Sculpting Donald Trump’s journey into epic poetry or Hollywood screenplay would demand neither exaggeration nor fiction.
Trump’s path from 2016 political ingenue to the White House is without parallel, and his 2020 defeat, dealt him by a senile sock puppet campaigning behind a mask in a basement, was comedy relief. As humor it stretched thin during four years of Biden, but helped keep the nation’s attention away from Trump’s exile.
Has there been anything like it? Trump thrown out. Trump in winter: Alone, attacked by media rodents nipping and gnawing, prosecutors filing charges no jurisdiction in the USA would dare bring to court had the allegations targeted a defendant named Joe Trump.
But fair play, honesty, scruples and justice were swept out the door. Donald Trump was charged with criminal acts in New York, indicted in Georgia, lawsuits filed in Colorado; other states demanded he not be allowed to run for office, his name struck from ballots (to Save Democracy, y’understand).
Friends and allies (General Michael Flynn, Mayor Rudy Giuliani) were harassed, sued, charged, fined millions of dollars, the federal boot heel of the law pressed firmly to throats.
Is this your America? Have other political enemies, other leaders of the opposition been attacked relentlessly in the media and in the courts, the aim purely to drive them from the public square and turn the loyal opposition into criminals?
Ugly stuff. They called Donald Trump Fascist and they called him Hitler. Should he be dragged naked through the streets, ears nailed to a truck’s back bumper, jeering crowds throwing rotting fruit?
I don’t remember Jimmy Carter being put in stocks outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after his failed presidency, nor Herbert Hoover jailed for shortcomings during the economic crash of 1929. Was Nixon’s head impaled on a stick?
Name other political leaders attacked, harassed, threatened with bankruptcy and prison, without mentioning Cuba, China, Venezuela, Argentina, Russia, Nicaragua or other Third World socialist / communist utopias beloved by our Democrat Party.
We wonder why Donald Trump didn’t give up. Nearing 80 he had spent years locked in court proceedings bleeding millions in legal fees. He could have pled simple exhaustion and burrowed back into his Florida mansion to play golf and assemble his memoirs.
Why not abandon the struggle? Why not concede the cruel and corrupt power had been too much? Trump in 2024 was a felon and nonstop target of the country’s vast power machinery. Yet he soldiered on, bloodied but unbowed.
Is Donald Trump a martyr, a hero, a savior, mocked and scorned but tough and unyielding? Is he The Man on the White Horse, surveying the smoking ruins of his valley village from a distant ridge top?
Or The Man in a Red Toga, tossing it over a shoulder, climbing the marble steps to a columned stage to address the assembled legislators, target of assassins, a man in defeat but not broken, driven by what money can’t touch and power can’t heal.
Or simply the product of modern America: Master and creation of reality TV, showbiz whiz, carnival barker, part John Wayne, part PT Barnum, part Huey Long, real estate tycoon, king of bling, casinos and gambling, World Wrestling boss, a mighty lion and a wounded patriot bleeding for his country, vowing Fight! Fight! Fight!
How he’ll some day be viewed when finally stripped free of the petty political debris is a puzzle. Perhaps a hazy figure like Andrew Jackson, hewn craggy and rocky in a few deft strokes from a hickory stump, or a jaunty, confident FDR, cigarette holder jutting from his jaw, or Abraham Lincoln sad, lamenting, troubled. Donald Trump in high relief on a collectible gold coin.
America was recently on edge, locked in racial showdowns that claimed only Certain Lives Matter, that believed cops woke up every morning hoping to go on shift to shoot down unarmed black men.
It seems long ago. We recall NFL players refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and instead taking a knee. Today? BLM revealed as a money-making hoax while NFL and college players are doing a funny, awkward Trump Dance in the end zone, laughing and bumping each other’s fists.
The left’s quivering hysterics over Trump building a new Auschwitz for gays and people of color is yet another grotesque lie.
Proof: Watch Donald Trump onstage at his 2025 inauguration, mingling with The Village People performing his campaign song, a gay anthem called YMCA. See him shake hands with all of them: Indian Chief, construction worker, bare-butt cowboy, police officer, everyone doing the silly little Trump Dance in front of millions at the event and on TV.
Trump is the insane left’s Hitler. He is their genocidal Nazi Fuhrer come to exterminate his enemies and “Steal Our Demockwacy,” sob sob whimper.
Oh the horror! Ah the humor!!
Tommy Wayne Kramer’s mockery of people who are opposed to the dangerous, reckless antics of Trump is appalling. Not a word about the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ after the Palestinians are removed. Cramer smirks in his eff you column about Elon Musk, Doge, and some of the worst cabinet appointees in modern history. Today, we learn Trump’s warrior boy Defense Secretary says Putin gets to keep the Ukraine territory and no membership in NATO. Trump is a Fascist, Tommy Wayne. And you would be laughable if your groveling at the feet of the MAGA crowd wasn’t so dangerous and pathetic. There is nothing humorous about your writing this day
Yep. Not funny at all. Sad instead.
++1 Thank you, Mike.
+1 TWK has jumped the shark. Pathetic.
Way to go TWK, you are correct in your assessment:)
Just as you sat back and never called the Biden Administration out! Let’s not get into appointee’s after the Biden fiasco. You’re calling out DOGE, speaking of dangerous. Do you not believe that an audit is unconstitutional? C’mon Mike your hate for Trump makes you sound crazy. I know you have common sense and agree most of the time with you.
You have to be the most willfully ignorant moron suckups to not acknowledge the brazen idiocy, callousness and moral bankruptcy we are currently in compared to any other time in this nation’s often troubled history. Hate for Diaper-narcissist is not only reasonable, it’s patriotic to the core. Mad cow Facebook nazi-Elon excusers like you are the reason that every day is a fearful, angry hurtful sad odyssey into the depths of depraved patheticness. Trump wouldn’t let you sniff his farts. Your support is truly sad.
Trump repeated a statement several times during his 2024 campaign that went sort of like this: “Vote for me, and you’ll never have to do it again.” That said a lot. Think about it.
I’ll agree that Biden was a senile POS, and his performance illustrates why I haven’t voted for a corporate (Democrat or Republican) candidate since 2000, when I held my nose and voted for Gore. I have a feeling that Trump is a lot like Viktor Orban in Hungary…
CALL IT AS I SEE IT, A real audit would be welcomed. However, Musk and “Big Balls” are not doing that or providing evidence of the massive waste they cite. You may take faith in Trump and his motley crew. I don’t. Their actions are hurting people and programs while removing oversight of the rich white boys who have pushed their way into the Oval Office. The Trump lies, distortions, and manipulations are over the top. Now, Trump and his boy warrior Defense Secretary have signaled their abandonment of the brave Ukranian people in favor of the steely,
cold Putin. What the hell does Putin have on Trump?
To notice something is not necessarily the same as for one to support it. You should be able to distinguish between this essay and a letter from say, Jerry Philbrick; may he rest in peace. Democracy Now sounds like the Trump Report and they aren’t supporting DJT . It’s what people are talking about.
Oh and by the way, calling people dummies and fascists doesn’t seem to bring them around to your argument. Hopefully that could be one lesson we learn from this past election. Only 205 weeks left!
I’m not sure what your goal was here Tom, but I could not find that witty satire I admire. For that you need some level of factual information contrasted by the irony of a situation. What I was left with though, was the impression of a maga loyalist using partial information to cynically defend his leader. You compare the treatment Trump received with that of Carter, Hoover and Nixon. Well, Carter and Hoover had not broken any laws, so jailing them would have been wrong. And Nixon resigned from the presidency and was pardoned by Ford, thus avoiding legal action and punishment. The rule of law is that those guilty of crimes should be tried, and punished if convicted. But the current republican party believes that political opponents should go to jail regardless of whether a crime has been committed, while allies should be allowed to commit crimes with impunity. Hillary Clinton was investigated for years over Benghazi (lawmakers admitted their investigation was solely to hurt her presidential chances), and the email debacle. Charges were never brought because they did not think she could be successfully prosecuted, and not because the Democrats had rigged the system. I could go on, but you get my drift. I would love to see more of the great writing you produced in the past, but you are going to need to be more honest with yourself about our current situation to be successful.
“I’m not sure what your goal was here Tom, but I could not find that witty satire I admire.”
Satire by definition, ridicules vices in mankind, setting it apart from lampoon, which uses the techniques of satire to ridicule certain people or groups —such as National Lampoon, which ridiculed American pop culture. And so when TWK uses these techniques to attack Democrats, he has left satire behind in favor of a personal agenda…
Had TWK used the same techniques to trick out the folly of Republicans in casting such hyperbolic aspersions on Biden/Harris as to call them radical liberals and Marxists, when the democrats today are all so very reactionary that they all eagerly threw Bernie Sanders (himself not even close to a leftist, let alone a radical, but far too scary for mainstream democrats) under the proverbial bus to get their squalid old grifter Biden in place—well, you see the difference?
Sure, you do. But I don’t.
Calling Trump a fascist is just as absurd as calling Biden a radical, to me. But TWK never saw fit to get a few bitter laughs out what a travesty it was for the MAGAs to put Marx’s beard on Biden— he could only see the parody when it came to pasting Hitler’s mustache of Trump.
No offense, Norm, but the modern definition of satire and irony have been altered by the neoliberals to refer to sit-coms and New Yorker cartoons. I subscribe to Dr Swift’s definitions. But neoliberalism is swiftly sinking into oblivion as Triumphant Trump introduces the fresh new horrors of neoconservatism on steroids and acid!
You’re way out of my league Bruce. I guess if I were to refine my point, it would be to say that for satire to be effective, one’s audience should agree on one set of facts, and hold similar values of what is right and wrong. Maybe that is not the modern view, but it is my view. :-)
“Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books
Excerpt from Verses on the Death of Dr Swift ( written posthumously by the deceased…)
“ Arbuthnot is no more my friend,
Who dares to irony pretend,
Which I was born to introduce,
Refin’d it first, and show’d its use.”
I know how it is, gotta get attention and this time TWK got a two fer: his MAGA fans probably liked it and he got a lot of attention from the other side also, nice job…
Oh and congrats, his man made it back to the white house,
conclusion: TWK is fulla shit…
(Of course anyone who is estranged from his own brother and family probably needs help, why he hates therapists so much, probably..)
I know, I’m just envious because I rarely get any comments…
Damn, I wished I had come up with Bruce Ewen’s line:
“But neoliberalism is swiftly sinking into oblivion as Triumphant Trump introduces the fresh new horrors of neoconservatism on steroids and acid!”
In among all these comments, we see the beginnings of a serious grasping of the facts and consequences of Trump’s and Musk’s power plays. Several weeks now into the chaos and disruption–watching their moves–now comes the sorting of it all with more clarity–the calling-out of facts, the analysis of what is going on, the real damage being done. The wrongness of their acts. And then the resistance will come in many forms, as it must. Thanks to Mike and Norm and others.
There’s no resistance coming from anywhere—look around: everyone buckles under on every issue, just like you did when Bernie ran against Trump the first time. You buckled for Biden. And then you finally, just yesterday, acknowledged Bernie’s courage and fitness for office! Sorry, Vicar, it simply will not do.
Ah, yes but…The resistance is just getting ready, seeing what is afoot–folks will start to push back, as they are now, with many lawsuits, as we’re already seeing. Judges will be pissed-off and fight back hard, for their rights to back-up the laws. The people will resist in ways not yet seen, when they see these guys care nothing for their needs, just want to be richer and richer. Women will push back, young folks, (not all of them) will push back as they see these guys are incompetent morons and fools. Old folks, like you and me, will linger on the sidelines, using words that mean not much, we are shot and nearly finished.
But, as one attorney noted in a public missive recently, give them a bit of space, let them do their thing, watch them fuck things up beyond belief, hurt the people’s interests, cause plenty of harm to the nation. Then– bring on the attack with vigor and force, given the information we’ll have then. It’s the old dynamic in politics, hang ’em with their own rope, then vote them out and vote in better ones to fix it all. The time will come.
This is the cutest cutie-pie, I know.
Can you come up with something, better?
I think there’s at least a smile, a chuckle here for everyone, like Paul Modic said.
https://t.co/BJ9pe9khB7
(https://x.com/photo5065/status/1889239196558151959?t=B7D9urSZlaED7Yi5jETBBA&s=03)
The ava is unalterably opposed to “cute.” We’ll let you slide this time, but…
Many if not most Americans pride themselves on not being suckers.
The worst con man in American history comes along and a third of them, so gullible, fall fully under his spell.
Leaving all politics aside, all one should need to know is Trump’s history of confirmed and convicted fraud, sexual abuse, lying and more to know he’s wholly a professional con artist and grifter.
People in his longtime arena of real estate have warned about this for decades – “Don’t do business with that family, they are entirely untrustworthy.” (Toss in de facto president Musk with a similar reputation for burning people).
He’s used the timeworn ruse of being a “Christian”while acting fully the opposite of all that stands for.
He’s been heartily endorsed by the likes of the KKK and American Nazi party, and frees violent convicted criminals while shouting Law And Order.
His record in office clearly shows all this to be true to form, regardless of how many get hurt or even die.
His own senior staff, generals, cabinet, etc refused to endorse him for a second term, as they actually know him.
His VP called him “cultural heroin” and a fascist before hypocritically succumbing to the greed drug himself.
He does nothing for “the people” or the nation, it’s all for people like him, laws and decency be damned.
The fact that so many ignore all this just confirms Mencken: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”.
It’s pathetic, and now they are taking down the nation and maybe even the world, so that a few may profit. His latest Bitcoin scam, ripping off supporters, is just one more of countless blatant examples.
If we truly “get the leaders we deserve,” we’re really a sad and pathetic lot. But actually most do know better, and Trump’s falling approval rates already make him the least popular since Nixon. The backlash will grow as more and more Trump voters realize they’ve been shafted, and as the incompetent MAGA cabal mess things up and succumb to infighting, and as inflation, epidemics, human rights horrors and more rise.
We’ll see if the full backlash and correction comes too late. We’re already disdained and laughed at by the world.
One need not support any party or politician to recognize that a very dark time for our country.
Scrolling through these comments here, let me be clear I’m no fan of Trump or his MAGA toadies, but…. It seems clear too me that thew Dems have no one but themselves to blame for this situation, abandoning working class people in favor of DEI culture wars, tends to provoke resentment in millions of people, and pre ordaining Genocide Joe as their nominee, shielding him from any primary challenge, and all the while gasliting the entire planet about his mental fitness, then when the lie cant be hidden any longer select (not elect), to “save” Democracy, their nomineee, who pledges to continue to murder Gazan kids, this and their hypocrisy tends to provoke some resentment and erosion of trust
Descriptive mapping of perspectives may help illuminate our current situation of a degrading human social order. Probably the most notable contemporary attempt to do so comes from the thinking and pens of those presenting the contours of “integral” politics.
Essentially this is based on a charting of a “spiral” picture of growth and development of stages of consciousness going beyond manifesting left and right political ideologies.
Here’s a brief reposting from an interview with Steve McIntosh from 2007 in the mag What is Enlightenment:
“Each distinct stage of consciousness—tribal, warrior, traditional, modern, postmodern, and now integral—has a corresponding political form of organization that almost always goes with it. We see that the tribal stage of consciousness produces a tribe and the permanent authority of a chief. Warrior consciousness, whether we’re talking about the early Vikings in Europe or the Incas in South America, retains many of the political characteristics of the tribe, but now the tribe is based on conquest, so you have early forms of empire building. Then the traditional stage of consciousness produces a feudal kingdom; indeed, no matter what kind of traditional consciousness we are talking about, East or West, feudalism is a political system that goes with it. That’s not to say that feudalism is an ideal system by any means, but the point is that feudalism is appropriate for traditional consciousness. Then with modernism, we have democracy and the multiethnic nation-state, and this is still basically the de facto system of global politics today—a world of competing nation-states.
Then with postmodern consciousness, we have a political organization that we might characterize as a form of social democracy, which we see, for example, in Scandinavia. There the welfare state is much more developed than it is in the United States; however, that system of government works because you have relatively homogeneous populations in Scandinavian countries. There is also a high level of education and therefore a high level of human capital. You don’t have huge segments of the population that are at premodern stages. And so, in narrow circumstances, a social democracy is a really highly evolved form of political organization, but it’s only one rung on the ladder. I think that to solve the problems of places like the United States, and indeed, the world, you need a stage of organization beyond that—one that can simultaneously accommodate all of the rungs on the ladder. So what type of government is associated with the integral stage? I’m suggesting that it points to the eventual emergence of an integrally informed, integrally structured, democratic federal world government.”
In our case, we are at a messy transition stage where we either go extinct (giving the natural planetary dynamics a break from our retarded ways) or we survive to begin participation in a galactic milieu of advanced interstellar civilizations.
MIKE G: Before you type again, kindly wipe the spittle from the keyboard.
BRUCE M: I’ve never tried to write satire, and cannot define it or even recognize it when it sits next to me on the Ferris wheel.
TO ALL OTHERS: Thank you for your responses; we can congratulate one another on a well-stirred pot.
Tom Hine, cleverness doesn’t mask your support for Trump’s chaotic return. I have been reading your observations for nearly 40 years. It is stunning how you have drifted to the extreme. I suppose we will next read about how the rise of the neo-Nazis in Germany, and in the form of Trump’s new Warrior Defense Secretary, is healthy and good.
I’ve tried and failed to write satire so I know what it is and what not, but you, Tommy, you excel at lampoon —which I could never master as it takes a certain level of sobriety— and when you aim a well honed one at a rogue whale the readership responds with enthusiasm ! By jingo, I believe you got more indignation out of this one than even the late great Jerry Philbrick could garner in a single missive. Congrats!
Thank ya for the kind words, Bruce. I’ll wait for the proportunity to shovel praise on your writings, and as the best court reporter I’ve ever read. (If I detect a fondness for the old National Lampoon magazine and a desire to have a big box of your very own, I’m your man.)
I gamboled all my ambition away playing Bingo at the Boonville Senior Center/American Legion Post 54 Angus England (as my long expired membership card indicates), so no, I must decline this singular honor. TWK is right up there with GBS in my book. But I hardly know Mr Hine, Private I.
Ahh, and forty years on, and you’re still reading me. (Sigh)
Myself, I can’t recall ever reading a Mike Geniella story all the way to the end.
Gee, Tom. You have even taken to Trump-like insults to bully your way through criticism.
S.ays the Geniella who accuses me of cozying up to Nazis
Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent.
Lemme blow the referee whistle and break up this gut punch clutch… go back to your corners and rephrase those last parting shots. Give the editor time to sell tickets to what’s turning into the local fight of the century!
Round 3. Ding!
Now come out swinging!
No mas
2020:
A total of 44,135 voted, 82.3% of registered voters.
28,782 or 66.4% BIDEN
13,267 or 30.6% TRUMP
42,049 total
2024
A total of 39,837 voted, 72.9% of registered voters
24,049 or 61.32% HARRIS
13,528 or 34.49% TRUMP
37,577 total
Polling had already identified the Democratic nominee who would have won by a landslide but she wisely wanted nothing to do with politics especially with a significant number of mentally ill citizens calling her “Big Mike”.
I don’t think there’s yet to be seen analysis from regular MCT punditry that really hits the mark on why more people are opting for authoritarian and regressive-character leadership. There’s always been this racist, fascist strain in the American population that sometimes goes ascendant.