Is It Any Wonder?

The day JFK was shot, I was substitute teaching at Hatch Junior High School in Camden. The kids were mostly black. I substituted at Hatch a lot because a lot of white sub teachers turned it down.

 One day, the kids got so out of control that Tom Foster, the Black dude who taught in the classroom next door, had to come in and restore order. I knew Tom from Rutgers. His father was Napoleon (Nap) Foster, who was about as high at the Camden post office as a Black guy could get. Nap and my father had gone to Camden High School together. My father, like most of his generation, was a casual racist, but when Nap died my father went down to South Camden to pay his respects. 

 

We lived in the suburbs, and when our football team was scheduled to play Camden, one of the assistant coaches, who had actually played for the Pittsburgh Steelers, told our team, “We're going to kill some jungle bunnies.” When he retired, he was celebrated for his contributions to the school and town.  

 

The first Black person I went to school with was in college. When I was in high shool, a Black family moved into town – briefly. Cars were driven across their lawn to leave deep tracks, ceaseless hangup phone calls were made to them, racist signs were left on their lawn. They moved out after less than a month. Mission accomplished.

 

I know guys who worked at high risk jobs – police, fire-fighters –  with Black men who literally had their backs, yet they use the word “nigger” as if there were no slur involved. There is again a casual, almost ingrained racism that is passed down. It doesn't even have to be spoken, but is implied throughout  so many aspects of our lives. And if that is the case with a WASP like me, brought up in the white burbs in South Jersey, what about those who were brought up where racism is in many ways spelled out on a daily basis? Is it any wonder that racism is still a way of life to so many Americans, fostered or implied, active or casual? It is still racism, and it is among the ugly, interlocking factors that fueled Jan.6. We sowed. Trump reaped.

 

Yet today my high school and home town are fully integrated and it is no big deal – now. Some of the ugliness has thankfully been absorbed by the passing of time, but it is deep and living and has been exposed in recent times in great and telling measure; the now-nonsense of the American Dream that has been the thin layer of myth laid over a darker reality has been yanked away by the convergence of Donald Trump and the pandemic.

It is a despairing sight, yet in many ways we are at a last ditch ground zero from which we inevitably move forward in time – to what is our choice and destiny.

Fall of the Roman Empire on Ice!

by Susan Bergeron

January 24: Like a deposed emperor, his repulsive nakedness finally revealed for all to see, Trump descended his heavenly stairway one last time and stopped to wave to the last of his adoring minions who were waiting for him down below. His once dutiful empress quickly skated away and disappeared into her shining black chariot.

High Noon approached and all of the sand finally ran out of his hourglass beneath the gleaming sun of Trump’s island of exile. The royal “We” would no longer fall from the disgraced “First and Last Emperor’s” evil lips. There was no fanfare, no tens of thousands of loyal foot soldiers come to save him or to save his empire. 

America was never meant to be an empire. It was born in 1776 of a band of revolutionaries who rejected that notion of despotic governance. They formed a new experimental form of self-ruling republic in its stead. Trump tried to replace that, after 244 years, and install himself as the first Emperor of America. He began from the very beginning, by getting the electorate used to his obnoxious use of the royal “We” when referring to himself, a practice reserved only for royalty and the Pope. Amazingly, no one ever called him out on this! I suppose it was because it was easy to assume that every time he said “We” he was referring to his administration. But as time went by, it became more likely that Trump had been convinced he actually was becoming the Emperor. It was finally crystal clear on January 6, 2021, when during the raging riot taking place in the world’s seat of democracy, Trump sent a message to his army of insurrectionists that said “We love you.” He meant he  loved the seditionists. Who else was “We”? I don’t think anybody else in the White House wants to lay claim tothat  “We.” 

In the final days of his empire, which crumbled and burned at Trump’s feet, he amused himself with outings where he played his favorite sport, golf, and he sequestered himself in his ivory tower, where he watched television. He awarded pop entertainers with medals of Honor and planned scores of pardons. Trump, the failed attempted Emperor of America was often compared to Emperor Nero, as Nero was said to have fiddled while Rome burned. But Trump actually resembled another Emperor of Rome much more closely: Emperor Romulus Augustus. 

Somewhere around 476 A.D., as the once mighty Western reaches of the Roman Empire finally took its last gasp, history records what has come to be known, sadly, as “The Fall of the Roman Empire.” The once mighty empire that reached halfway across the world had produced some of the most technologically advanced wonders of the world, many that still endure today. Some say Rome was overcome by the sheer weight and speed of its own growth. Others site its lack of moral values; at the height of its progress the Empire began to choke on the depravity of its very riches. 

The last Emperor Romulus was deposed and believed to have probably abdicated under pressure from the Germanic Barbarian Odoacer. Although all Roman Emperors took the name Augustus, it’s fitting that the last one, said to be incompetent and a failure, was given a derogatory nickname. With the passage of time, history came to refer to him as “Momyllus Augustulus.” In Latin the words translate into “little disgrace,” and by adding the suffix “ulus” onto Augustus, the Emperor’s name becomes the undignified “Little Disgrace of a Little Emperor!” 

Trump rose up to become leader of the Free World from nothing more than a carnival barker who works the boardwalk at Coney Island selling empty promises of an “easy win” and “big prizes!” The guy that spent his whole life calling foul and “unfair” and claiming every game he played was rigged, turns out to be the biggest cheater and liar there ever was. He rose to fame pretending to be a successful and rich businessman who had conquered the real estate game in the richest real estate market in America---Manhattan. But he really hadn’t. Tax records and legal documents uncovered in a 14,000 word expose published by the New York Times while Trump was in office revealed how he stole from the taxpayers and the U.S. government to finance his projects. But because a well-financed British TV executive producer named Mark Burnett decided to take a chance on the glamorous media magnet Trump, we had fourteen seasons of “The Apprentice.” That television show falsely convinced millions of worldwide television audiences that Trump’s business acumen was real---a reality TV show ended up nearly costing the oldest surviving democracy in the world its freedom. Burnett helped Trump create the “brand” that would go on to help him build his empire.

In four years Trump built an army 74 million strong. He built up a military and “The Thin Blue Line”---his new centurions. He pillaged the nation’s treasury and Trump’s empire grew and grew and his corrupt Senate continued to prop him up. But there was one enemy he hadn’t planned for and couldn’t conquer: the plague that came to be known as Covid-19. And even as it killed almost half a million people, it was credited with saving the republic, for it was the plague that finally ripped off the mask of the blind and showed them what a poseur Trump really had been. 

Trump made a TV show of it all. He opened it out of town and then brought it into living rooms around the world. Every day Trump’s attempt at leadership became a new episode on Fox TV. He’d learned the entertainment business all those years he worked on his popular show “The Apprentice.” He learned how to find his key lighting, read the cue cards, work the crowd, and use catch phrases. He came up with clever names for the “actors” in the show---Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Cryin’ Chuck, and Nervous Nancy. He learned how to play the American people for suckers. He used suspense and “cliff-hangers” to manipulate the mainstream media when making policy decisions and selecting important administrative aides. He pushed “the brand” with social media---Facebook live events and Twitter videos. He threatened war and fired cabinet Secretaries by tweet. He had his Trophy Wife Queen to help him attract more fans. He had Rudy the Court Jester. It was the Court of the Orange King---appearing live---just like the ice shows at Madison Square Garden! But like all terrible shows, even ones the producers try to save by putting them on skates, in the end this one had to close, too.

Even Mickey Mouse, the skaters from Starlight Express, the gang from Sesame Street, the cast on hiatus from “Frozen” and all those former stars of the Olympic Skating Team can’t save your show now, Trumpulus Augustulus. The traveler has slid across the stage on your show for the last time, and the big red velvet curtain has slammed down from the ceiling. Skate away, skate away into the Florida sunset before the ice melts, Loser.  

The Winter of Our Discontent

Tomorrow, Air Force One will become Air Force None at the very moment Joe Biden takes his hand off the Bible. The Secret Service in Florida will be waiting for an ex-president.

 

Donald Trump will be physically gone from the White House, but as Shakespeare knew, the evil that men do lives after them. Every Covid death will be a page in Trump's legacy; every mention ever of January 6 will be his marker in the books of history. Donald Trump's legacy will be as sordid as the man himself, a psycho-morass of the very worse of American public life and terror capitalism slopped together into a dark broth of death and vengeance and ignorance. 

 

And yet a dismaying swath of Americans have drunk deeply of this potent potion and it has corrupted the final frayed remnants of their weakened souls to the point that some will literally shit in the halls of government. Trump's living legacy of tens of millions of people who believe deep down and through and through that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president is a startling and fearful tribute to Trump's endless megaphoned pounding of that Big Lie. He mixed the Kool-Aid; they drank it. They were ready for a Messiah of Hate. Their terrible stunted dead-end white lives demanded retribution. Being white was all many of them had, and Trump, that billionaire television celebrity was just what the doctor ordered – Dr. Goebbels. Together, they would take back an America that had never existed for any of them in the first place. He would lead them back to the Big Myth, the white version of history, the only version they could tolerate. 

 

When Donald Trump is wheels down in Florida, he will leave us in the midst of an unequaled winter of discontent. The country is at the point of insurrection, no matter how short-lived – so far -- in physical fact. The pandemic is making our health system a broken battlefield, and the heralded Warp Speed of vaccine salvation has become a tangle of Trumpian lies and cruelty.

 

Yet Shakespeare's winter of discontent was the precursor of golden days. Ours? The one golden truth is that Donald Trump is no longer president. The pestilence has been finally banished by the voice of the people, no matter the denying clamor of treason and the ignorance it preys upon. 

 

We have the makings to survive these terrible Trumpian legacies. We've always had them, but they have become warped and distilled by the never-ending dangling of the impossible world of cable television and zero sum life that has infected the body civil as greed and power lust have infected the body politic. 

 

We've had a good long look into the abyss that was – and is – Trumpism, so-called, and there were enough of us to pull the country back  – for now. This winter of our discontent is ending. There will probably be more. Whatever new times emerge will be in the shadow of what we and the world saw on January 6. 

 

That shadow must be respected and feared lest we provoke it once more. Jefferson's strict rejoinder should be our guide: “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

Trump the Killer

By Susan Bergeron

There’s a beautiful and haunting song by Neil Young called “Cortez the Killer.” When I was a child I loved history class and was enthralled with the story of the brave Spanish conquistadors who came “dancing across the water” to discover the New World. We children of the mid-Twentieth Century were taught that version of the story, anyway. It wasn’t until I became an adult that the truth began to emerge, because the indigenous people of Mexico demanded that the history books be re-written. It turns out the conquistadors actually came crashing onto the shores of what is now Mexico and South America, raped, pillaged and murdered the indigenous peoples who had lived there for millennia, and stole their riches. The “brave” conquistadors carried the gold and pearls and beautiful women they had stolen back home to Spain to share and enjoy with their monarchy. During their many journeys to the New World, the Europeans returned this favor by trading something of their own with the Aztecs and other peoples of what is now Mexico. It was something the Indians had never known before---pestilence and deadly diseases.

 Let it be noted that the Aztecs had some pretty gory rituals, but who are we to judge? They were known for their brutal sacrificial killings. The Aztec Kings slashed the victim’s chest open, ripped out their heart and presented the still beating heart before the victim’s eyes and to the Gods, then kicked the dead body down a 200 foot ramp. 

 

The late Fred Trump, Sr., the father of Donald Trump, often said that in order to be successful in life one needed to be “a killer”. Fred’s granddaughte, other Trump children and many others who knew Fred well have stated this. Now most certainly, we can surmise that Fred only meant this metaphorically. It’s the reason family members of Donald Trump tell the sordid tale of why Fred, Sr. passed over his oldest son and handed the reigns of the family business and lion’s share of the Trump riches to his second son, Donald---because Fred believed Donald had that inborn killer instinct. How very prophetic of Fred. If only Fred knew just how much of a killer little Donny really was.

 

I wonder if the children of the distant future will be taught a false narrative of the history of America, much like many of us children of the twentieth Century were---like how all the Indians were savages and how the brave white soldiers saved us from them. You know, all that kind of stuff. Many men have laid claim to the quote, “History is written by the winners” (most recently, by Secretary Mike Pompeo) but, interestingly, it actually can be traced back to a Confederate loser. Missouri Senator George Graham Vest in 1891 said, “…for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side.” Will students of the future have to wait for the “moral arc of the universe” to finally bend toward justice before the truth can finally be told to them, much like we had to wait? Will they someday learn the truth about the 21rst Century attack on their democracy? Will they ever learn the truth about the rise of the false God, the cult leader, the “Chosen One,” “Donald Trump the Killer”?

 

What we do now may influence that. What happens to America now depends on what happens during only a handful of precious days that tick down like gushing sand in a wicked warlock’s hourglass. Will America survive? ---or will it crumble and be crushed under the weight of the cataclysmic horrors that are coming to a head? There is surging uncontrollable plague, growing civil unrest, the seemingly unstoppable treason, lies and conspiracies that grow by the day. Like 747’s over LAX in a storm, the ambulances continue to circle the hospitals in Los Angeles, with patients gasping and dying in the back of them. They have nowhere to go. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had to issue a statement to the American people on TV last night warning us that insurrection is against the law! We are at a crossroads of disaster. We are being warned that every single state capitol is being targeted for attack this coming Sunday! The insurrection on the Capitol was just a warning shot across the bow.

 

I have many, many questions. I wonder if the children of the far distant future will learn a corrected history of America. Will they even have the chance to? Will books be obsolete by then? Will there still be an America? Will there still be public education? Will they sit there wide-eyed in their futuristic desks and ask their futuristic teachers how in the world 70 million people could have been hypnotized into believing an idiot like Donald Trump was worth destroying almost 250 years of freedom and democracy?

 

Like Cortez the Killer, Trump the Killer stole the riches of our land, pillaged the lands of our indigenous peoples, stole thousands of peoples’ babies, and trampled our natural resources. He poisoned our air and water, killed us by the hundreds of thousands with disease, ransacked our treasury and gave it to the donor class and the rich. How could tens of thousands of crazed Americans trample each other to death, jump to their deaths from buildings, commit suicide, beat peace officers to death with crutches, flagpoles, and brickbats for the love of Trump? How could they pledge to die if they had to, for the likes of Donald Trump? And worst of all, how did the law enforcement leadership enshrined with protecting our lawmakers and our nation’s Capital and its sacred temple of freedom and democracy betray us in the most heinous act of treason, by assisting the insurrectionists?

 

Time is running out. Trump must be impeached for inciting insurrection. Then the United States Senate must convict him before January 20, 2021. There is no time for hearings and investigations and the types of delays and bullshitting around that derailed his first impeachment trial. Everybody saw what he did! The evidence was clear and out in the open!  

 

Alan Dershowitz, I respect your desire to defend the Constitution, but at this point you are an obstructionist and you can go fuck yourself. You lost any credibility you once had by launching your ludicrous defense in Trump’s first impeachment trial and by aligning yourself with the complicit Fox News Channel. For God sake, let Rudy Giuliani take over Trump’s defense! Trump said he wants him to do it. Let him do it. It’s a slam dunk Rudy will sink Trump’s case like the Titanic, and that’s exactly what’s in order here! The President of the United States has been fomenting sedition throughout his entire campaign! He’s been inciting sedition since he lost the election! But the actions of January 6, 2021 are proof enough that he must never ever be allowed to hold or enjoy office in America ever again. It is in the Republicans’ favor to excise him from their party. What are they waiting for?

 

I bet Fred Trump, Sr. died with a smile on his face. He went to his maker (the Devil Himself) secure in the knowledge that, indeed, he produced a killer. Trump the Killer.

Trump Train Crashes on Dead Man’s Curve

By Susan Bergeron

January 11: Every railroad worker knows about “Dead Man’s Curve.” It really only exists as a reference to any extreme curve that warrants caution and reduced speed when traversing it. There’s no one Dead Man’s Curve. There are many, each of them historically more devastating than the next. You can site Dutchman’s Curve in Nashville, the infamous crash of 1864 near Culver Station, Indiana at the height of the Civil War, or the awful crash at the Altoona Horseshoe Curve in Pennsylvania. They all killed. 

I’m a retired railroad conductor. I remember “Dead Man’s Curve” at Bridgeport in the 1980’s. I was working as a bartender on wheels back then, before I got promoted to trainman. I cursed the engineer under my breath, every time, as we swung the curve and I got tossed hard into the counter. Drinks got sloshed all over the passengers and down the front of my uniform. Dead Man’s Curve is real, but it’s everywhere.

Last summer we began to see the emergence of a phenomenon which quickly became known as “Trump Trains.” Remember the AP photos and video of deadly marauding packs of pick-up trucks out on our nation’s highways, emblazoned with huge Trump flags and “Blue Lives Matter” flags chasing after Biden campaign cars and buses? One such video sticks out in my mind, wherein the driver of a huge obnoxious black truck with Trump flags literally tries to run Joe Biden’s campaign bus off the road while he’s on his way to one of his last drive-in rallies. The truck actually strikes one of the Biden caravan of campaign cars, nearly causing an accident! “We were trying to escort them,” said the Trump liars. Mobs of these Trump Trains started to show up at Biden and Harris drive-in rallies and harass the Democratic supporters from the back of the parking lots. They tried to drown out the speeches by beeping their Trump horns and made loudspeaker announcements from their Trump trucks to try and disrupt the rallies.

 What really pissed me off about that was this: the Dems were already knee-capped by this damn pandemic, and they were trying to do the right thing and be safe. From the start, the Biden campaign made it a priority not to endanger their supporters by emphasizing safety and finding ways around traditional campaigning and rallies. Meanwhile, Trump is out on his Nationwide Superspreader Tour, spewing Covid-19 all over the country in a selfish bid to stay in power and stay out of jail. His Mask-less Bikers for Trump escorted many of the Trump Trains, like leather-clad demons straight of The Wild One. And if anybody believes the Covid-19 surge in our country this winter is coincidental to Trump’s actions in November, I’m sorry but that’s hardly possible. Surely, it was exacerbated by holiday travel and weather, but Trump was out to cause herd immunity---a concept pushed by the Flat-Earther Scott Atlas. Operation Warp Speed is turning out to be anything but that.

 Trump made sure the vaccine was hurried onto the doorsteps of the states, where they dumped it. Then they drove away, leaving the states holding the bag on how to get it into people’s arms. All Trump cared about was getting credit for the vaccine. He wanted it named after himself. Americans give credit to the dedicated doctors and scientists who quickly developed these vaccines for us, despite Donald Trump’s continued interference. As usual, he lost interest and went golfing, instead of following through with the hard work of seeing the Operation Warp Speed program through to its final phases.

Despite the Trump Train’s best efforts to derail Joe Biden’s extremely difficult campaign and his many challenges, the people spoke on November 3, 2020 and their decision was loud and clear: it’s time for Trump to haul his train back to the yard and “pull the pin,” as we say in railroaders’ lingo. You’re all done, Trump. Go home.

But he was a runaway train. There was no one at the controls. Ever see “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3”? Trump tossed Mike Pence out the door of the cab and slammed a brick down on the Dead Man’s Pedal. He put Engine #45 in the Ninth Notch, headed for the massive curve known as the Well of the Senate. Away they barreled, crashing through the barricades that held for 244 years. Trump, the worst engineer ever, ran to the back of that train, jumped off the caboose and ran away like the coward he is. Then, before a horrified nation’s eyes, the Trump Train jumped the track at Dead Man’s Curve. 

World’s Most Dangerous Man, Indeed

By Susan Bergeron

While on hiatus from exhausting the literary mushroom cloud of disgust that the soon-to-be-former-president continues to cause to explode daily from my head, I’ve engaged in some reading over the holidays. For Christmas I received Mary L. Trump’s fast read “How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man”---her unauthorized biography of her world famous uncle, President Donald J. Trump.

I was excited to receive the gift, as it was on back order for weeks. I love listening to Mary Trump tell her stories on the cable news shows and love reading her Twitter feed. Mary has a PH.D. in psychology, but because she has intimate knowledge of her subject, President Trump, this puts her out in front of scores of armchair psychologists who have broken with the Goldwater Rule in trying to diagnose the President from afar. And despite this intimate knowledge, she makes the disclaimer that he would still need to sit for a battery of tests and evaluations by expert mental health professionals in order to sort out his complex plethora of personality and mental disorders caused by an extremely dysfunctional upbringing devoid of the love and nurturing she claims he never received as a child. And she also states that of course, he will never agree to that. So we are left to conjecture and speculation. But because his other family members remain silent, probably out of fear of him, we have only Mary’s stories to go by. And fascinating stories they are!

This book is a real page-turner. Chapter after chapter has me going “Oh---so thatexplains it!” There’s the tale of how Donald used to steal his young baby brother Robert’s toy trucks and hide them---knowing they were Robert’s favorite toys. He did it just for laughs. When Robert would cry Donald threatened todismantlethem if he didn’t shut up! Pure evil. This story also reminded me about the dismantling of something else---mail sorting machines, the State Department, The Consumer Protection Agency. Even at a tender age, Donald found nefarious joy from dismantling things for no good reason.

There’s the time sixteen year old Donald, shortly before cheating his way into Wharton, drives up in his spiffy new sports car to his older brother Fred’s apartment in Marblehead, MA. Sent on a mission by patriarch Fred Trump, Sr., Donald spends a night bullying and belittling his pilot brother for leaving the family real estate business to pursue a career in the airline industry. He stabs a knife through Freddy’s heart with words like, “Dad’s embarrassed by you” and “…he’s sick of you wasting your life…” and tells the older brother that their father considers Robert’s choice of job as a TWA pilot nothing more than a “glorified bus driver.” Fred Jr. was Mary, the author’s father. She tells a sad tale of his alcoholism triggered by rejection and emotional abuse by her grandfather (Trump’s father). She claims that after this particularly cruel and emotional dismantling of her father at the hands of Donald, the drinking began in earnest and it was the beginning of the end of his airline career. After growing up in a household literally devoid of alcohol, he died in his forties from alcohol related illness and Mary blames her grandfather for pushing Freddy over the edge and not getting him any help. 

Donald also was cunning enough to see the writing on the wall. His evil rat brain figured out that the sociopathic father of theirs had given up on the eldest son as heir apparent to the family business. Donald quickly moved in to take over as Fred Sr.’s Number One Son, and become the “killer” that Fred Trump, Sr. had failed to produce in his eldest son, Freddy. Later in the book Mary tells the awful story of how a cold and callous Donald grabs his equally uncaring sister Elizabeth and trots off to the movies, leaving Freddy to die in the hospital at age 42, sick and all alone.  

I was impressed with how Mary Trump remained fairly non-judgmental throughout her telling of the horrors of this incredibly dysfunctional family and the monster that they produced. If you’ve ever seen her on TV she comes across just that way---dry and very calm in her demeanor. She talks about her uncle with a sense of deep understanding, but makes clear she does not condone any of his behavior. I’m of the opinion that even when we suffer a dysfunctional up-bringing (and let’s face it, most of us probably do if we’re being honest) we are still responsible for our behavior as adults. It’s up to us to fix it. To simply go through life settling for the results of that and punishing the world around us because we didn’t have a cakewalk of a childhood is selfish and wrong. There is help available. Change begins with the desire within.

Mary Trump is a fine writer, to boot. I’m guessing there’s no ghost writer involved because she’s a well-educated woman and I’ve heard her speak often. She writes in the style of what Truman Capote developed in the 1960’s called the non-fiction novel. It is not a journalistic biography of Donald Trump’s life by any means. There is a lot of vivid dialogue and carefully recreated historical scenes that leave the reader wondering, “How did Mary know about that?” But we must remember she is not just a reporter here, she was an intimate family member who knew the President for many years and must have been a good listener (an important quality in treating mental patients, after all) and she must have heard many stories from her many relatives. Because of that, I do believe her story, even if written as creative non-fiction. It was a good choice in style, on her part, as it’s much more readable that way. Capote trail blazed a style that never went away in journalism.

If you lived through the 1970’s and watched Donald Trump embarrass himself time and again on the front pages of the New York tabloids you probably wouldn’t have guessed he would ever become the Leader of the Free World, let alone the World’s Most Dangerous Man. But indeed, he has done just that. Mary L. Trump’s telling of how it happened is a well-chronicled warning to parents everywhere. The full title of her book is “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” I think the too much refers to money and the not enough refers to what happens when the most important ingredient is left out of child-rearing---love.   

A Crazy Crybaby

Donald Trump is thrashing like a netted eel in the unbearable sluice of losing. His life is draped in black crepe. He is taking crybabyism to new levels of tears. I would say he is the Babe Ruth of crybabies, but maybe the Barry Bonds of crybabies is better because Bonds was a steroid-pumped fraud and Babe Ruth for all his faults was a legitimate American hero.

 

If you go by classic definitions, Trump is also undeniably crazy because he keeps doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. He is nothing if not steadfast in what seems to be his total belief that he won the election – and bigly, at that. He is something like 1 for 80 in ludicrous, proofless, amateur lawsuits that he's going to keep filing as long as they're on the house. Too bad Jimmy Breslin isn't around to comment on this gang that can't file  straight. Breslin peeped Trump's hole card when The Donald was just a punk Queens “developer” trying to sit in with the big boys in Manhattan.

 

Trump's legal “A” team bailed when they saw they were on a crazy train and then he sent in Rudy and the Clownshow to straighten out the election. This was a posse of the perverse: Qanon-spouting women in leopard skin tops, witnesses so high or drunk or just pain nuts that the nation watched incredulously, jaws akimbo, if that's possible. Then there was superspreader Rudy his own very bad self, leaking Kiwi shoe polish or Clairol or axle grease from his pate while he set new levels of low, lying at a spectacularly Trumpian rate.  

 

Of course, the capper was at the Four Seasons landscapers in Philly, where Rudy and Young Don looked incredibly at home spinning lies in a landscape of sex stores and crematoriums. Dig up Hunter Thompson for this one – if he wasn't cremated.

 

All this ballyhooing of the absurd was for the cameras outside court; inside, there was whimpering and the admission that yes, we have no evidence. Judges throughout America – many of them Trump judges, so-called --- heaved these thin wafers of dishonesty out the nearest judicial window as fast as they were filed. The one Trump win netted zero votes. I guess that's a big win when you lose the other 79 or even more by the time you read this.

 

Anyhow, Big Don has always said that he'd take the thing all the way to his Supreme Court if that's what it took to keep the gig and stay out of the can and – lo- and behold – the Texas AG rounds up a bunch of other Repub AGs and some equally culpable Republican congress people and they want the Supreme Court to overturn the election for Trump. They don't even get to bat. The Supremes basically tell them to take it on the Boardwalk. So there it is: end of the line. Jeez, even Putin and Moscow Mitch are admitting Joe Biden won, even if the election was what seems like 47 years ago. Better late than never, I guess, although it does seem a tad rude to wait that long.

 

All this is not to say that Trump is rolling over in that ugly sluice of losing; far from it, he is firing patriots like Chris Krebs and even fellow traitors like the late Bill Barr. He is grabbing money from his loyal moonies – many of them so broke they don't have the time of day – for whatever comes next be it another run or a cable network or something else dangerous for America. And he's telling these patsies it's to finance his overturning the election.

 

Even when he's crying as hard as he is, Trump can still see a good grift through the tears.