Heart of Darkness

A friend who finally died of a heroin overdose once told me, “Once you throw your leg over that white horse, you never get off.”

Then there's the lesson of the tar-baby: once you get stuck to it, you never get unstuck.

And over Dante's Gates to Hell, the inscription reads: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

What all three of these examples are leading up to is that once you get hooked up in any way, shape, or form with Donald J. Trump you are going to end up screwed, blued, and tattooed. 

This guy – our fucking President – has left a trail of broken hearts and lives from the working stiffs of South Jersey, where he stiffed a lot of people right out of business when he was trying to be a casino mogul and ended up building the Taj Mahal, a monument to bad taste – to Michael Cohen, who came out of court yesterday after copping to perjury charges looking like he was 70 years old.

Our President is the American Heart of Darkness, to crib from Joseph Conrad, and he hasn't the slightest regard for any wants or whims but his own. He is a black hole that swallows any positive traits of those he entangles and spits back out ruin and contamination. 

The thing is, unlike a lot of the people he has ruined, those who have fallen under his dark political and personal spell in Washington are not always virgin-pure to begin with. Michael Cohen was a cocksure bully who thought he could spend the rest of this days under the warm wing of Donald Trump. To Trump he is now a “weak man” who is being left to the less than tender mercies of Robert Mueller.

All the Trump people who are in jail or going to jail never thought anything like that could ever happen to them until along came Trump. Paul Manafort is a convicted felon and yet he seems so sure that Trump is going to pardon him that he actually has been a double agent, reporting back to the Trump lawyers on a regular basis on what he has observed of the workings of the Special Counsel's investigation. 

He will not be pardoned and will probably spend the rest of his natural life behind federal bars. Remember, Trump doesn't like people who are captured. 

Manafort has been a sleaze since his first breath, and the Trump administration so far looks like the Sleaze Hall of Fame. John Kelly was a respected Marine general until he got on the Trump bandwagon. Now he is less than an errand boy. The sleaze has rubbed off on Mike Pompeo, too, who recites Trump truth like a hand puppet. Mattis is little better because he doesn't have whatever it takes to rid himself of the Trump Darkness.

Not so the Trump family, who are all born to the Sleaze Manor. Daddy's protection is not guaranteed and once the walls get too tight and the dominoes are falling all around them, it's going to be every Trump for him or herself.

The rats are going to be trapped aboard the sinking ship.