And so it ends on a Saturday in Pennsylvania

The Column: 07.18.24

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I have a feeling that the 2024 campaign is effectively over, thanks to a gunman shooting him in the ear and Mr. Trump having the presence of mind, as the Secret Service carried him to safety, to thrust his right fist in the air and shout, “Fight, fight.” The photograph of him doing it, streaks of blood on his face, the flag flying behind him — there is no way for Joe Biden to argue with that photograph. If I were Joe, I’d be thinking of a country to fly to on January 19, the day before treason charges are filed, perhaps Sweden.

Senator J.D. Vance promptly accused Democrats of responsibility, that Biden’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Others blamed the Deep State, Antifa, elitists, transgender persons, and a Republican congressman said, “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Democrats failed to put forward a theory of their own, given Vance’s line, that President Trump had attempted to “assassinate” himself by snipping his ear with a fingernail clipper, but they didn’t. Democrats are a bunch of clerks and clerics, no talent for fiction.

And Democrats are now in utter confusion. Their leaders are folks who loved high school debate, making your point, rebutting the opponent’s. Mr. Trump is a new phenomenon, a stream-of-consciousness orator who goes on at great length uninhibited by factuality or even relevance, and his interest in actual government policy is slight at best. People were sick and tired of scripted politicians and they love him for his rants and improvisations, the wilder the better. He launched himself in politics as a birther, arguing that Barack Obama wasn’t an American citizen but a Kenyan. He stuck to this position for five years before acknowledging that the birth certificate was authentic and that Hawaii is part of America. From this undistinguished start, Mr. Trump went on to invent the Make America Great Again cap, a truly brilliant idea because nobody knows what it means on any particular day. And he demanded that Republicans deny the existence of the 2020 election and they obeyed.

What he will do in his second term is anyone’s guess. A red wave could give us a solid Republican Congress, and if it replaced Civil Service with political patronage, outlawed abortion utterly and gay marriage and rewrote the libel laws to inhibit investigative journalism while creating a commission to approve or disapprove movies and TV for their faithfulness to American cultural values, it could all be accomplished in three months flat. Will he deport ten or twelve million people? Ukraine will surely fall and the Soviet Union will rise. NATO will become a shadow, Europe will need to make its own arrangements with Putin.

I am not an elitist. I have tried to talk like one at times, using words like “hierarchical,” “hegemony,” and phrases like “the weaponization of outright ignorance,” but nobody is fooled. I do enjoy having a president I can look down on, like Nixon, who, having installed a taping system in the Oval Office, said, “I am not a crook.” Not smart. Reagan was an actor and able to conceal his mental decline. Clinton had bubba tendencies, Dubya was Dubya. And when you have a tycoon with a titanic ego, anybody with an ear for balloon juice can be a satirist.

Hillary came off as an elitist when she should’ve stalked across the stage at the first debate and grabbed Trump’s crotch. Biden spent a week preparing for the debate, memorizing statistics, then got confused when Trump said that Biden’s administration was the worst in American history and that America had become a Third World country. Biden should’ve said, “You are a werewolf and you drink the blood of aborted infants.” But he didn’t because it’s not true. Big mistake.

If twenty years ago you had written this in a novel called Schlump, it would’ve been wicked satire but now we’re living in it, and what I intend to do is go back to ordinary comedy. The Lord came down to visit the earth and met a man who was crying. The Lord asked, “Why are you crying, my son?” The man said, “I’m blind and I’ve never seen a sunrise.” The Lord touched the man’s eyes and the sun rose and he was happy. Then the Lord met another man crying. The man said, “I’m a Democrat.” And the Lord sat down and cried with him.

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