EDGARTOWN, Massachusetts
Even here on Martha’s Vineyard, the balmy island retreat for east coast cosmopolitans, it is difficult to get through an otherwise pleasant day without news of the latest vile, repulsive, revolting, obnoxious, abhorrent, racist, disgraceful, or flat-out stupid act by the president of the United States—an incontinent boor with a ridiculous yellow hairdo stomping and clomping his way across the world stage.
With its beaches and charming villages and excellent seafood restaurants, the Vineyard offers seaside refuge from urban cacophony. But it does not nor cannot assure respite from Donald Trump’s insinuation into every aspect of the national psyche.
No respite from daily reminders of consequences to what we Americans have done in electing to the presidency a man of exceptionally low character: a convicted felon, an adjudicated fraudster and sex offender, a pathological liar and cheat. Not once did we elect Mr. Trump, but twice. Never mind those two Congressional impeachments in his first term, largely consigned to the soothing black hole of amnesia—
• Mr. Trump was first impeached in 2019 on a charge of political extortion, to wit: Withholding delivery of war matériel necessary for Ukraine’s defense against Russian military invasion unless Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced an “investigation” of Mr. Trump’s political rival.
• In late January 2021, Mr. Trump was impeached for inciting his cult of armed loyalists to commandeer the Capitol building Washington weeks earlier. The mob threatened then-Vice President Mike Pence with execution by guillotine. The insurrection resulted, directly or indirectly, in the deaths of eight persons, five of them police officers.
Perhaps there should be no respite from reminders, weary though we may be. Perhaps we—We the People, as begins our 18th Century declaration of independence from Britain—should be reminded to shake our thunder at what is clear and present, and shameful in this 21st Century: Donald Trump’s gestapo of masked thugs, assigned to abduct black and brown immigrants for incarceration in the expanding gulag of U.S. concentration camps; the wholesale transfer of wealth from working and middle classes to the morbidly rich; a president in the thrall of brutal foreign autocrats; the „rule of law increasingly given way to the rule of Don,“ as California Governor Gavin Newsom sees the crisis at hand.
At this point, Herr Trump’s fascist assault on two hundred and forty-nine years of American constitutional law and common decency—as promised in the violent themes of his election campaigns—seems lacking only in swastikas.
In part to contemplate this moment in history, I spent the month August decamped at here at Edgartown, the Vineyard’s easternmost village that was a hub of the whaling industry in the early 19th century. My time was spent reading and writing and worrying amidst oak and pine and sassafras trees, in the cool ocean air that drifted in from the Atlantic. Fragrant trees and sweet breezes could not dilute the omnipresent dread of “Despicable Don,” as I call him.
Mr. Trump intruded every morning via headlines in the newspapers from Boston and New York and Washington, available at a friendly newsstand a short walk up the road. In the newsstand café, the talk was Trump.
Every evening, I had my choice of edifying lectures at venues throughout the Vineyard—such as a church event in neighboring Oak Bluffs that attracted attorneys general from four states, including New York and Minnesota. The prosecutors recounted high crimes and misdemeanors of Donald Trump, a rap sheet stretching well back before he slithered out of New York, heading south to despoil Washington.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, famed for her success in winning multi-million dollar settlements in fraud litigation against Despicable Don, counseled the president thusly: “Evil will not win.” Minnesota’s Keith Ellison referred to the president as “Lucifer.”
Besides “despicable” and “Lucifer” and so forth, there are dozens more rude monikers with which to tag a wannabe dictator who wears more makeup than Dolly Parton. To wit: Mango Mussolini, Donald Von Shitzinpants, Cheeto Von Tweeto, the Manchurian Cantaloupe, Vladdy’s Boy, Tangerine Idi Amin, Rancid Kumquat, Fatso der Führer, Sweet Potato Hitler, et cetera, et cetera…
…Go ahead, laugh.
In 1933, a man with a ridiculous little moustache was likewise the butt of mockery. His high hopes of becoming a renowned painter were hobbled by limited ability; ultimately, he was emotionally crushed by rejections from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, describing his deep disappointment in an autobiography entitled “Mein Kampf.”
Detractors mocked the disappointed man as a “Schicklgruber,” his father’s amusing birth name. Irreverent journalists noted that the ersatz Schicklgruber used “gas pills,” so-called, to control his flatulence. In song-song lyricism, British satirists of the World War II era made light of Schicklgruber’s single testicle, and the unmanly shortcomings of his top brass—
Hitler has got only one ball/
Göring has two but very small/
Himmler is rather sim’lar…and
Poor old Goebbels has no balls at all
Laugh now, in 2025, at the crude man-child Donald Trump, forever addled by his exclusion from fraternity with the mandarins of his pre-political profession—marquee Manhattan real estate for New York’s capital-F fabulous. To this day, the élite of that clubby universe rightly deride the “tacky” style of a “loudmouth” parvenu who, when not in White House residence, hangs his red MAGA hat at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida copy of Marie-Antoinette’s gilded Palace of Versailles.
Laugh now at the man in the badly-tailored suit and blaze red cravat drooped over a bulge of adiposity toward his crotch; the man mocked by the use of a Rhineland-Palatinate ancestral name that amuses the English-speaking ear— Drumpf.
The man-child Drumpf finds no welcome in snooty New York circles he yearns to join; there is no place there for an interloper born and raised in the city’s non-fabulous borough of Queens (with the accent to prove it). No place for a man-child whose circumcised penis is publicly described by a pornographic movie queen of his acquaintance as small and mushroom-like. No place for a man-child who uses urinary pads, and whose aft side could benefit from a hefty supply of Mylanta.
As we seem never to learn from history, humiliations fester in certain people—especially those who dwell in the sewers of narcissism. They dream of revenge against perceived superiors, these certain ones; to the delight of the hoi polloi, they rage against superiors and visit suffering upon perceived inferiors.
They are inmates in a prison of resentments.
The more ambitious of them will rise to positions of state power, with which to commit monstrous crimes against the rest of us. They are sincere in their mediocrity and conscientious in lofty self-regard.
•
Delusions of grandeur are markers along the life paths of megalomaniacs the likes of Herren Hitler and Drumpf.
In the case of Hitler, delusion originated in his messianic vision of leading a “Thousand Year Reich” that would restore Germany from abject defeat in World War I to a rhapsodic past glory. His cause was the political slogan Machen sie Deutschland wieder großartig—anglicized by Donald Trump for like purpose: “Make America Great Again” (MAGA).
Adolf Hitler believed himself infallible; accordingly, he demanded blind loyalty from the German citizenry, especially from his underlings. Mr. Trump is a self-rated “very stable genius” who frequently appears in a red hat emblazoned with the MAGA catchphrase “Trump was right about everything.”
After a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed the tip of his ear during a campaign appearance in 2024, Donald J. Trump attributed his survival to divine intervention; he insisted, once more, that he is destined by God to “rescue our nation from those who seek its ruin.” Many within his MAGA cult are thus inspired to believe that the middle initial of his name stands not for John, but for Jesus. Hitler likewise credited God with sparing him from an assassination attempt in 1944, after which he ordered the arrests of some seven thousand suspected of involvement in the attempt, executing five thousand of them after show trials.
Both men were and are fond of rightwing theatrics: Hitler for his annual Nuremberg Rallies, full of blaring martial music, torchlight processions, Nazi banners and chants, anti-Semitic oratory, and Der Führer’s own spittle-ridden speeches. Trump for his appreciation of the “very fine people” marching by a synagogue in Charlottesville, Virginia, in jackboot formation as part of the “Unite the Right” extravaganza—a event festooned with Nazi banners, full Trump-loving of Aryans in MAGA hats in the illumination of torchlight, and resounding in non-stop chants of “Jews will not replace us!…Jews will not replace us!…Jews will not replace us…”
In the wake of Charlottesville, which resulted in three deaths and thirty-five serious injuries, attacks on Jews (some fatal) and Jewish establishments have skyrocketed from 2017 to now. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith reports a rise in anti-Semitic violence by as much as one hundred forty percent. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports a rise over the same period by as much as sixty-three percent.
Nazi time in 1933, Nazi time in 2025.
We laughed, we cried, we died.
Delusions of grandeur are markers along the life paths of megalomaniacs the likes of Herren Hitler and Drumpf.
In the case of Hitler, delusion originated in his messianic vision of leading a “Thousand Year Reich” that would restore Germany from abject defeat in World War I to a rhapsodic past glory. His cause was the political slogan Machen sie Deutschland wieder großartig—anglicized by Donald Trump for like purpose: “Make America Great Again” (MAGA).
Adolf Hitler believed himself infallible; accordingly, he demanded blind loyalty from the German citizenry, especially from his underlings. Mr. Trump is a self-rated “very stable genius” who frequently appears in a red hat emblazoned with the MAGA catchphrase “Trump was right about everything.”
After a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed the tip of his ear during a campaign appearance in 2024, Donald J. Trump attributed his survival to divine intervention; he insisted, once more, that he is destined by God to “rescue our nation from those who seek its ruin.” Many within his MAGA cult are thus inspired to believe that the middle initial of his name stands not for John, but for Jesus. Hitler likewise credited God with sparing him from an assassination attempt in 1944, after which he ordered the arrests of some seven thousand suspected of involvement in the attempt, executing five thousand of them after show trials.
Both men were and are fond of rightwing theatrics: Hitler for his annual Nuremberg Rallies, full of blaring martial music, torchlight processions, Nazi banners and chants, anti-Semitic oratory, and Der Führer’s own spittle-ridden speeches. Trump for his appreciation of the “very fine people” marching by a synagogue in Charlottesville, Virginia, in jackboot formation as part of the “Unite the Right” extravaganza—a event festooned with Nazi banners, full Trump-loving of Aryans in MAGA hats in the illumination of torchlight, and resounding in non-stop chants of “Jews will not replace us!…Jews will not replace us!…Jews will not replace us…”
In the wake of Charlottesville, which resulted in three deaths and thirty-five serious injuries, attacks on Jews (some fatal) and Jewish establishments have skyrocketed from 2017 to now. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith reports a rise in anti-Semitic violence by as much as one hundred forty percent. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports a rise over the same period by as much as sixty-three percent.
Nazi time in 1933, Nazi time in 2025.
We laughed, we cried, we died.
•
Hitler chose Jews for confinement, torture, and death in wartime Nazi concentration camps. Donald Trump chose immigrant Latinos, Muslims, and Africans for lock-down in his camps.
Days after his second inauguration last January, Mr. Trump began acting on his promise of what may only be called ethnic cleansing—ridding America of some twelve million people who are “poisoning the blood of our country,” as he declared in New Hampshire during a 2023 rally of his Republican Party Kameraden.
The crowd roared its approval of racist slander.
“Disgusting!” groused fellow Republican heavy-hitter Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey who served in two sub-cabinet positions during the first Trump administration.
Mr. Christie’s plaint was quickly gone with the wind, never to be repeated by Republican lickspittles who wish to remain salaried lickspittles.
Absent further squawks from party elders, Mr. Trump kicked off his second administration by siccing masked thugs of the Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) on what he calls “illegal criminal aliens,” ordering them to round up the “worst of the worst”—which turns out to mean minimum wage meat plant workers, farm laborers, hotel maintenance staffers, hospital orderlies and janitors, home health care aides, factory hands, nannies, students, and those accosted by said thugs in courtroom hallways following required appointments in the process of their obtaining legal status in the U.S.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for American Progress report an avalanche of improper force in meeting Mr. Trump’s quota-based orders—ICE tactics such as smashing car windows, deploying explosives, snatching people off the streets, grabbing parents away from sobbing children; in one case, ICE thugs arrested a young mother as she breast-fed her infant.
The civil rights organizations further report filthy conditions and inhumane treatment at the Trump administration’s network of concentration camps. While the first notorious outpost is now closed—the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” in the dangerous Everglades of south Florida—others are popping up all over in similarly remote locations that make it nearly impossible for lawyers or family members to meet face-to-face inmates.
Food quality and the lack of toilet facilities are appalling, according to the reports; guard-on-detainee sexual misconduct is common. Mr. Trump’s subordinates are inventive, as usual, in nicknaming new camps: the “Speedway Slammer” in the wilds of Indiana, the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska, the “Deportation Depot” proposed for north Florida.
Meanwhile in Washington, the president’s cabinet-level lickspittles assembled recently for three hours and seventeen minutes of televised flattery offered up to Dear Leader. In the world of professional sports, such behavior is known as “butt-sucking.”
More delicately, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman called the lickspittle show an “endurance test of who could praise Trump more.”
Is nothing new under the sun in the context of powerful megalomaniacs’ craving for endless adoration? I am reminded of a storied flattery-fest offered up to the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) back in 1937. As Stalin entered a meeting hall for Communist Party pooh-bahs, he was greeted with an explosion of strenuous applause that went on for a full eleven minutes.
A man who knows from whence he speaks of Siberian labor camps and Moscow pageantry, the Soviet dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), wrote of Stalin and company in his book “The Gulag Archipelago”—
“It was becoming insufferably silly, even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would be the first to stop? With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding ‘til they fell where they stood, ‘til they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.”
•
The term “good Germans” was coined at the end of World War II, referencing those who claimed unawareness of monstrous crimes committed by Hitler and his confederates during the Holocaust.
Good folks would say, “We didn’t know.” It was a preposterous excuse, made to absolve themselves of complicity and/or guilt.
Preposterous because signs of what was likely happening out of sight were abundant and open for public view: anti-Jewish laws enacted by the Reichstag in Berlin, government-organized boycotts of Jewish businesses, violence such as Kristallnacht directed by the government…
…and something familiar to Americans right now: deportations forced by Nazi thugs, and tolerated by Hitler’s own lickspittles.
If anything, the signs of potential for monstrous American crimes are even more abundant. Fewer and fewer voices that would matter are available to guard us against the most wicked impulses of Mr. Trump and his favored goons, men such as the ghoulish Stephen Miller, architect of the president’s anti-immigrant policies in the initial Trump term.
Mr. Miller co-stars in a heated conversation with former Pentagon chief General Mark Milley, recounted in “Peril,” the 2021 book by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa—
“’Mr. President, [liberals and blacks] are burning America down, they’re burning it down…Barbarians are at the gate!’
“General Milley responded, ‘Shut the fuck up, Steve.’”
Stephen Miller was hired for the second term, in which he holds the elevated title of Deputy Chief of Staff for policy. We no longer have Mark Milley to shut down at least some of the hatred emanating from the White House. The general, now retired, is currently “under investigation” for unspecified reasons by a Trump justice department that has weaponized law to suit the president’s foul moods—and the foul moods he senses in others.
“I am your retribution!” candidate Trump promised, articulating the central text of his policy agenda.
Hitler said the same in naming the first of his two-volume book, “Mein Kampf”— Die Abrechnung, which translates to “the settling of accounts,” or “revenge.”
•
“Good Americans” who voted for Donald Trump in 2024, returning him to the most powerful public office in the land, cannot make excuses for their choice. Not in light of the chaos and catastrophes of his of a first term that ended in death and mob violence.
According to figures from the Federal Election Commission, Mr. Trump won 62.9 million votes in the 2016 presidential contest. In 2024, he grew that total to 77.3 million. A popularity increase 14.4 million votes obliterates any claim of unawareness of cruelty and criminality to be continued.
The Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne gives a damning summation of these awful Trump years in a recent essay for the Toronto Globe & Mail—
“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
“The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics…Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
“There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster…The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do—to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world—is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero…
“All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I’m even more frightened of them.”
