Waiting to exhale
To quote Stormy Daniels, let’s get this unpleasantness over with. We have been waiting to exhale for nearly four long years. It’s hard to believe but the moment is finally almost on top of us. I still recall that bleak morning, 9 November, 2016, when I awoke to the surreal news that Donald Trump — yes, really, THAT Donald Trump — was president of the United States.
We consoled ourselves with the words of pundits assuring us that Trump wouldn’t survive the first year of his first and only term. We were off by four disastrous years. We never really believed he’d make it to the next election until the next election was all that we had to hope for. And now — here it is at last.
Meanwhile they still astonish us with their feeble hypocrisies. Their latest nontroversy, the “But his laptop” boondoggle, has turned out to be a colossal red herring, fooling no one but the already willingly fooled.
Contrast the pearl-clutching, virtue-signaling, counterfeit indignation over four dead Americans in Benghazi, to the chinless dauphin, the soi-disant “expert,” Donald Trump Junior, proclaiming to Laura Ingraham, “Give me a break, Laura, the reality is … the number [of Covid deaths] is almost nothing.” This on the first day of a three day spree of 2,977 American deaths due to Covid-19. If the number 2,977 sounds familiar, by the way, it’s because that’s the number of human beings who died in the United States due to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
As I write this, 236,072 Americans are dead from Covid-19. Meanwhile, Donald Trump Junior is on a self-congratulations tour over his father’s “victory” over the pandemic. I know how tired this game is getting, but imagine Obama being in the same place. Fox News excoriated Obama and Hillary Clinton over Benghazi for four long, tedious years. But let’s be honest here, for Republicans in general and Fox News in particular it isn’t about four dead Americans or four hundred dead Americans or 236,072 dead Americans. It’s about whether or not a Republican or a Democrat is in charge when it happens. That is all they care about.
I don’t want to tempt fate here, but I have a feeling we’ve got this one in the bag. Donald Trump is going to lose and he’s going to lose big. As I write this, a staggering 91.6 million Americans have already voted. That’s 67% of the 136.5 million ballots cast in the entire 2016 presidential election. In an election where the electorate has been fed the disinformation by Donald Trump and his flunkies that only Election Day votes are free of suspicion, those figures presage a blue wave of voting the likes of which has never been seen before.
While we wait, remember this. We have not just the right but the duty to remember the people who made Donald Trump and his murderous, hateful, divisive regime possible. Like an Oscar winner thanking the people who made the moment possible, it’s our turn to recall and expose the people who need to be blamed.
First I’d like to blame Fox News. Were it not for their shameful, 24 year long campaign of deceit dressed up as news, Donald Trump would not have been possible. Next, I’d like to blame the spineless cretins who carried water and made endless excuses for this murderous psychopath. They include Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Bill Barr, Kellyanne Conway, Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaney, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Batman Villain Roger Stone, handbag maven Ivanka, Dumb and Dumber, Don Junior and Eric, respectively, the shirt-tucking Rudy Giuliani, Mike “Lock her up” Flynn, the glassy-eyed dybbuk Jared Kushner, our home-grown Goebbels, Stephen “I’m gonna party like it’s 1499” Miller, the latest Trump-circle arrestee Steve Bannon — oh, there are so many! I apologize for the ones I missed. But don’t worry, we’ll get to you sooner or later. And you will carry the full weight of your own considerable blame.
Next I’d like to blame the Trump supporter. The book-hating, monotooth, drooling, ignorant, nose-picking, gun-toting, Dunning-Kruger poster children who never met a cliche they didn’t want to become. Thank you for being the perfect, Mad Magazine exemplar of an idiot with his hat on sideways, standing on a corner waiting to prove how stupid he really is.
Finally I’d like to blame Trump himself. Trump the monster, Trump the psycho, Trump the self-dealing, bottomless ego-feeding shredder of our sacred Constitution and wretched defiler of our consecrated People’s House. For crimes against humanity, Donald John Trump, I condemn you to the eternal infamy of all of human history, and, if there’s true justice for all in America, prison for the rest of your miserable life.
Now, brothers and sisters, if you haven’t already done so, go forth and vote, and help us return America to sanity, and send these creatures of the night back under the rocks from which they have slithered. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.