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A personal tribute to The Donald, who will surely be reading HB today, while the mob has stormed the Capitol.
Donald, the first time I encountered your existence, it was sometime in the late eighties, in a full page ad in the typically 2-day-old NYT, one cloudy afternoon in Powell's in downtown Portland.
I was barely a college kid then, but still I wondered why a real estate developer was criticizing US foreign policy, using a huge # of cliches, in an internationally known newspaper. And I wondered what the point was of that $100 grand you spent, and quickly realized there was no point except self-promotion.
Since then, your life, barring the bluster for the buffoons, has largely been predictable on this theme. Everything you have touched, you have consistently damaged or destroyed for your own sake. Including much of your dubious 'empire' (the value of which is similar to the Kardashian one in being identity-focused rather than providing a particular product or service, and which will now mean something quite different than when you rode down those gilded stairs), and now, the party you switched allegiance to.
The US is in shambles today. It is the first time in almost 4 decades that the debt grew so much when the economy was booming. The tax cuts you provided which were cunningly set to expire a year after when you thought you would leave office are nearer to their end. The infrastructure bill was never even introduced, indeed you passed no meaningful legislation except the corporate tax cuts.
The coercive pacts you undertook with South American countries to stem illegal immigration will be reversed. US will rejoin Paris. The Iran accord will be revisited. General Motors could not wait to distance itself from you. Tesla, which is part of the end of fossil fuels, is worth more than Ford and GM combined. A fringe talk about secession, sedition, revolution, and see nothing wrong in subversion of pretty much every institution (by Jove, that raps) and are now storming the Capitol. And the international image of the US has fallen through the floor in the "First World", as the Pew Surveys show. And I didn't even mention Covid.
Also meanwhile your bete noire, China, signed a Yuuuge trade deal this week with the EU, our allies you endlessly antagonized. Earlier they signed two even Yuuuger trade accords in the Pacific: The TPP and the RCEP, during your regime. Their trade surplus is off the charts. Their stock market is booming spectacularly. Their total Covid infections is less than what we average a day. The regime has become far more authoritarian: from clipping Jack Ma's wings, to repressing Hong Kong, to sentencing bankers to death. Outside the Twitter world you live in, they are far stronger than when you came to office.
And to crown it all, you will be a 1 termer.
I have wondered what you will do next. Will you go back on the Howard Stern show and indulge your Whiskey Tango heart and proclaim your amorous appreciation for your daughter while women writhe on Sybians? Will you play golf in Scotland and complain about the clean energy windmills that block your view? Will you pick fights on Twitter with Greta Thunberg?
And here is the silver lining to all this, Donald, you will not.
You will want to be king-maker, except that 2nd word is not something that is conducive to your nature. You will thus want to be King. And that will mean those who manage to win primaries will need your seal of approval wholeheartedly. Even when they get it, it may not last, such as today, when you will sell an caricature of an ass-licking sycophant down the river, and send him and his wife/mother back to political oblivion (and before that, there was Sessions, who was the first to endorse you. And the Kurds, who sacrificed their lives for US troops. And before that your brother, who on his last day on deathbed you did not visit, preferring instead the urgent imperative of a midday movie, but lets not meander so morbidly).
So unfortunately, those who manage to get those seals (displaying the ardent fealty you will demand) will also be receiving a big fat uncouth kiss of death from you, as far as elections of national importance go. For you have managed a partisan miracle, Donald. You have managed to so repel sufficient parts of suburbia and exurbia that in aggregate you have turned them blue! They are the Boujeest of Boujee places where American wealth resides, and they have the most people. They are the ones growing the fastest. In a 2 party system, no one can win in the US while losing the exurbs/burbs. Your supporters have attacked things and ideas that were supposed to be the embodiment of what suburbanites revere.
And from this fundamental addition by subtraction, the past and forthcoming political carnage, the calculation it will force, we will have our best chance to lance this boil in the Republican Party and thus the US. I am not sure we will succeed, but the attempts will be made and frankly, I like our chances, though it will not be easy.
(For the strength of the US is not that it has no warts, it is that it brings them right to the forefront, and thus they are forced to be reckoned with, and never stays festering to become unmanageable, as in most other, older countries) |
