Trump Socks It to the World

I want to play sockhim (oh, sorry, sockher) for President Donald Trump. In our world today, there’s nothing, it seems, he can’t fiddle with or kick around or, for that matter, sock. And whenever he feels it’s necessary (or simply has the urge to do so), he’s always been willing to sockthem, whoever they might be. If something then goes wrong, as with Iran and the global economy right now, thanks to his wild and wildly destructive acts, so what? He’s still Donald Trump and can do the equivalent again somewhere else in some other way the next second-minute-hour-day-week-month-year.

I’m thinking, of course, not just about his unbearable urge to bomb Iran for the 940th (9,400th?) time, as oil and gas prices surge once again, but about his relatively recent intervention in the soccer World Cup to ensure that one of the best players on the US team, who had committed a foul, was red-carded off the field by a referee, and then was denied permission to play in the next game against the Belgian team, could instead compete in that very game. And of course, since everything You Know Who does is headlined, you know just what happened next: The World Cup organization, FIFA, gave way instantly, that player was indeed in the next game, and the US team still lost to Belgium by a significant margin.

And Donald J. Trump just rolled right on. No matter what goes wrong, he never loses. (If you think otherwise, ask him and you’ll find out that you couldn’t be more off base!)

I sometimes try to imagine telling my parents, who died deep in the last century, about “our” president. The only way I could do so, I suspect, would be by comparing him to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Donald Trump of the early 1950s, who claimed that his opponents were “commies” and, in a distinctly Trumpian fashion, swore that he had a (fictional) list of 205 State Department employees who were members of the American Communist Party and later that the US Army, too, had been infiltrated by commies. His charges would be the focus of the 1954 televised Army-McCarthy Hearings, which did me the great favor (at age 10) of putting a television set in our apartment for the first time so that my mom, Irma Selz, then a well-known political and theatrical caricaturist, could draw McCarthy and crew for the New York Post.

At a time when this planet of ours needed rescuing (from us, of course), the American people reelected a man who continues to openly promise to send us—all too literally—to the blazes.

And yes, he was an all-American monster, distinctly clobbering various figures and destroying certain American lives. Still, in the end, he was condemned by the Senate and essentially drank himself to death, only affecting our all-American world for a few years and (at least in comparison with You Know Who) in a relatively modest way.

Historically speaking, Donald Trump, president (no less!) of the United States of America twice, puts him to shame. Of course, once upon a time (believe it or not), Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump had the very same adviser (at different moments, of course), Roy Cohn, who, in the (all too literal) end, may have helped create a president from beyond the grave.

McCarthy only had a relatively brief moment at center stage before falling apart in a big-time fashion. Donald Trump, on the other hand, simply goes on and on and (yes!) on, whacking away at so many of the rest of us—Iran being at the top of his list, right now—day after day, week after week, year after year, while our world begins to disintegrate under us. (Oh, sorry, my mistake even to refer in passing to climate change when “our” president considers it a first-class “con job“!)

Joe McCarthy was functionally ejected from his political world and then essentially ejected himself from ours. Unfortunately, Donald Trump took our world by storm, two (out of three) times, while tossing out so many others in the process. And now, at least in climate terms, he seems intent on ejecting us all from Planet Earth.

“We Have a Score to Settle”

If I had told you his tale early in this century, you would never have believed me. In fact, you would have thought me an idiot and a half (maybe even three-quarters). Donald Trump, the president of the United States (at least) twice and so many others of us his apprentices? You must be kidding! Once upon a time, that would have seemed beyond inconceivable for even a second, no less at least eight years. You simply wouldn’t have believed that so much of the Republican Party (and all too many other Americans) would ever have become Trumpublicans.

Under the circumstances, can there be any question that we now live in an upside-down, gloom-and-doom version of a fairy-tale world? Why, just as I was writing this, President Trump decided to launch a new series of air strikes against Iran (yes, Iran!), claiming that “we have a score to settle.” And he’s certainly a big-time score-settler, though who really knows what he’s doing or why—probably not even him. He just seems to get the urge to sockittothem and we’re off to the races.

Isn’t it strange that the man who, once upon a time, wrote The Art of the Deal can’t quite seem to imagine making a deal with anyone anymore? Actually, as he said recently when it comes to Iran: “We’re going to have a deal. We may just do it without a deal, because you know what, it’s easier.” Perhaps he should now change the title of his book to The Art of Doing Without a Deal.

And, of course, that shouldn’t be surprising when the people he’s dealing with there are, as he put it recently, “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people,” He summed things up this way when it comes to Iran, “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars… there’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” (No matter at all that, only weeks earlier, he had praised them as “very rational people,” “nice to deal with.”)

And what do you do when you’re dealing with sick scum? You bomb the crap out of them. Or, to put it in sports terms, you sockthem to hell.

At a time when this planet of ours needed rescuing (from us, of course), the American people reelected a man who continues to openly promise to send us—all too literally—to the blazes. He’s simply hot, hot, hot, the very word he used for Trumpian rapper and “White House Barbi” Nicki Minaj. (”We also have a woman that is so respected and so hot and so great and such a great friend of, I don’t say conservative, I say of common sense.”)

You, of course, could say the very same thing about Donald J. Trump. He’s so hot, and the one thing he seems determined to do on this overheating planet of ours is heat ever more of it (which war, of course, accomplishes in a particularly striking fashion).

So, here we all are with a president determined to play sockher, sockhim, sockthem, and sockplanetEarth for at least another two and a half years. And where will we all be then? Sockme if I know?