With apologies for the language… fuck you, Donald.

I just finished writing a post in response to the daily writing prompt, which was asking about what I like to do in my leisure time, and a certain dissonance materialized. It got me thinking that I should probably be joining the resistance. Instead, I chose to write about golfing and diamond painting and day trips and woodworking. How dare I?!

I should be more conscientious in these days of suffering the consequences of a person who has chosen to go on a daily power trip and listen to people who want to tear the country apart.  How dare I think of leisure time activities when the “Leader of the Free World” appears intent on obliterating the “free” part?

Go to hell, Donald. You’re raining on everyone’s parade but your own, and you appear to enjoy this trampling of rights and abandonment of norms and calculated villainy. But how dare you sit so pretty and ignore the shouts, ignore the pain? You are a cold-hearted ignoramus surrounded by diabolical schemers and losers who have it in their heads that the general population should be nothing but a collection of know-nothing subjects.

How dare you indulge your worst tendencies at the expense of everyone else?

The words come haltingly anymore, especially when it comes to making sense of how such an anomalous distillation of evil could be elected to public office. Twice.

You’re nothing more than a bullshit artist, Donald. People thought you were a plain speaker, that you told it like it was, when really you’re just a died-in-the-wool liar who grew up deprived of everything that really mattered.

And now we pay the price, because seventy-seven million of us were duped. Or maybe they knew exactly who– and what– they were getting.

The Trump debacle is one ever-flowing firehose of contaminated effluence, a never-ending and infuriating case of excuse making, diversions, and CYA. The hope of this administration is to throw up enough mindlessness to de-sensitize and wear us down.

The Donald’s performance at Davos was nothing short of troubling, though his backers will say it was pure Donald genius. Supposedly, his strategy worked to perfection: threaten invasion—OF GREENLAND— along with tariffs and damage to the NATO alliance, and then back off when it looks like he gets what he wants, or the DJIA does a tumble.

Does he really know what he wants? When it comes to leadership and vision and governance, is there any indication that he knows what he’s doing? He wants a peace prize but then orders an invasion of Venezuela. He is actually given the peace prize as a sort of pacifier, but still threatens to invade a sovereign territory.

He says he will tighten the borders—which has happened—but then he creates a goon squad commissioned with spreading cold-hearted fear among people who, for the most part, are already fearful and just looking for a safe space to live and work and make their way through life. Tren de Aragua and Antifa become cliched buzzwords, vengeance and deceit continue to rule the day.

He loses his train of thought with some regularity; he wanders around during meetings—physically and verbally. He probably thinks that the polar vortex we’ve been seeing is a sign that there’s nothing wrong with the environment—even though this intensity is indicative of melting sea ice and warmer water contributing to all this cold spreading more extensively than ever.

Nothing this administration does should be left unexamined, because there are others involved behind the scenes, maybe even running the show. Trump, to some extent, is a hapless moron, drunk on power, always angry at somebody, doing whatever he can to outrun those damned Epstein files.

Donald… did you have something to do with the death of your bestie?

We Zoom most Tuesday afternoons with my brother and his wife, something we started during Covid and which has become a regular thing. We get caught up on the goings-on of the intervening week, and we always close with sharing what each household is prepping for supper. Often mundane stuff.

Every now and then, tensions rise because someone lets slip something that can be taken as political commentary. My wife and I are in one camp, my brother and his wife are in another. There is an intentional effort to avoid such discussions because they bear no fruit and become tension-filled very quickly.

This was close to happening toward the end of our time yesterday, and it really bothered me, for some reason. No voices were raised, but it became fairly obvious that the session was hastened to its completion, finished until next week.

And I began thinking about this dynamic.

It was good that we didn’t keep talking– for one thing, they had plans for supper they needed to tend to– but the dis-ease left me pondering the massive divide that exists between family members. Our situation is a microcosm, indicative of so many households across the country. Feelings and opinions are kept at bay so as to keep the peace, but everyone realizes that we’re only one stinging comment away from verbal fisticuffs.

It all feels dishonest, in a way, though I’m convinced that silence and avoidance are the best way to go, since the likelihood of a breakthrough, without a moderator present, or a significant change of heart, is low. There’d be a lot of shooting from the hip, red faces, raised voices and blood pressure, both sides armed to the teeth with purported facts and opinions, along with quips and quotes from their favorite news sources.

And then it would be necessary to calm down, back away from those heightened emotions and find a way to return to some sense of equilibrium and peace, for the sake of the relationships.

I think it’s the tenacity with which we hold onto our opinions, as if we’re always right and the others are always wrong. Yet the possibility of sharing some middle ground, besides feeling remote most of the time, also seems somehow unsatisfying, less a compromise and more a surrender. Until that changes, we’ll be dealing with at least two camps.

And I will go on believing that Donald Trump and Fox News have been intentionally poisoning the water and pushing a cockamamie agenda that many are still buying. Lock, stock, and barrel.

There are, of course, a million different things to write about. But Donald Trump often emerges as a topic because he’s always doing or saying something so monumentally shocking or dumb, considering the position he holds and the fact that he’s running roughshod over long-held norms and expectations. Promising the world and delivering nothing but misery and embarrassment.

The fact that he doesn’t care about any of this is apparently still a plus for a lot of people—even with the evidence before us that he’s trying to topple whatever pillars once existed.

The only conclusion one can reach is that there are many who prefer we tear down the Statue of Liberty, or at least remove “The New Colossus,” with its invitation to the poor, huddled masses. The powers that be, currently, aren’t interested in any poor, huddled masses. For one thing, they don’t want to work that hard to welcome them. But more significantly, they harbor this destructive notion that desperate people looking for a better life are not to be trusted. The only ones who will do are white people from northern Europe or white “refugees” from South Africa.

It’s hideous on the face of it—that we let this mindset through the door, allowed it to fester and spread to the point where the cost of freedom for all of us is rising by the day.