New York City
America’s predominant criminal and aspiring autocrat is fast losing his grip, mentally and politically. The incipient collapse of Donald J. Trump and his second attempt to win reëlection brings joy, or at least relief, to a land sick and tired of his fascist following and flatulent presence.
The Mar-a-Lago man grows and lazier and crazier by the day as he indulges his obsessions—misogyny and mendacity, persecution and retribution. His only solace is the golf course. It is there, in manicured fairways he navigates aboard a motorized cart while favorably marking his scorecard before reaching the green, where the ex-president is able to temporarily forget news media reports of dwindling attendance at his campaign rallies and the press of civil judgements against him (in the hundreds of millions of dollars), and adjudications yet to come.
About that flatulence—
The man literally stinks, as several in his circle of intimates dare to report. I myself was within whiffing distance of him last May. There in a windowless Manhattan courtroom the smirking ex-president was on trial in the celebrated “hush money” case, stemming from his (ahem) hotel rendezvous with a buxom blonde actress while his wife, fresh out of a hospital maternity ward, attended to their newborn son. Thus can I attest to the defendant’s daylong bout of gastrointestinal distress, often audible in form. Frequently wrinkly-nosed jurors, seated even closer than I to the defendant, found Mr. Trump guilty on thirty-four felony counts of violating election law by claiming $130,000 (€117,000) paid to one Stormy Daniels, leading lady of pornographic cinema, as a business expense.
—Further reasons for joy are the ongoing prosecutions of Herr Trump’s Straßenkämpfer, bully-boy brigades of the Washington insurrection he encourged on January 6, 2021. On that winter afternoon of ’21, he was still president, though on his way out. His bid for reëlection two months earlier ended with voters giving him the bum’s rush; we’d had our fill of incompetence, shame, and nonstop chaos.
On that winter afternoon, a profoundly angry President Trump emerged from the White House to address a gathering throng of angry true-believers in the Big Lie he propagated, and propagates to this day: He lost the election because the process was “rigged” against him. Never mind that all eighty of his legal challenges to the vote count were ruled either meritless or frivolous by the courts.
Regardless, the then-president loudly urged his street brawlers to prevent Congress from meeting to certify his thumping loss to President Joe Biden. “If you don’t fight like hell,” he railed before his adoring yahoos, “you’re not going to have a country anymore!”
Three-thousand strong, the frothing mob duly marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House to the Capitol building where Congress was convened—a distance of 1.2 miles (1.9 km). Breaking his promise to join them, a walk-averse Mr. Trump returned to the White House to eat hamburgers while watching live television coverage of violent mayhem that he and his shadowy comrades envisioned, per his pre-insurrection Twitter command: “Big protest in [Washington] on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.”
Five people died in the wildness that day of January 6th, including a police officer. Four other officers, traumatized by hand-to-hand combat with a mob shouting “Trump…Trump…Trump,” later committed suicide. One hundred and forty-seven other officers were hospitalized with serious injuries dealt by Trump’s club-wielders, who, after bashing their way into the Capitol building commenced to hours of terrorizing members of Congress and their aides, trashing offices, and sliming corridors with their urine and excrement. Property damage ran to $2.7 million (€2.43 million), according to government estimates.
And lest we forget:
• Former Vice President Mike Pence, who refused Mr. Trump’s order to prevent the lawfully prescribed vote certification, owes his life to Capitol cops. They whisked him away from gangs of flag-waving would-be executioners who erected a makeshift gallows and rampaged through the building chanting “Hang Mike Pence…Hang Mike Pence…Hang Mike Pence!”
• Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, third in line for the presidency as speaker of the House of Representatives, owes her life to sheer luck. The police vehicle in which she rode during an emergency evacuation of the Capitol building narrowly missed running over a bomb planted in a street along the escape route.
• In his testimony before a post-insurrection congressional investigating committee, Capitol Police official Sean P. Gallagher described the “chaos” of the day: “We were dealing with a pipe bomb…We were dealing with a pickup truck that had eleven Molotov cocktails, machetes, rifles, handguns, ammunition in it…[A]t the same time, our officers were suffering injuries…”
To date, more than a thousand Fascisti di Trump are charged with or have been convicted of crimes ranging from assault to attempted murder. Donald Trump has more than once pronounced them “patriots.” A prominent Trump flunky and Republican Party congressman, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, characterized the insurrection of January 6th as “a normal tourist visit.”
Further in normalcy, by the lights of Messrs. Trump and Clyde, this news just in:
On September 5, Mr. Trump will host the “J6 Awards Gala” at his swanky golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The event will include songs performed by the “J6 Prison Choir,” made up of defendants serving prison sentences for crimes committed at the ex-president’s behest. Raffle tickets will be sold. I reasonably presume that most of the proceeds will be pocketed by a lifelong grifter with the initials DJT.
Yet now comes Republican Party presidential candidate DJT, ringleader of that deadly day of infamy known simply as J6, asking that we allow him back to the Oval Office. His opponent in the coming election—as I write, sixty-five days hence—is Vice President and former Senator Kamala Harris. She is a woman of Jamaican and Indian parentage, which famously perplexed Mr. Trump’s notion of racial classification. Ms. Harris began her career in politics and law as a criminal prosecutor in California.
And so it is: kismet. Contenders for the most powerful office in the world are Prosecutor versus Felon.
Ms. Harris projects confidence, winning thunderous applause at the Democratic National Convention in August when she told delegates, “Hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Mr. Trump played to type by passing along an ally’s vulgar sentiments, as posted to his internet platform, Truth Social. The post denounced Ms. Harris—and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to boot. The post attacked not one but two highly accomplished women, with a lewd accusation as to how they achieved their respective ambitions: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers.”
As for Donald Trump’s career and exchequer, the ends are nigh: He may fume all he likes, but his dance card with Lady Justice nears full swing, and his bank accounts are dribbling away.
He is a man not so much running for president as he is running from prison and penury. He is a slouching man on an endless perp walk.
When he loses the election in November, as odds-makers in London and opinion polls here predict, Donald Trump will be an ordinary citizen—powerless to quash a deadly serious *federal indictment brought against him in the final week of August by the indefatigable Jack Smith, special counsel for the U.S. Justice Department. The charge: conspiring to overturn the presidential election of 2020 by way of insurrection on January 6, 2021.
*An earlier filing was overridden by a controversial Supreme Court ruling holding that presidents are immune from prosecution for criminal acts committed in the course of “official duty.” With disgust, so I imagine, Mr. Smith calculated the indictment in accordance with the outrageous decision of a nine-member rightwing high court—six Republicans, half of whom are Trump appointees, and three Democrats.
Meanwhile, Mr. Smith seeks to overturn dismissal of a second indictment—theft of top-secret intelligence files discovered in haphazard storage at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf resort, in alleged violation of the Espionage Act. In this matter, too, the special counsel has been thwarted by a rightwing Trump appointee, Florida federal Judge Aileen Cannon, who dismissed the case.. In two earlier actions that smack of partisanship, the judge was deservedly overturned by an appellate court; legal observers expect she will lose on appeal for a third time, risking removal from the bench.
According to lifetime actuarial tables, indictments brought by Jack Smith could see the now 78-year-old Mr. Trump die in a federal penitentiary.
Here in New York, Mr. Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on September 18 for his thirty-four count state conviction in the hush money case. Each felony count is punishable by six years in a New York prison—amounting to a maximum two hundred and four years, which would most certainly be reduced to six years at the discretion of Judge Juan Merchan. A pre-sentencing report to the judge will surely consider Mr. Trump’s complete lack of contrition; his internet attacks on Judge Merchan’s politically active daughter; and his insistence, without evidence, that Judge Merchan is “highly conflicted.”
As for his finances: Donald Trump owes a half billion dollars in civil court judgements against him, according to calculations by Fortune Magazine. Very little of that amount seems likely to be reduced through appellate pleadings.
Perhaps even on the fairways, an aphorism credited to the baseball great Leroy “Satchel” Paige (1906-1982) is heard by the man in a golf cart: “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.”
•
Mike Pence has politely denounced the man who chose him to be his vice president. Others who served in the single presidential term of Donald Trump are vociferous in their objections. They form a sadder-but-wiser chorus of Republican grandees urging us to vote Democratic this year—to reject the man they regret having served, or ever met.
Among the chorus:
• BILL BARR, former attorney general. On Donald Trump’s role in the J6 insurrection, he said, “Someone engaged in [J6]…shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”
• MARK ESPER, former secretary of defense: “He’s unfit for office…His actions are all about him and not about the country…He has integrity and character issues as well.”
• JAMES MATTIS, also a former defense secretary: “Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.”
• JOHN BOLTON, former national security adviser: “I believe [foreign leaders] think he is a fool.”
• JOHN KELLY, former chief of staff: “[He] has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law… God help us.”
• TOM BOSSERT, former homeland security advisor: “He is culpable for this [J6] siege…He is an utter disgrace.”
• CASSIDY HUTCHINSON, former State Department aide: “Donald Trump is the gravest threat to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”
• REX TILLERSON, former secretary of state: “He’s a fucking moron.”
Such a collective beat-down has visible effect. Donald Trump’s face is usually sweaty nowadays. He appears exhausted—from himself. His MAGA slogan (Make America Great Again) has lost its sting; his two-handed accordion gesture is not as amusing as in the past.
So much about Donald Trump is in the past.
His video pitches inviting the flock to waste money on the latest in branded merchandise—Trump bibles, Trump sneakers, Trump trading cards—are half-hearted. The faithful who once packed the stands to whoop and cheer for his hours-long exhortations at campaign rallies are waning in number and leaving for the parking lot ever earlier, weary from the catechism of Trump grievance.
At one such rally, in the state of Pennsylvania at mid-July, a psychotic young man joined the fading festivities. He came with a backpack concealing his brand new AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, and the intent was to assassinate the yellow-haired man in the red MAGA hat yelling at the crowd. Instead, he only nipped the ex-president’s right ear. He managed, however, to send volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore to his death. The shooter was shot dead by police.
Mr. Trump has yet to offer condolences to the Comperatore family.
Back on that day in July, and for a handful of days after, few seemed especially saddened by Mr. Trump’s brush with death.
Today, the episode is largely forgotten.
°
Though the bar is high in rating the many casual cruelties of Donald Trump, his sacrilegious conduct in a suburban Washington graveyard in late August immediately shot to the top of a long list.
This is what happened at Arlington National Cemetery, a shrine to America’s war dead:
On the solemn occasion of honoring troops killed three years ago in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, Mr. Trump and a posse of his campaign videographers gathered with the family of one victim for a wildly inappropriate graveside photo-op in which MAGA-man issued his trademark “thumbs up” seal of approval.
Who the hell flashes a thumbs-up signal in a cemetery!
Mr. Trump and his thumb pulled the ghastly stunt in an area of the cemetery known as “Section 60,” statutorily off-limits to partisan politicking.
A female worker at the cemetery approached the Trump retinue with a reminder of federal law that prohibits political activity in Section 60, whereupon one or more of Mr. Trump’s tag-along male thugs manhandled her. A Trump mouthpiece in a nice suit told reporters that the female worker was mentally ill and “despicable.”
Who the hell…? Only a man who, while in presidential office, refused to join other world leaders in a Paris cemetery where Americans who died on French soil during World War 2 were honored because he worried that a rainfall would muss his hair. Only a man who, like his German-born grandfather Friedrich Drumpf, dodged military conscription; in Donald Trump’s case, by arranging for a doctor to sign off on a diagnosis of “bone spurs.” Only a man who refers to veterans as “suckers” and “losers.”
For this Arlington matter and dozens more reasons, presidential candidate Kamala Harris offers her own diagnosis of Mr. Trump—and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, and chief bootlicker Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy Jr., betrayer of the most hallowed Democratic dynasty.
“Simply put,” said Ms. Harris, “they are out of their minds.”
Her own running mate, the increasingly loveable Minnesota Governor and former high school football coach Tim Walz, concurs. The MAGA crowd, he declared, is “weird.”
Mr. Trump is capital-W weird, but the other two are gaining on him:
• According to his daughter, Bobby Jr. once used a chainsaw to hack off the massive head of a beached whale off the coast of Massachusetts, after which he strapped it to the top of the family van drove it to suburban New York—with the bodily goo of a dead whale flowing all the way home.
• In defending Mr. Trump’s conduct at Arlington, Senator Vance was critical of Kamala Harris’ stern reaction. He declared of Ms. Harris, “She can go to hell!” His previous eruptions have centered around childbirth: how women must be strictly controlled by in such a matter, and how “childless cat ladies” must not be allowed to determine policy on the topic.
•
While the Trump-Vance campaign flounders, with its two candidates unable to do anything right, the Harris-Walz team emerged from August’s Democratic convention as happy warriors who seem to do everything right.
Among the first things Tim Walz said to Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee for vice president was, “Thank you, Madam President, for the joy.”
The two have lifted the dank fog under which we have lived in this sorry era of Trump. On November 5, We the People of the United States will deliver election defeat to Donald Trump once again, this time forever more.
His followers will remain, of course. For a time. Should they turn violent when their mighty lord is bum-rushed as before—Mr. Trump suggests a bloodbath if he loses the election—there will be the likes of Jack Smith with whom they must contend. Most in the angry MAGA cult will eventually submit to being shunned, some might even understand that their anger has been false courage all along.
As an anonymous contributor wrote of Donald Trump in a Facebook post, “When he’s gone, what I’ll remember most is those who encouraged, supported, and enabled him. They will forever reek of his stench.”
