Some comics are known for their transgressive humor. With Donald Trump, we have a transgressive presidency. He violates another law or norm nearly every time he opens his mouth.
I have toyed for years with writing a piece called “We deserve a better class of mobster,” but I didn’t want to encourage anyone. My penchant for wisecracks aside, I’m not sure I want a better mobster.
Trump thinks he is a law unto himself. The very laws of the universe, he seems convinced, alter themselves at his whim.
He signed an executive order declaring English America’s official language, as if it’s a miracle we survived 249 years without such a directive. I live in the nation’s capital, where foreign languages are overheard all the time, and I never have any problem communicating with people. I joked with Cesar, the bilingual manager at my local McDonald’s, that if the feds come to arrest him, I will interpose myself between him and them.
Let’s just say: El presidente está loco.
Trump is the perfect social media victim, awash in aggressive ignorance, idiotic conspiracy theories, recklessness, greed, and obsession with revenge — all of which he sells as the path to restoring our national greatness. When it has the effect of diminishing us instead, he blames everyone but himself.
The real question is not what’s wrong with him, but how so many of our fellow citizens could be so full of rage that his modus operandi has worked for him for so long.
The public reaction to his rapid demolition of a thriving economy suggests that his thuggish charm may be wearing off at long last.
Nor is it just the economy. Virtually everything he says and does is destructive. For someone who benefited from his opponent being considered too old, he is going out of his way to convince us that he is our crazy uncle.
He alienates our strategic allies. He wants to buy Greenland and annex Canada. He advocates the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which is a war crime, in order to build a resort. He treats pesky reporters as enemies of the state, blacklists law firms when he disapproves of their clients, calls his political opponents traitors and peaceful protesters terrorists. He doubles down on every stupid thing he does, like his trade war, because he can never admit to being wrong.
Trump recently told reporters that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – who lost members of his family in the Holocaust – is no longer Jewish, but Palestinian. Who put Trump in charge of deciding who is Jewish? More to the point, if Trump cared about antisemitism he would not have dinner with people such as Nick Fuentes and Ye who talk like Nazis, nor draw to himself people such as JD Vance and Elon Musk who admire Germany’s Nazi-adjacent AfD party.
The divider-in-chief recently tried to start a scandal over transgenic laboratory mice, which has to do with genetics, not gender. If we’re going to have a fit over anything with “trans” in front of it, everything from transportation to transistors will be in trouble. Don’t tell Donald, but even Tesla cars have transmissions. There’s a region of Moldova called Transnistria that borders on Ukraine; I hear they have good wines. Maybe he’ll slap a tariff on them.
Incidentally, I once imagined setting up a service called Slap-o-Grams, which you could have delivered to people who annoyed you to tell them they deserved a good slapping without actually being violent. I am not litigious, but if you steal this idea and make a success of it, I think you should at least buy me lunch.
With no other leader can you so readily anticipate his wreckage. It is as if Trump were inspired by Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” about the ruins of an ancient pharaoh:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The trouble is, the wreckage is not just to Donald’s imagined statues, but to our constitutional republic. That is why we must resist.So what is our positive message? A good summation comes from Senator Pastor Raphael Warnock of Georgia. He talks of America’s covenant: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. Yes. We must carry on the ever-challenging work of making ourselves one people.