Out With the Old, In With the Lewd

Donald Trump in his gilded War Room

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein)

So we now have an incoming Commander in Chief who's more interested in screaming from his Twitter perch at 3 AM about non-existent porno movies by a former Miss Universe and a Vanity Fair food review of his glorified TGI Fridays restaurant at Trump Tower than he is in setting up a new government (aside from installing 1% assholes in his 5th Column Cabinet).

     Five blocks from the White House is a converted post office that's flawlessly symbolic of the slow GOP takeover of that august organization partly founded by Benjamin Franklin that's been turned into yet another gaudy Trump Hotel, featuring in it everything that Trump professes to despise including Korans on request and Chinese-made merchandise. The Presidential Suite goes for $18,000 a night, a strange take on economics for a charlatan and a fraud who positioned himself as a man of the working class.

     2017 is now here and while I will not miss right wing war criminal Barack Obama one bit, I will miss what he represented beyond his blood-spattered legacy of extra-judicial assassination: Intelligence. Class. Urbanity and sophistication. The man wore the presidency very well and learned the finest points of world leadership from his hard-nosed opposition to Russian and Israeli policies to the sophistication of his body language and elocution. Best of all: No scandals (aside from the undeclared ones of his war crimes.).
     For eight years, he provided a refreshing counterpoint to the brain-dead, pretzel-choking Bush years that gave us more malapropisms than 100 Norm Crosbys. When the most ironic Nobel Peace laureate since Kissinger wasn't murdering innocent brown people by the thousands with his dramatically ramped up, double tapping drone strike program and violating every international law under the sun, he at least presented himself as the model of grace. Yes, the man has a bloated ego and had the audacity to compare himself to truly great, truly Democratic Presidents of the past such as FDR and JFK. But you couldn't deny the man's quick wit, the ability to sing Al Green well and his high intelligence. Children, starting with his own, adore him.

     We have none of that with Donald Trump. Every time I look at this lumbering oaf walking through the halls of power as he sets up his billionaire's insurrection against everything the working class cherishes, I keep thinking of that famous meme of George W. Bush smiling and waving over the caption, "Miss Me, Yet?"

     It was hardly relevant between 2009 and now but it will certainly be so after January 19th.

     Trump's administration, as with the resumption of Wall Street's excesses after gorging itself on bailout bucks from the gilded trough of the US Treasury, promises more of the same of what we've seen of Trump over the last four plus decades- Egotism on a galactic scale and endless rapacity disguised as ambition. Trump is exactly what his mouth-breathing sycophants imagines a rich person should act like: Crude, boorish, intolerant of anything with a whiff of liberalism or divergent of oneself and a disdain for intelligence and erudition. In other words, a richer version of themselves.

     There was an Onion piece many years ago in which George W. Bush promised to try to speak to people who weren't heads of state. But it's impossible to imagine Agent Orange doing that with his fellow One Percenters. He'll have at least two billionaires in his Cabinet and several multimillionaires. They're essentially the same people who've been "picking your pockets", to use Trump's own words from last April, and still his redneck goobers love him for installing into the highest levels of government people whose sworn duty it is to dismantle that government with the intention of turning it into merely another subsidiary of Trump International.

     If you think 2016 was a wild ride, we have yet to reach peak assclownery. What this bellowing reality TV baboon has in store for us will make the spate of celebrity deaths last year look like highlights by conspicuous relief.

     And the first to be kicked to the curb will be an already supine and belly up mainstream media that Trump had told had too many protections under the First Amendment. He's Putin's Manchurian Candidate with a bad double weave, a man with a libido as out of control as his greed, misogyny, racism and ego.

     And despite the President's strained pretense of a smooth transition, Obama will do as virtually every ex president has and will spend the first few months of the new administration criticizing it once the transition has been completed. And few will listen to him once Trump takes the podium and addresses the Woodstock of rednecks listening on the National Mall, crunching their pork rinds and fooling themselves into believing that everything this man will do to them, including gunning after their Social Security, Obamacare, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps, is in some way marvelous.