Stoopid

I’ve been writing about this asshole Donald Trump since the Voice called me up back in the early spring of 2016 and asked me if I could write a piece about the man who was taking over the Republican primary. I wrote a long piece for them, then I wrote another, and then in 2017 after he had taken office, I started writing a column for Salon, and inevitably many, many of the columns ended up being about the newly elected president.

He was an inveterate liar and a scam artist and a sexual abuser of women and a bankrupt businessman and a serial inflater of his accomplishments in life, which began with his claim to be a billionaire, which he wasn’t. But at the time, I didn’t think he was stupid. He got himself elected with a shoestring campaign that consisted almost entirely of rallies he held daily, sometimes twice a day, a political strategy which hadn’t been tried since politicians barnstormed the country and spoke to crowds from the porches on the backends of trains. Clearly, he had identified and appealed to a segment of the public that hadn’t been paid attention to by mainstream politicians seemingly for decades, and he had figured out a way to unleash their resentment and residual racism, which had been more or less held in abeyance until he came along and said, look at me! I’m just like you! I’m a racist, and I’m not afraid to show it.

His accomplishments in his first term consisted of recycled, timeworn Republican Chamber of Commerce auto-twaddle such as tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and in fact, that was it. But he got it done. His appointments to the courts weren’t even his, farmed out to the Federalist Society. He lost to Biden in 2020 because his corruption, even then, had become too visible, especially during COVID, when he took over the White House press room and turned it into a colonoscopy that showed both his incompetence and corruption in cinemascope.

Out of office, he spent four years steaming and swearing that he wouldn’t make the mistake he made in his first term -- a failure to adequately employ the power of the office to enrich himself, which he proceeded to do with startling alacrity this time around.

His ego, already blown up to the size of Mount Whitney, exploded. There is no need to recount his rampage through the traditions of Washington D.C., starting with making himself the Chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center, which appeared somewhat benign until the board, all of whom were his appointees, “voted” to put his name on the front of the art center dedicated to President Kennedy. And on he went – the east wing blasted to kingdom come, a “ballroom” that if built will dwarf the White House itself…

All this understandable as a kind of logical conclusion of Donald Trump writ large.

But then came his war on Iran, which after four months we can see for what it was all along – a hundred-billion-dollar revenge campaign against one man, Barack Obama, who had made a deal with Iran that Trump simply couldn’t get out of his head. He would beat Obama. He would beat Biden. He would beat them all. He would wipe out the mullahs and destroy their nuclear dust and put himself in the history books as the Man Who Solved the Middle East.

So he went to war, and he very quickly – four months is a blip in the scheme of recent wars fought by the U.S. – lost the war, and in so doing, he has had to buy his way out the same way he used to buy his way out of his bankrupt business career – with other people’s money – this time, ours.

He has been reduced to a stumbling, babbling display of what he was all along, beneath the pancake and red ties and “YMCA” and bluster – a very stupid man who can’t hide it any more. Threatening to bomb the shit out of Iran during the hours his own Vice President was in Switzerland sitting at the negotiating table with representatives of the country that had just handed him his own shit to eat on a platter: stupid. Not a mistake. Not a midnight social media post that could be explained away. Stupid on a scale the world hasn’t seen since Hitler refused to listen to his generals about Russia and where to defend the coast of France. Deadly stupid. Loser stupid.

But what really capped it for me was the display he put on yesterday in the Oval Office about his utterly fucked up reflecting pool. He claimed someone used a “knife” to make a cut in the the bottom of the reflecting pool that was 290 feet long. Then it was 300 feet. Then it grew to 350 feet. All this in front of the White House press that had followed the stories, knew there was no “cut” in the bottom of the reflecting pool, knew the whole thing was a complete shambles created by the man sitting right in front of them. How could someone have waded into the reflecting pool and cut it when you’ve had National Guard all over the place? a reporter inquired. Ask “parks,” Trump told him. Clearly blanking on the name of his interior secretary, Trump said, “ask the secretary.”

Five people had been arrested, he claimed. Five more were “under investigation.” None of this was true. There was one arrest. Everyone knew about it, knew who it was, knew that the guy just touched a piece of floating paint and got busted. Everybody knew he would turn into the reflecting pool’s sandwich guy, the man who was accused of attacking the police by throwing a Subway sandwich. Everybody knew a D.C. grand jury refused to indict the sandwich guy.

Trump babbled on, sitting there in front of a White House press corps, every one of whom had watched him fall asleep in his chair again and again and again, his mouth drooping, as members of his cabinet stood behind him issuing forth with layer-cakes of praise, which Trump slept through, his head lolling, everyone in the Oval Office, press included, just standing there watching this old man sleeping. Most of the press had been there when Trump apparently shat himself sitting in that chair, watched as more cabinet members tried unsuccessfully to stop themselves from screwing up their noses in disgust, all of them knowing exactly what had happened because the sound was louder and wetter than a simple fart. It was shit coming out of Trump’s ass, as he just sat there unable to stop himself, waiting for his aides to dutifully clear the room, press first, cabinet and guests second, so an aide could come in and clean him up.

This is incredible, of course. It’s unprecedented. It’s unbelievable. But most of all, it’s stupid, because he’s not getting away with it anymore, and everyone knows it. Stories began running in the last few days about White House staffers actually using the word “old” in describing Trump’s recent behavior. This didn’t happen before. People were too scared. Now they know that something is different. Some things can’t be explained away. A reflecting pool covered in algae that resulted from a corrupt contract with a buddy of Trump’s, a “pool guy” who was called in to paint something that wasn’t a swimming pool, that resulted in a disaster that happened in slow motion, in neon green, that couldn’t be explained away with shrieks of “radical leftists” and “Antifa” and “sabotage,” because it was not any of those Trump excuses, it was nature refusing to cooperate with the narrative, nature that was going to do what nature does, that war is going to do what war does, it gets out of control because that is what wars do.

You could call what has been happening to Donald Trump a perfect storm, but that is not what it is. It’s a stupid man finally hitting a wall. He couldn’t find his way around at the G-7. He let out one of his epic farts when everyone was sitting around the meeting table, and it wasn’t the Oval Office, with all the trained lickspittles knowing how to keep a straight face. It was presidents and prime ministers, and they couldn’t keep their faces from showing how bad it smelled.

He’s old, and his orange makeup is absurd, and he smells, and he can’t walk straight, and they can’t hide his physical ailments, and whether his mental decline is age related or not, the simple fact that he is a stupid, stupid man has come to the fore, and it’s not going away.