New York
We Americans believe us a decent people suffering the rule of an indecent, impulsive baby-man bully forever shaming us before the world. Our own impulse seems righteous: Kick him now that he’s falling down, now that he’s knocking at the door to irrelevance.
Surely we decent folks might earn patriotic credit in avenging a bully who sorely deserves a farewell boot in the butt, metaphorically at least. For indeed, comeuppance is overdue for his very presence in our national life—this lumpy, balding, badly tailored ruler…
…this adjudicated sexual assailant and huckster, convicted felon, vulgarian deadbeat, six-time bankruptee, hamburger-gobbling glutton, cryptocurrency profiteer, golf-playing fascist, and non-paying White House tenant who thinks he owns the place.
You likely know of whom I speak.
We snicker and guffaw in our fantasies of stomping on the fetid rump of this megalomaniacal baby-man misogynist and soiler of every chair that has ever borne his lard.
But when the time havoccomes for chortling to die, we realize that good swift kicks in the pants are but temporary triumphs. We realize, too, that we must take into account the rôle that We-the-Decent-People have played in a crime story starring a boor who trumped, if you will, the basic tenets of civility here in the world’s oldest continuous democracy.
The boor at question was hardly alone in wreaking havoc wherever he stumbled or strode. Despite claiming to be a “very stable genius” with a “big, uh, brain,” the man is simply not bright enough to destroy normalcy all by himself. It becomes our duty, then, to identify his partners in crime.
To begin, there is the notion of a worldly animal of the forest named Pogo, possum hero of Walt Kelly’s eponymous cartoon strip satire—
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Democracies are the delicate constructs of societies sufficiently confident to put ordinary people in the driver’s seat. From time to time, here in the United States and elsewhere, democracy is side-swiped by an autocratic dullard and his supportive clique of oligarchs—a limousine-riding group that requires a useful idiot up front to amuse the asses and confuse the masses. All in the cause of the limousine types stockpiling ever more power, ever more money, ever more golden gewgaws.
Enter Donald Trump.
As with creatures of the rodent kingdom, Mr. Trump is not intelligent but he is single-minded—most certainly in holding strictest obeyance to the clique. Cuddle him with cash, flattery, peachy young females—and an early morning tee time at the golf club, where plutocrats play a game with their sticks and little dimpled balls—and Donald will say the damndest fool things. For instance: Pesky journalists who keep tabs on his daily doings are “enemies of the people” who peddle “hoax” after “hoax” after “hoax.” (Somewhere in Hell grins the late Josef Stalin.)
And by the way, that nasty old business about Mr. Trump’s dear friend Jeffrey Epstein? The rapist who supposedly hanged himself in a jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of child sex trafficking? The rapist whose East Side Manhattan brownstone was a perpetual swirl of scantily-clad “models” who loitered, fetchingly, in the mansion’s so-called massage room—a parlor with hidden cameras packed in the walls? Whose brownstone neighbor was and is the home of Howard Lutnick, currently serving as commerce secretary in the Trump administration?
That Jeffrey Epstein?
Mr. Trump dealt with the matter during an Oval Office press gaggle two years ago. At the time, a female television correspondent inquired as to why the promised release of document files and videotapes related to lewd entertainments for friends of the late Mr. Epstein had not, in fact, been fully released. (Nor have they been today.) In typical fashion, Mr. Trump barked at the woman, “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? …That is unbelievable!”
Enemies of the people, bless them, are still talking about Epstein.
And yes, We-the-Decent-People knew of Epstein et al. during all three of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns—somewhat so in 2016, then widely so in 2020 and ’24.
Yet in every one of those years, Americans by the tens of millions cast ballots for Donald Trump, whose name is reportedly referenced many hundreds of times in the Epstein files. Whose popular vote total nevertheless grew exponentially—62,955,340 votes in ’16, then 74,216,728 in ’20, then 77,303,568 in ’24, according to figures from the Federal Election Commission.
And yet in each of those years, according to an Australian political observer’s Facebook complaint about the U.S. electorate, posted in late September, this, too, was known to voters who chose Mr. Trump’s insistence on the country’s inarguable greatness over ugliness he cannot or will not see—
“[America] is a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
“You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re just too poor to make bail.
“…Your kids do active shooter drills between math and English [classes]…You’ve got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn’t attack you.”
The question begs: How do we reconcile dark truths about America, and ourselves?
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Great guy.” — Donald Trump, being photographed with Jeffrey Epstein…
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Following the 1996 collapse of South Africa’s evil era of apartheid, the new President Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) named Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931-2021) as head of a restorative governmental body known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Accordingly, the TRC commenced rooting out indecency by “bearing witness to, recording, and in some cases granting amnesty to perpetrators of crimes relating to human rights violations, as well as offering reparation and rehabilitation to the victims,” per its directive, along with a “register of reconciliation established so that ordinary South Africans who wished to express regret for past failures could also express their remorse.”
I can think of no better, no more charitable or noble model than South Africa’s TRC for U.S. adaptation to our needs as we await the Trump regime’s final hour: high noon on Saturday the 20th of January 2029, per constitutional law.
Between now and then, we see a daily erosion of Mr. Trump’s administration and personal popularity; of the latter, the best approval rating for the president—crippled as he is by the public’s disgust with thuggish round-ups and killings of immigrants, a grinding and pointless war he started with Iran, and our homefront economic crises—has him at merely thirty-two percent among major opinion polls.
An American TRC, if we are a good enough people with a good enough president to assemble such a body, would take inspiration from the African philosophy of Ubuntu, which roughly translates from the Nguni languages as “humanity to others,” or “I am what I am because of who we are.”
In this way, we Americans may begin slouching toward a comity that would more truly distinguish decency from wickedness, while at the same time recognizing an ancient conundrum: There is a bit of each of these opposing qualities floating free in each of us. Perhaps this would save us the trouble of another boy-man bully, at least for a few generations down the line; we could recognize the flimflam early on, thus tamping down damage to the national soul.
Meanwhile, “The walls are closing in on Donald Trump,” as former federal judge J. Michael Luttig says of the president. Time draws short for the deserved merriment of kicking a noxious little man whose latest attempt at relevance is a YouTube channel he has christened “Trump TV.”
In the spirit of state media in Russia and North Korea, Donald Trump’s YouTube offering debuted last month with video clips of his greatest hits—a collection of his braying and ranting before friendly audiences of the past. The initial episode attracted eight thousand viewers, reduced to slightly more than a thousand some ninety minutes into the stupendously boring broadcast. These numbers in a country with a population of more than three-hundred million.
Come that January day in 2029, how many viewers will tune in to the sure-to-be-joyous coverage of Donald Trump at last departing from Washington? Or, how many will yearn for even greater joy in recalling the Irving Berlin tune of 1941, “When that Man is Dead and Gone”—
When that man is dead and gone
We’ll go dancing down the street—
Kissing ev’ryone we meet…
What a day to wake up on,
What a way to greet the dawn.
Some fine day the news will flash:
Satan sleeps beneath the lawn.
THOMAS ADCOCK
U.S. correspondent
His essays with us: click here.
