The Countdown Continues

     

     Fourteen hours and five minutes.

     If you're like me and probably over 100,000,000 other Americans, you don't need to know what that is. But for those of you who do, that's the amount of time Trump has left at the White House from which he has been rightly and lawfully evicted by 81,200,000+ of us.

    To paraphrase Gerald Ford, another right wing, one term nonentity, "Our long national nightmare is almost over." There are only last minute pardons for Trump to issue for murderers like Joe Exotic and white collar criminals like himself and there are going to be a lot of pissed off lawyers and white collar criminals who'd given vast sums of bribe money to better hedge their bets of getting a last minute pardon come noontime tomorrow.

    Sucks to be them. Maybe, like Trump, they should've made their own villainies more spectacular and enterprising to better get his baleful notice.

    But history and its handmaiden Posterity will not judge the rest of us very kindly, either. They will begin charting our social and political descent with that of Donald Trump on that escalator on June 15, 2015.

     It was then that America changed for the worse.

   It was two days before the AME church shooting in Charleston, SC that killed nine black parishioners. As he began bumbling, slouching and lurching his way down the campaign trail for what was supposed to be his third stunt campaign, Trump never mentioned it.

     And somehow, in a month or less, he went from being cheered by a tiny crowd of mostly paid actors (whose employer was eventually stiffed) to packed stadiums in an ongoing, hideously-developing dystopian political nightmare not seen since Robert Penn Warren or Sinclair Lewis.

     Before we knew it, after dozens of rallies, the Democratic "shoein" was wiping egg off her face and instead of Clinton, we had to endure the sight two days later of Barack Obama struggling to remain gracious as he had the "winner" over at the Oval Office.

    And, for the last four years after that painfully awkward meeting between Trump and Obama, when the former could barely stand to look the latter in the eye, we in turn have had to endure having in that hallowed office a fat, pasty, vain, corrupt, petty, mendacious, drug-abusing, misogynistic, lazy, xenophobic, racist, fascist, treasonous, megalomaniacal, ignorant, murderous, sociopathic, lecherous child molester who'd coddled the very worst elements that American society is capable of producing:

     He pardoned political criminals like Roger Stone, racist criminals like Joe Arpaio, paid unregistered agents of foreign countries like Michael Flynn and war criminals like Eddie Gallagher. He coddled dictators like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Erdogan, Duterte, Bolsanaro, Orban, MBS and others. While he feted the most bloodthirsty dictators this planet has ever seen at least in our lifetimes, he'd alienated our oldest and staunchest allies, even those who'd run conservative governments like Merkel in Germany and Theresa May in Great Britain.

    He'd begun needless trade wars with countries, most notably China, that he'd deluded himself into thinking would be paid for by China and were, instead, paid for by American workers and consumers. It had resulted in China bringing its ruinous virus to our shores, bad diplomatic will and the loss of countless US jobs.

    He'd started his so-called presidency by imposing a ban on first seven, then six Muslim-majority nations, none in which he'd held a financial stake. During all this, he and his spawn had shamelessly  chased licensing deals and played golf about a quarter of his one term in office and bankrupting the Secret Service by August 2017.

      He was so racist, he had no problem putting children in cages after forcibly separating them from their parents. He tear-gassed migrants at the border then his lawyers argued in court we could still meet humanitarian legal thresholds by depriving these innocent children of soap, toothbrushes and even beds. Then hundreds, at least, went into the wind.

     He'd ended his so-called presidency with an act of treason and sedition, openly calling for his own vice president to unlawfully reject the Electoral College results and in doing so, painting a target on the back of Mike Pence and everyone in his family who was at the Capitol that day. It resulted in a riot and a sacking of the nerve center of our Legislative Branch of our government that had not been seen since the British burned Washington to the ground in 1814.

     He got himself impeached over Joe Biden not once but twice. The first came when he'd illegally withheld $391,000,000 in Congressionally-mandated military aid to Ukraine in exchange for just the announcement of an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden long before Biden had even won his first primary.

     He got impeached a second time a week after he'd started a riot that killed five people to somehow overturn the results of an election that more and more Republicans admitted was won by Biden.

   That was because, as Election Day drew closer and closer and Biden's appeal grew among progressive voters, Trump got more and more frantic that he'd be rudely be deprived of the legal impunity of the presidency upon which he was increasingly becoming dependent. He never wanted the duties, responsibilities and burdens of the presidency. He just craved the attention, being at the center of the world stage and, of course, the legal immunity from prosecution.

    Trump was a sociopathic narcissist who literally tried to not just violate the Constitution by having his top lieutenant reject Electoral College results that were lawfully cast last month and didn't care who got killed or hurt. He also tried to overthrow the very government and have himself installed as an unelected dictator. That's how insane he is at the end.

     Now, those tens of thousands of fools are expecting or hoping for last minute pardons.

     They never realized that Trump threw his own vice president to the wolves. And, if he was willing to do that, what would he think of the rioters who were nothing more than nameless, faceless cannon fodder to him?

     If there was any shred of doubt that Donald Trump never gave a shit about anyone but himself, that he thought he was bigger than the government, January 6th should have put those lingering reservations to rest. He killed 400,000 of us for not addressing a deadly pandemic because meaningfully addressing it would have gotten in the way of his reelection campaign.

    And we will all have to answer to Posterity and be slapped with its wide brush, whether we ever voted for him or not. Tragically, we all own him, all 328,000,000 of us.