In August, 2015 I was visiting my family in Bucks County when I remember hearing about Donald Trump for the first time. To be clear, this was the first time I had heard about Donald Trump the presidential candidate, not Trump the casino owner, hotelier, or reality show joke.
Everyone was abuzz about his stupid fucking golden escalator. I listened to what he said and instantly applied a Gertrude Stein-esque observation: there’s no there there. He said all these words, but no phrases coalesced into meaning, no words teamed up to act as purveyor of a point, a salient observation, or anything that made much sense. In the thousands of words he spewed, he didn’t say a damn thing. Everyone once in a while he said ‘build the wall!’ and that got people going. Probably because he’d finally said something they could decipher.
It was then I made a mistake. I sauntered up to my laptop, sat down, opened Facebook, and typed up a delicious and witty attack on the orange ball of venomous gas. I clicked enter and awaited the legions of appreciative responses surely on the way to me. For I had made sense and nobody I knew could support such an idiot.
I was wrong. Bigly time.
I was attacked by a swarm of angry Facebook friends. I was stunned, but it was clear: I had misjudged the zeitgeist. A friend wrote in the wake of these attacks.
“Hey, saw you get knocked around on Facebook. This country is completely different from the one you left – at Christmas. We’re in trouble.”
He was right. We were in trouble. We had no idea what was about to come.
In grad school pragmatics, we learned that rage is a temporary emotion, but nobody has told that to Captain One Inch, who has been unleashing a stream of rage for a decade. Since he rolled down that escalator, the orange bag of feces has done nothing but cry and whine, bitch and moan, attack and cry victim. It’s day-in and day-out. Not one time in the last 9 years have I heard anything uttered or seen anything written by this man that isn’t dripping with attacks, accusations, belligerence, misery, and bile. Not one tweet that says simply ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Birthday!’ or ‘What a great win, [enter sports team here]!’ Never in that time has this man talked about music, a musician, a movie, or an actor without an attack. Not one time in this past decade has he reached out to compliment a person who isn’t him. And even in the tweets when he compliments himself, he always makes sure to smack someone else with collateral damage. For each time the orange clown gets a compliment, it comes at the expense of someone else – usually the person actually responsible for the thing he’s taking credit for.
I have never hidden my dislike of this man. He was a shit from day one and he has grown nothing but fetid since. As the days go on and things look worse and worse for him, he becomes quite literally more unhinged and more insane. He lost an election, but his fragile little ego can’t handle it, so he has thus tried his hardest to destroy the very basis of American democracy.
I’m so tired. I think everyone is. The people who support him, those who know he’s a fraud, those who claim not to care. We are all so tired. I think many of us – secretly or not – want to be done with him. We’re in a toxic relationship, one in which we have had a morbid curiosity for a long time. (The first thing I do on Reddit is look for politics news.) Sure, we feed off the toxicity and the bile.
But isn’t enough, enough? Can’t we just be rid of this awful man?
It’s now that there’s hope that I am most nervous. What if he wins again? What if, just as we are on the precipice of eliminating him from our daily intake, all these massive attempts to suppress votes and decertify results works and we are stuck with an actual illegitimate president who most of the country despises? These are thoughts I almost can’t bear. I just want Donald to go away forever.
