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| It's 3 a.m. in America |
It’s been six months since
I weighed in on President Trump; maybe I thought he’d have a short-lived reign--as
short as his stubby little fingers. But here we are, almost a year into our
national nightmare.
Well, actually, it’s a bad
dream only to some of us. He still has his “base” (how apropos a word), in whose
eyes and minds (?) he can do no wrong. That constituency is holding steady at
35 percent of the populace, a number that corresponds, roughly, to the
percentage of Amurricans who seethed over the very idea of a black man in the
White House.
Trump promised to fight
for the interests of all those who’d been “left behind,” but thus far his Presidency
has been wholly devoted not only to leaving the little man (and woman) behind,
but to plowing him under. The Republican tax plan (or boondoggle, to be more
precise), the latest piece of criminal mischief intended to be shoved down our throats,
will benefit the rich and hurt the not-rich, almost everyone agrees, even the
227 craven GOP representatives who voted for it Thursday.
“I’m willing to pay more
(taxes),” Trump said last May, and in September he said that his tax plan was “not
good for me, believe me.” True, the measure that passed this week will benefit
him and his sleazy family by only about a billion dollars.
But what did we expect
from someone who looked at the Presidency of the United States as a
money-making opportunity?
Since this was
transparently so from the beginning, why did so many people vote for him? Well,
anything’s better than Hillary, right? Even a nuclear war, I guess.
But why did 53 percent of
white women decide to vote for this vulgar misogynist and admitted
pussy-grabber? As a lark, maybe? After all, Trump wasn’t really real, only
reality-TV real. Is the spectacle of him now unraveling in the White House
still amusing?
In fact, it’s not hard to
get people to do and say things that aren’t in their own best interests. How
else do you explain the women in Alabama standing up for Roy Moore? It’s not
that he might have done the things he’s been accused of doing, it’s just that,
in the bigger picture, they don’t matter. We’ll excuse his individual
peccadilloes, these women seem to be saying, because he’s fighting the good
fight against institutionalized
godlessness.
Trump, of course, hasn’t
joined the debate over Moore--he has his base
to think about--but he couldn’t resist tweeting about Al Franken. He couldn’t
resist, because he couldn’t bear to think that we might be thinking about Al
Franken, and not thinking about Donald Trump. That’s the only conclusion to
draw, since both his tweet, and his decision to tweet, were senseless.
That’s the rule of thumb,
now, about the rule of Trump: nothing about it makes sense.
