The Faces of Fear

Donald Trump and his band of gypsies, tramps, and thieves – with apologies to gypsies and tramps – has sought since the advent of his beer hall campaign to make fear one of the basics of his political philosophy, to use that term so loosely it vaporizes.

For reasons better examined by future historians – if any survive, to be snarky – the current President of the United States of America views the world and everyone who is not Donald Trump as dark and eternally-threatening forces bent on his absolute and total destruction. There are no shades of gray in his black and white landscape of chaos and treachery. It is Shakespearean in the magnificence of its scope and depth, made all the more so by the fact that the central figure in this maelstrom has the amplitude and the real time platform to make his ravings real, Lear on the internet. 

His face and the faces of those around him are the daily reflections of the atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia that fosters the endless and deadly leaks that are a stream of frustration and madness to the midnight monarch they betray. His face is an orange cover to the cesspool that lies beneath it.  

And the White House staff is one of pinched faces or shaky masks; take three as examples: John Kelly’s mug is now a clenched fist, daily drawing in on itself as each lie and deception further strips the pride of a once proud and valiant soldier. Stephen Miller has the face of a giant vampire rodent, rabid to eat at the vital liberties of America. Kellyanne Conway has the face now of the laughing lady in the funhouse, her every utterance a mock and hollow version of nothing.   

Other faces reflect the venom of the political moment, the singular pursuit of any victory at any cost. There is not an open and honest face among those who now hold sway in the miasma of lust to gain and keep power that has settled over Washington like a poison cloud.

Mitch McConnell is well-named “The Turtle.” And now his lidded eyes show the fear of an oncoming political disaster through which he must guide a Republican party weakened unto death by its mindless subservience to an obviously addled president. 

Chuck Grassley, a proud leader of the Anita Hill debacle, now leads the foredrawn political rape of Christine Blasey Ford. He is a squinty deranged pharmacist bent on making the whole country take its medicine.

Orrin Hatch is another Anita Hill mugger, a sloe-eyed ferret of informed ignorance and willing malice. He is dry slime.

It was, ironically, that great Republican Abraham Lincoln who famously appealed to “the angels of our better nature.” Today, the face of the Republican majority shows a resolute lack of moral integrity that only an angel could forgive. Their better natures have been sold off at the auction of power and corruption.

Look at their faces and despair.