New York
Upon a wonderful Saturday just two years and eight months from now, a newly elected president of the United States will stand atop a grand staircase of marble and stone at the west front of the Capitol building in Washington. Whomever it shall be, she or he will commence the making of a better world.
The winter air will be sweet and clean—sweeping away a toxic stench that has clouded Washington since a certain faux business tycoon and soul mate of the late paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein tricked out a once respectable political party as a vehicle for revving up his authoritarian ambition and fattening his personal exchequer.
On the wonderful day soon to come, one of fresh air as well as a fresh presidency, those of certain a vintage may sense a flashback to the year 1974. Back then, the new man in charge was Gerald Ford (1913-2006), who said of his immediate predecessor, the deeply corrupt Richard Nixon (1913-1994): “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”
My fellow Americans of today: To know such deeply satisfying sentiment again, or perhaps the first time, mark your calendars accordingly:
Date & time: Saturday the 20th of January 2029, noon.
The place: Capitol building, Washington (west front).
The event: Presidential Inauguration Day for someone not named Trump.
•
At high noon on a Saturday twenty-two months hence, the curtain drops on what has been, at best, an injurious theatrical farce of two non-consecutive presidential regimes starring Donald J. Trump and his troupe of flunkies and fascists, brutes and boneheads, liars and lickspittles, titans and twits, dorks and drunkards, grifters and golfers.
“I know the best people, the toughest people, the greatest people,” as we are informed by The Donald, this being the appellation preferred by the first of his three wives.
From a dais set above the Capitol stairs that wonderful Saturday in Washington, see in your mind’s eye a robed John Roberts, chief justice of the Supreme Court. See him with the Holy Bible in his left hand as he raises the right to administer the traditional thirty-five word oath of office to the president-elect.
Now hear the traditional pomp and circumstance that follows—clerical blessings, inspirational poetry and song. After which, hear the new president deliver an inaugural address of twenty minutes thereabouts, an address in which I expect to hear that echo of 1974.
Finally, a coda to the ceremony—a brassy rendition of “Hail to the Chief,” performed by the U.S. Marine Corps band.
Assuming that Donald Trump is restrained from instigating armed insurrection at the Capitol’s west front—as he did five years ago, occasioning the second of his impeachments—we will spend the balance of Saturday, 20 January 2029 in joyous relief that he is, at long last, a shrunken man no longer in our midst, no longer worthy of newspaper headlines and TV air time.
…Relief that a convicted felon, adjudicated sexual assailant, and pathological liar will never again soil the White House—the people’s house—with his presence. A babbling boor who will be escorted to Air Force One, perhaps in a straitjacket, for his final flight on the taxpayers’ dime, this time to the cheesy splendor of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, home of Florida’s rich and reprehensible.
…O, joy!
But our jubilation over the disappearance of a big-bellied, diaper-clad, yellow-haired Philistine with the complexion of a rancid kumquat will evaporate in the dawn of Sunday, 21 January 2029.
For that morning as we bolt from our sleep, step into our slippers, and shuffle into the kitchen for hot coffee, we will come to a cold realization: The blessed end of Trumpian chaos and cruelty has not so much liberated us as brought us to a harsh beginning—namely, decades of labor needed to restore the rickety levels of political and jurisprudential decency we recently knew, but allowed to collapse.
Decencies that were overrun by Mr. Trump and his cult, united in stupidity or bigotry or greed or all three handicaps. Indecencies overlooked or countenanced by too many among our well-fed institutional leaders who sought false comfort and security in taking the apathetic view, in which forgetfulness somehow became a virtue.
It is at this point when We the People understand that apathy is unaffordable; when we realize that we are the ones we’ve been looking for to dig into The Donald’s dirt and record it for posterity; when we realize the importance of regrettable memory as acknowledgment of shame we must atone.
—NOTE: I have written rude characterizations of Donald Trump herein, and will continue to do so in the cause of fair play. For every day of his miserable life, it seems, he repeats one or more insults from his hit parade: “low-IQ” or “total loser” or “fat piggy” or “nasty” or “low energy,” etc. etc. The man is a lout who especially delights in disparaging women, usually on the basis of appearance he finds not to his liking. Alas, I understate my contempt.
•
One could say that it is not entirely Donald Trump’s fault that our jurisprudential system has allowed him to mostly have his way when caught up short for conduct that would have the rest of us behind bars lickety-split. One could say that he has gotten away with everything short of murder, unless we consider him responsible for the February bombing of a school house in southern Iran that killed at least one hundred-fifty young children—one of the many horrid instances of potential war crimes in the pointless combat he initiated, likely for the purpose of distracting from the lurid details of his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
We the People are responsible for admitting The Donald to the posh and power of White House residency. In 2016, We the People made him president with a healthy ballot run-up of 62,984,828, according to the Federal Election Commission’s official tally. That number swelled to 77,303,573 for his victory in 2024, never mind the impeachments and assorted other disasters of his first term and his ludicrous charge—to this day—that he lost his first reëlection bid in 2020 because political enemies “rigged” the vote against him, state by state.
But of course, it was The Donald himself who stole into the 2020 contest by way of a recorded telephone conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on the sketchy subject of reversing win-loss results that found Joseph Biden the winner in Georgia. From the transcript of that call, Donald Trump suggested—
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
Racketeering charges were brought against Donald Trump by prosecutors in Atlanta, the capital city of Georgia. But in November of last year, a judge dismissed those charges, thereby allowing defendant Trump to wriggle his way out of possible incarceration. Then there are these matters among many others, these that top the list of The Donald’s escapes from the long arm of the law—
• Prominent economists estimate Mr. Trump’s private earnings over the past two years at between $1.4 billion and $3 billion ( €1.20 billion – €2.57 billion), largely measured in cryptocurrency, untraceable coin of the realm for a host of scummy enterprises.
For those seeking The Donald’s favor, crypto deposits are welcomed at the Trump family’s hastily formed corporate entity, World Liberty Financial—currently the primary target of lawsuits centered on the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, a provision aimed at preventing government officials from using their positions for private financial gain.
• Wholesale arrests and untimely deaths of migrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa have reached historically high levels under the command of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy who rarely misses a chance for public adoration of The Donald and who is frequently compared to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Mr. Miller established family separation as a standard for dealing with migrants. He is the driving force behind the “Detention Re-engineering Initiative,” a massive program of converting commercial warehouses into an archipelago of concentration camps for so-called “illegal aliens” rounded up by thugs employed by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.
As of April 30, fifty individuals have died while in ICE custody thus far in 2026. Causes of death include medical emergencies, murder, and suicide.
• Per the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal: At April’s end, the Justice Department has released to the public only half the estimated 3.5 million pages constituting the Epstein Files, so-called, as required under a document transparency law signed last year by Donald Trump. The missing files are widely believed to implicate The Donald in sex crimes facilitated by the late Mr. Epstein, who committed suicide in August 2019 by hanging himself in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting federal trial for recruiting, enticing, and transporting dozens of girls, some as young as 14, to engage in sex acts at his New York City mansion as well as his home in Florida near Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
• Per the aforementioned insurrection of 6 January 2021: The very first action of The Donald’s first day as president for a second run was to issue a blanket pardon for some 1,600 thuggish Trump loyalists involved in armed attack on the Capitol—a bloody event that killed one civilian and one police officer at the scene, and that caused the post-insurrection deaths of eight more officers. Hospitalized with serious injuries were 174 officers.
But Mr. Trump now seeks to further assist those of the 1,600 insurrectionists by seeking pardons for crimes they have committed in the months and years after January 2021.
•
Seven years ago on a fine October day in Berlin, I strolled through the Kreuzberg district with a friend of mine—a man of letters and a student of German history. We talked as we walked, of course. Inevitably, our conversation turned to the wickedness of Donald Trump in awakening a fascist impulse in America.
My erudite friend asked, “What is wrong with you Americans? Have you learned nothing from what happened to us?”
A fair question in need of an answer now rising in several places. Of particular resonance, I believe, are Monday evening broadcast segments on MS NOW Television in which anchor Rachel Maddow presents a cavalcade of resistance to the current regime—video reports of public anti-Trump demonstrations in small, out-of-the-way towns in states with a partisan tilt toward The Donald.
Nationally, we Americans organized three “No Kings Day” anti-Trump demonstrations so far this year in places big and small. Turnouts have grown from three million the first time out, then five million, then nearly eight million. (I have twice marched the length of Fifth Avenue here in New York.)
As I write, King Charles III of the United Kingdom is visiting the U.S., where he has pointedly reminded would-be King Trump that American riff-raff of the 18th century did the right thing in throwing off British colonial rule in favor of democracy—and establishing restraints on governmental rule that limit the power of wayward officials.
Also: Last month’s issue of The Nation magazine, the oldest continuing publication in America, contained news of its editorial board nomination for this year’s recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize—the high honor sought by Donald Trump, who lays wrongful claim to have “ended” eight wars abroad, even as he wages what may become a long and bloody slog.
The Nation’s nominee: the people of Minneapolis, where Stephen Miller’s goons shot and killed two citizens active in the city’s resistance to ICE round-ups of immigrants with legal status or otherwise. Armed with fierce objection to the indecency of Trumpian assaults on neighbors come from abroad to build new lives, the people of Minneapolis have expelled all ICE thugs.
•
Meanwhile, friends in Germany advise a formula for restoring American honor in the wake of Mr. Trump’s egomaniacal damage to humanity. In two delightfully long compound words, this is what we must learn to need––
• Firstly, Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, meaning to face up to the past.
• Subsequently—Vergangenheitsbewältigung, meaning to cope with past horror by implementing safeguards against reoccurrence.
Meanwhile, too, there is the remains Mr. Trump’s war on Iran. Ever the bellicose oaf, he fired off this message via social media the other day—
“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell. JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President, DONALD J. TRUMP”
As if singing to the oaf himself, the Iranian hip-hop performer Toomaj Salehi rejoined with this apt description of The Donald’s war—
“It’s a trap/It’s the graveyard of your vanity”
** **
