Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Like Paul Krugman, Matt Taibbi, and Garrison Keillor before me, I have arrived at the time I must write a think piece on Donald Trump, what he is and what he means in the context of our social and political evolution.
It's no secret that Donald Trump was born a wet wad of feces, rectal mucus, gravel, benzoate of soda, and minced twine. He emerged from Satan's anus, looked around, and declared himself a masterpiece. He then oozed, slug-like, across the linoleum of an abandoned, but haunted, state mental hospital toward the drain down which countless gallons of blood from tortured inmates had flowed. For the next twenty years he lived in the sewers of New Jersey among mutant fetuses who had somehow survived being flushed down toilets after back-alley abortions. He watched as they paraded along the excremental effluence on the backs of albino alligators similarly discarded, carrying torches fashioned from toilet plunger handles and used diapers.
Knowing he could never compete among the fetus creatures for mates, being many degrees uglier than even the most translucent and veiny of his cohort, he instinctively understood he would have to distinguish himself in some other way. He taught himself to communicate via fits of vomiting, a kind of Morse code of convulsive regurgitation of the very filth from which he was made. This he called "serenading," much as today he strives to label with pretty words such as "debate" and "speech" the putrid slurry of his various secretions.
It has been frequently reported that he is a physical abomination, and rightly so. To call the joints of his legs "knees" is to bestow upon them a compliment they in no way deserve. They are rotten tubers joining the vile armadillo sausages he has in place of thighs and calves. It would be remarkable that he has an anus where his mouth should be, if not for the fact that every orifice and aperture in his body is an anus as well. Disturbingly, Paul Krugman neglects to mention this. Light penetrates Trump's eye anuses like quickly melting suppositories. Sound enters his ear anuses the way Newt Gingrich's scaly erection violates the butthole of a shrieking piglet – a common enough occurrence, yet one we ought to be careful never to grow accustomed to. A minor tremor of revulsion, at the very least, is always appropriate. Newt's bestial sodomy is a direct result of the policies and rhetoric pursued by the GOP for decades. The blame for the Republican party's current status as a halfway house for practitioners of pedophilia, necrophilia, scatophilia, and penile cannibalism can be laid at no one's feet but its own.
Much has been made of Trump's genital deformity, but as is always the case, the truth is far more repulsive. In place of a penis he has a finger. The wormy cocktail franks that serve as digits on his fore-flippers each take a turn dangling above his testicles. His balls, incidentally, are two sacs of eel larvae, the elvers bursting out every three months in the shower to make the long journey back to the Sargasso Sea where normally eels are born. Thus Trump conjures a Satanic, obscene reversal of the normal eel life cycle. Travel by drain and subterranean plumbing has been a recurrent theme in Trump's life, which explains a great deal about the values he espouses.
As many an author has pointed out, Trump's vomit-serenades represent not some new territory for the GOP, but rather the culmination of the exact basic policy stances they have been formulating into a de facto fascist manifesto over the past three decades. The difference now lies only in the presentation. The wad of detritus Trump descended from is in fact the contents of the very well of filth the GOP has gone back to draw from over and over. When Mitch McConnell states that the House will not meet to consider Merrick Garland for appointment to the Supreme Court, he is merely stating in a slightly less offensive fashion Trump's own overtly voiced sentiment that, "Anything a black president touches has black-person germs on it. Anything he even says he likes is all negro-germy, just from him saying he likes it, like Islam, Africa, corn bread, Air Jordans, and FM radio. Disgusting. I wouldn't talk to anyone he picked for anything. That's a good way to get zika. That's what happens. And they give each other fist mumps, can you believe that? Do you want that? Mumps on your fist? Do you know how sad that is, to be a white person with fist mumps? Sad."
We know who is to blame for Trump. He's not anything out of the ordinary, ideologically speaking, that is resolved. The question now is, can the nation recover from having its squalid fascist undergarments of xenophobic resentment waved around in front of the entire world for the past year? Can the US rise above such shame even domestically and carry on as before? And will we ever recover our respectability on the world stage? Will we ever again be able to look Albania in the eye and say, "You're like a joke country, Albania. You're a kind of cartoon country, with a currency backed by generic laundry detergent and a half-assed hack government oppressing a tawdry, exhausted population of voiceless cartoon slaves," without Albania coming back with, "Uh, not to be rude, but: Trump."
The answer is no. We will never recover. Not internally, where even now the war between the reasonable but cowardly people and the unreasonable but cowardly people curdles to a chunky froth. And not internationally, where our face will be forever seen as bearing a slight tinge of orange, as if we'd been hit in the face with a salty duck egg, a Donald duck egg, and have never been able to wipe the yolk off completely.
So can we please stop pretending? Can we stop behaving as if there were some method to Trump's spastic barrage of gall? Can we agree that the next headline on the subject will be, "Yeah, More Trump Again?"
It occurs to me, of course, that entirely dismissing a candidate whom a great many in the nation are intent on voting for might be a mistake. It may just further divide us. It may further alienate the majority of Trump's supporters: the entitled racist white people making above the median income who are awakening to the concept of white privilege, resent being so rudely awakened, and resent even more that people without that privilege recognize it. Trump might, in fact, win, and we will have dismissed him as nothing more than a blustering buffoon farting out nonsensical soundwaves whose crests and troughs happen to intersect with a parallel waveform of jingoistic wailing.
But haven't we wasted enough time dignifying that cacophony by trying to give it an evaluative hearing? Plaintive though that cacophony might be, the flatulence purporting to represent its legitimate fears and hatreds has not only stunk up our discourse, but forced us into unhealthy thought habits. And they're not even pleasant or easy thought habits. The process of normalizing Trump, and the pre- Trump Republicanism that set the stage for him, is as uncomfortable as it would be to eliminate the physical man himself entirely from one's bowels.
It's difficult enough to pretend we live in a functioning democracy since the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush. It's enough of a chore to put a brave face on our servitude and act as if, yes, with just a few tweaks of the system, the price tag of a college degree and a home and an EpiPen will someday come into reasonable alignment with a worker's paycheck. It strains the spine to tilt the head so that a system of upside-down civic priorities looks like something worth going in to work for every day. It's enough of a doublethink contortion to pretend to wonder what exactly was agreed upon at this or that climate summit while we watch our cities flood and our planet die from our honoring the taboos and etiquette of capitalism.
At least give us this, now that we've weighed all the evidence: Trump is a grotesque turd. At least give us that. At least credit us with enough intelligence to appreciate when the drama of the political spectacle has plummeted to such a depth that it no longer requires the dignity of reasoned analysis. How about it? How about we just call a turd a turd?
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!