menu_open Columnists
We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close
Aa Aa Aa
- A +

Donald Trump's Final Spectacular Bankruptcy Will Be... All of Us

11 1
03.12.2024

Give him credit. As a start, for that first surprise victory in 2016.

No, I didn’t fully get it at the time, but I kind of get it now (since, like the rest of us, I’ve lived through it all, including his close loss in 2020). Still, twice? Him? A convicted felon, no less! And yes, I do think italics are all too appropriate under the circumstances.

Two times as the president of these increasingly disunited states of America? Holy cowpie!

Perspecting (No, That’s Not a Typo) Donald Trump

This country actually did it — elected him (again!) — and so we deserve whatever we get, at least a little less than 50% of us do: Fox News… oops, sorry, Pete Hegseth to run the largest, best-funded, and least adept military on planet Earth? Robert Kennedy, Jr., to keep our health in check(mate?) or do I mean checkerboard red shape? Tulsi Gabbard overseeing what still passes for American “intelligence,” though in some sense it couldn’t have been dumber for endless years? Or Chris Wright, who denies that there’s any kind of a climate crisis on Planet Earth, to lead — yes, of course! — the Department of Energy. And that’s just to start down an endlessly expanding, mind-blowingly unnerving list.

Yikes! You really couldn’t make this stuff up, could you? And I haven’t even mentioned Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security. Nor did I have time to put in Matt Gaetz at the Department of (In)Justice before he went down in an instant cloud of smoke and scandal. (The question is: Before we’re done with the madness of it all, will everything be, in some fashion, enveloped in that same cloudy firmament?)

I suppose there’s no reason to be shocked, not really. After all, it’s a matter of history. Sooner or later, all great imperial powers go down the tubes — or do I mean the drain? — in some fashion, even if Donald Trump, the second time around, gives tubes and drains a new meaning. Just ask any of the emperors of imperial China or Winston Churchill or, for that matter, Mikhail Gorbachev about imperial decline. But to have almost 50% of the population vote to send this country directly (no stops along the way) whooshing down those tubes into the basement of history, well, that’s no small thing, is it? Or maybe, on a planet already going to hell in a climate-changed handbasket, it actually is a small thing. (And, yes, I just can’t seem to help myself when it comes to italics and him, though he’s all too literally not a small thing, not The Donald!)

Who knows anymore? Who can make any real sense out of it when you’re not comfortably outside looking in, or in the present peering into the long-gone past, but right here, right now (and nowhere else), distinctly experiencing everything from the inside out — or do I mean, the outside in or even the inside in? That, in truth, may be the lesson Donald Trump(ed us all) has to offer when it comes to our ever stranger world. And perspective isn’t exactly available to us, is it? After all, when The Donald fills the screen 24/7, how can anyone perspect — if you don’t mind my making up a word to fit our ever-stranger world — anything?

And yet, let’s face it, if you try to take a step or two back, even if it’s into the deep doo-doo of the rest of this planet of ours — check out Benjamin Netanyahu’s nightmarish version of Israel, for instance — Donald Trump isn’t just a strange (all-)American happenstance. Under the circumstances, however happenstantial, of a country in which there was already an increasingly greater (and still growing) space between the wildly wealthy (especially the rising number of all-American billionaires who have more money than half of the rest of the population combined) and the ever more pressed working and middle classes, what populace, already distinctly in trouble (or he never would have made a political appearance in the first place), wouldn’t have elected a “businessman” (and I’m only being socially truthful by putting that word in quotes) who claimed to be all in for them on his third presidential run (though, of course, you won’t actually see 78-year-old Donald Trump, the man who reputedly once urged soldiers on our southern border to shoot migrants in the legs, running anywhere). Whew, that was one long sentence! And no wonder, since he’s distinctly wound us up in an endlessly convoluted world.

And this time around, the richest man on Planet Earth, Elon Musk, was ready to pay out millions of promotional dollars to potential voters to increase Trump’s vote totals in swing states — and don’t for a second think that was bribery! After all, in a country where keeping yourself afloat amid still rising prices is no small trick, why wouldn’t you find appealing a man who swore he spoke for you and whose claim to fame, in a sense, was his remarkable ability to keep himself (and no one else) on the (more or less) flat and level, or even the uphill incline, as he sent his own businesses distinctly downstream into failed or bankrupt states? Whew, again!

And don’t be surprised, given his record, if, in his second term in office, he sends this country into his own version of, if not bankruptcy, at least ruptcy. After all, Donald Trump is — if you don’t mind my inventing another word — a distinctly remarkable (or do I mean smashing?) rupturist. His story (or do I mean history?) — since Kamala Harris lost, it certainly isn’t herstory — suggests that he’s likely to repeat his business “success” with this whole country the second time around, keeping himself on the flat and level or even the uphill incline as so much........

© Common Dreams


Get it on Google Play