The Cadaver Synod of Pope Donald

Some day, Donald Trump will be dead.

His rodentine mouth, so incessantly slit open to spit imbecilities past his bleached dentures, will be permanently closed. His insistent hands, perpetually positioned a foot apart as if to burrow bullshit into the national conversation, will lie limp and motionless at his sides.

It may happen organically. Face down on a tray table from arteries congealed over decades spent in a slurry of Big Macs, Filet O’ Fish, and sauce both tartar and special.

It’s even remotely possible that Trump tires of himself. Of regurgitating all those tedious conversations that begin and end with a worshipful “Sir”. Resulting in his final public act truly being a thing no one’s seen anything like since the day R. Budd Dwyer mouthed a gun barrel.

Trump, however, remains audaciously alive. Therefore, facts must be faced. At this very moment the President is at the peak of his cognitive powers. He will not get saner at 80, and the odds are pick ‘em that when he does shuffle off this mortal coil he will attempt to take all of us – and the copper wiring from the coil – with him.

Yet Trump’s defenders sicken me more than Trump. They constantly claim deeper perspectives for his actions, as though the Trump Presidency were an inverse Picture Of Dorian Gray, and locked away in the Oval Office was a pristine portrait growing more fair with each act of indecency. But the moral leper behind the Resolute Desk isthe reality, and no tacky amount of gold or cheap bordello flourishes can camouflage its pustules.

Then too, this is not entirely Donald Trump’s fault. Trump is an undiluted American. Free of introspection. The inevitable result of every National Anthem introduction, every honoring of America, every flyover above a stadium sized flag. Our national misapprehension devolved into madness.

What’s more, I find it hard to be aghast when a heinously self-reverential geriatric insists on clinging to power because I am old enough to remember the spring of 2024.

I remember Joe Biden’s subservient staff attempting to lessen the visual impact of his doddering by having everyone around him walk slower. I remember smug enablers from the media and Congress insisting all was well with Biden’s mind by recounting occasions when that blood-soaked Zionist had uttered an unaddled sentence.

For consecutive presidencies, the American people, citizens of the least caring government in the industrialized world, have been forced into the role of caregiver for an abusive elder. With all the time demands and undue stress that role entails.

But, is there anything we can do to care for ourselves?

Being a history geek, I find equilibrium in musing upon tales from the ancients: Of 53 BC, when the opulently rich Marcus Licinius Crassus was defeated by the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae and mockingly forced to drink molten gold. Or 37 AD, when the trembling and syphilitic Emperor Tiberius emerged from his Imperial chambers mumbling for a pork cutlet and Quintus Macro, a prefect of the Praetorian Guard, seized a pillow and smothered life from him.

And for those who prefer their coping mechanisms centered within the present millennium, there are practical things to hope for.

For instance, The United States has 18 separate intelligence agencies and a preemptive attack budget currently hovering between 2 and 3 trillion dollars a year. A military once designed to fight 2 wars simultaneously without an ally is now funded to fight 3 perpetually without an enemy.

Surely somewhere in that vast intelligence bureaucracy someone has been intelligent enough to create a facsimile Presidential Emergency Satchel with gag nuclear codes!?

It ought to be a relatively easy thing to make Trump lose interest in vaporizing the planet… just involve reading material! A few dense paragraphs of instructions for how to initiate the codes and, like an impatient child at Christmas, Trump will move on to his next toy. Perhaps the observation deck atop the Trump Arch could use premium luxury boxes?

You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve always preferred laughing at the world to going insane. Never more so than when times are hard. And times are hard now.

Nothing works and everything costs. Corporate America, in tandem with the government it owns, is remorseless in its attempts to screw us for fees large and small. Like modern day peasants, it seems we’re all just cowering on plots of land next to the IT castle on the hill, waiting for our non-discretionary expenses to erase our existence.

And if that weren’t bad enough, the wall between church and state has been replaced with a shower curtain.

Trump, as you may have heard, now considers himself to be both Caesar and Christ. This, to say the least, is tricky politics, but it fills me with hope. For one day Trump really will die, and history, yet again, presents us with an example and an opportunity.

In 897 AD, the corpse of Pope Formosus was disinterred and put on trial for heresy. Catholics, you see, know how to hold a grudge.

I can think of no more fitting end to the Trump era than to place his carcass on a golden throne in the middle of his golden ballroom. Not to question his infallibility, but our own. To honestly reassess what lies about our national character and our system of government we can continue to comfortably tell ourselves.

That just might make all this madness worth it.

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