Selected, Elected, Defected, Rejected, Dejected

 

 (By American Zen's Nike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

On June 13, 2020, Donald Trump was on West Point's Plain Parade Field and battling a lot of things: Consistently and eerily steady but still-low approval poll numbers. Straw polls showing him losing to then presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. And, the most dastardly and invincible foes of all, a glass of water and a ramp with a three degree incline.

    But out of all those Socialist, radical liberal adversaries, the ones he was fighting the most fiercely were his own memories. And, as dotty and spotty as Donald's memory is (If we could photograph his gray matter, it would look like moldy Swiss cheese that's more holes than cheese), he couldn't have not been thinking of his parents' rejection of him, or at least his behavior, in 1959. It was that year, when he was 13 years-old, that Fred and Ann packed him off to a military boarding school, the New York Military Academy in Cornwall, NY, which, like West Point, is north of New York City.

    In 1959, Donald Trump was a coddled boy birthed in wealth and privilege, one born not with a silver spoon in his mouth but the entire silver drawer. By age seven, he was already a dangerous, violent sociopath. It was at that age that he attacked his music teacher and pronounced him ignorant in all matters musical.

 

    By 13, even Trump's equally sociopathic parents (And Fred Trump looked and acted like a villain straight out of central casting for The Perils of Pauline) had had enough of him and finally sent him off to that military boarding school in order to instill in him some discipline and respect for his elders. But it's become obvious to those of us paying him more than cursory attention that whatever discipline that may have been drummed into him had long since dissipated. By the time he'd matriculated into the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School, he'd already hired a boy named Shapiro to take his SATs. That was the beginning of an endless grift that's lasted for 56 years.

    So, as Trump squinted into the West Point sun and the fresh faces of those 1107 uniformed cadets, the memories of his parents' unforgivable rejection of him (and the singular brilliance that seemingly only he and his EKG flatliner supporters can see), those thoughts must have been tugging at his elbow. Contracting COVID-19 was still three months off, his election defeat still four and a half months away. The walls hadn't begun closing in on him, yet, not while his impenetrable denialism could still keep those slowly advancing spectres at bay.

    No, it wasn't the future that haunted Donald Trump on the 13th of June, 2020. It was the enemy that denialism cannot defeat- It was the past, the realm where everything has happened, been decided, when memories ossify into hard, ascertainable, verifiable fact.

    Looking out at those thousand plus young faces, all of them eager to meet an uncertain future, and their flawlessly crisp cadet uniforms, Donald Trump, their illegitimate Commander in Chief, could not help but be reminded of his adolescent self in the 50s and early 60s. It was the first time in his life when his parents, who had withheld their love and attention from him, had fully rejected him. It was the first and only time in his life when order and discipline had been imposed upon him.

     And he never forgot that outrage.

They Manned the Ramparts But He Couldn't Man the Ramp

By 2018, Trump's cognitive decline was so alarming, it prompted Dr. Justin Frank to break the Goldwater Rule and virtually put Trump on the couch. The 2018 result was, unambiguously, entitled Trump on the Couch. Since then he has been relentlessly psychoanalyzed by the likes of Dr. Bandy X. Lee and his own niece, Dr. Mary Trump. In fact, if Trump had shown the cognitive decline in Cornwall as he ceaselessly has since joining the campaign trail in 2015, he would've been sent packing back to Jamaica Queens with a recommendation from the headmaster that he see a neurologist. Stat.

    Five months after West Point and one week after the election, Trump may have been thinking of his excommunication in 1959. He may have even been thinking of the mashed potato incident in which his brother Fred Jr, Mary Trump's late father, had dumped a bowl of it on Donald's head, to the family's evident delight. After Trump had been washed into the White House on a tidal wave of Russian disinformation and GOP electoral fraud, he held a birthday party for both of his sisters. Maryanne Trump had reminded her younger brother of the mashed potato incident.

    Trump never had his sisters at the White House ever again, not even for his younger brother Robert's improbable White House memorial service. Yes, Robert, one of Donald's most ardent backers, a very small man who spent his last remaining weeks on earth fighting his own niece's book from being released with, in typical Trump fashion, a pair of failed lawsuits, got a White House service. Fred Jr, he of the mashed potatoes, was shunned, his special needs child denied health insurance while Trump grasped and clawed after what was left of his late father's estate.

    The petty, sadistic vindictive nature that got him banished to military boarding school, in the end, triumphed over the discipline he only pretended to have and was immediately jettisoned the minute he left for Pennsylvania, the same state that would get called for Joe Biden on November 7th, four days after the election.

     But this time, 61 years later, things are much different. Trump is no longer a 13 year-old powerless to control his future (One could seriously make the point the difference is now he's a 74 year-old who still has no control over his future but that's beside the point). The actual difference is Donald was essentially evicted from his home for the first time in 1959 (Again, one could make the case the same thing is happening on January 20th but that's also beside the point). However, 74 year-old Trump has an army of mindless, screaming morons, starting with his legal team, who are fighting tooth and nail to keep him from that eviction, that almost unprecedented rejection.

     It was Trump's very brutish, violent nature is what got him banished from Washington DC, the same brutish, violent nature that got him banished from his childhood home in Jamaica Queens in 1959. And he can't understand why either of these rejections happened. So now, for just the second time in his life, Trump has been rejected, with no control over the outcome. 

     Except there's no headmaster and no training instructors to instill discipline.