too, stupidity, which shall figure ever more prominently with the calendar’s turn to year 2025.
Meanwhile, a dazed Matthew Louis Gaetz has resigned his congressional seat as he casts about for a place in life. Perhaps we may see his crease-free visage in Fox TV broadcasts.
As said in blaring TV commercials narrated by excitable pitchmen, “But wait—there’s more!”
Donald Trump is announcing his pick for director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as I write—Washington lawyer and political firebrand Kashyap Pramod “Kash” Patel. Author of the 2023 book “Government Gangsters,” Mr. Patel reports from the lowest depths of a Republican fever swamp to insist that President Joe Biden engineered a “rigged” election in 2020 in his favor—the undying Big Lie of Trumpworld.
News of Mr. Patel’s selection as the scariest nominee yet was broken by the online publication HuffPost, under the headline TRUMP NAMES NUT FOR FBI. More truth in the confines of four words and an acronym is not to be found.
One year ago, Mr. Patel was on a tear about the supposed enemies of his lord, Donald Trump. Imagining himself as the eventual F.B.I. chief—overseer of some seven thousand law enforcers—Mr. Patel appeared on a rightwing podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, briefly a Trump aide who served four months in prison for refusing to testify before a congressional committee investigating the January 2021 coup attempt. Before a friendly Bannon audience, Mr. Patel let fly.
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Mr. Patel declared. “Yes, we’re going to come after people in the media who…helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
He added, “Yes, we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice…and Steve, this is why [journalists] hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators.”
Echoing the hostile sentiments of Kash Patel is Mr. Trump’s alternate pick for Attorney General—Pam Bondi, currently serving in similar title as chief prosecutor in Florida, where she is known as Boss Lady. Slightly less incendiary than the Trump-loving Floridian she replaced, Matt Gaetz, Ms. Bondi remains on board with the Big Lie and the notion that “leftwing” fellow prosecutors of the Democratic Party persuasion must be punished for hounding her lord.
Those who have filed charges against Trump “will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Ms. Bondi promised in an interview with the Washington Post. “The investigators will be investigated.”
Whither Mr. Gaetz?
Having undergone cosmetic improvement, which included nips and tucks that dramatize his eyebrows, the ex-congressman doubtless divides his time between gazing into a mirror that reflects his sleek new image and chasing short skirts worn by barely legal good lookers.
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Of the four indictments handed down against Donald Trump in the time between his rejection for reëlection in 2020 and now in ‘24, the two most serious were brought by Jack Smith, appointed special prosecutor for the Department of Justice in 2022. Hugely successful in putting war criminals, mobsters, and crooked cops into prison cells they sorely deserved, Mr. Smith constructed slam-dunk cases against defendant Trump, cases fat with convictable evidence.
But in Trump, Mr. Smith may have met his match. The vulgarian president-elect is not intelligent, but he is single-minded—and self-protective. People forget that about him. With the approaching final curtain to what is now his 78-year-old life, Donald Trump is determined to avoid the prison cell he sorely deserves. To survive outside prison walls, he has hit on a sure pop method of getting away with murder, figuratively speaking and per his disquisition on shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. The cunning Mr. Trump has figured out that to remain free, a criminal must float above the law.
And how to float? Two ways: 1) Perfect your TV showmanship in appealing to millions of adoring suckers who will buy whatever schlock you have to peddle and will vote for you come what may, and 2) succeed in running for the presidency.
Once in office, or even immediately after a term in office, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it exceedingly difficult to impose criminal accountability on shifty presidents of the Trump variety.
Thus, Jack Smith has had no choice but to formally drop his carefully tailored federal cases against Mr. Trump—the first, for fomenting treasonous insurrection in January 2021; the second, for stealing top-secret government documents upon leaving the White House that same month and year, in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917.
In petitioning courts to drop both federal cases, however, Mr. Smith managed to retain the right to reopen prosecution once Mr. Trump leaves the White House. He will be 82 years old at the end of his last act and surely on the brink of death, given the bloated looks of him. Should he live, and actually bow to rules of the U.S. Constitution by leaving voluntarily after a second presidential term, he has merely to appeal to throw himself on the mercy of the court, just like any infirm old man.
State indictments in New York and Georgia may also fade away from delay after delay after delay. As earlier mentioned earlier, we are rendered exhausted by the cunning Mr. Trump.
We are exhausted as well by the rank stupidity of half the country’s voters opting for the loutish Donald Trump, found guilty by a New York jury in May of this year for falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments made to a pornographic movie actress for her sexual services.
Stupidity is a kind and charitable estimation of Trump voters. Otherwise, we would think they actually reasoned him up to the difficult job of president, superior to “that bitch” and worthy of the honor to serve from the White House; we would think such voters were maliciously bent on harming the country.
Although widely ignored in current election post mortems, a very old adage applies here: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
