Like most Americans, I have a morning routine. It starts with coffee and a quick skim through the news and whatever sensationalist slop social media has to offer. Then coffee, and maybe a bagel. Then I walk my dog Archie through my neighborhood for a bit before settling in to read and reply to whatever email messages arrived overnight.
But today, things got interrupted a bit. While drinking my coffee, I stumbled upon Trump’s tirade against the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Apparently, he still thinks he should win the award, and when he found out they gave the award to a much more deserving brown woman, he just couldn’t take it. Here’s the text that kept Archie from his walk long enough for me to start the piece you’re now reading.
Now, while I am required to say that I am not a mental health professional, Trump’s particular brand of narcissism is now so obvious, so unmistakable that a professional diagnosis isn’t necessary. His illness is as obvious as a massive head wound or a broken arm – expert opinions are not exactly necessary, and pretending things are normal simply makes no sense. He’s very ill, and he needs help, but we all know he’ll never admit it, and no help is coming.
Ater reading through a mountain of whiny text about wars he never ended and awards he will never deserve, Archie and I set out for our daily walk, just as we have been doing for the better part of the last decade. He’s almost eleven now, so we walk a bit slower these days, giving me a lot of time to look around and think.
I passed Bob’s house on the corner, and it hit me that there has been a Trump sign in his yard for the last several election cycles, but his yard is empty today. Less than a month from Election Day, and there are no signs of any kind. As we continue, we see the same thing in yard after yard. I live in a seriously red district, and in past cycles, signs were everywhere. Now, there are none. I haven’t seen a Trump hat in months. It’s like the entire neighborhood is hiding its shame, and while I don’t miss the signs, it used to be fun trying to get Archie to pee on all of them.
About halfway through our stroll, Archie and I passed by a house that I remember from my time as a candidate back in 2018. The owner had Trump gear everywhere, including a giant Trump tapestry in his garage. It took up the entire back wall, and he left his garage door open at all times just to make sure everyone saw it. That’s what he told me back in 2018 when he called me a variety of impolite names because I dared to oppose his dear leader.
Today though, there are no signs, the tapestry is gone, and my former MAGA neighbor, who was mowing the lawn, would not look me in the eye, so I stared directly at him until Archie and I were several houses away. This happens to me all the time these days. My neighbors know who I am and what I believe, and these days, none of them meet my gaze when I pass by. I know because I try and try to get them to do so. They don’t even look up when Archie poops in their yards, but I clean it up anyway because while I may be a “dirty librul” I am not a bad neighbor.
Trump is entering what I like to call his late McCarthy period. He’s ranting about socialism and all the “red scare” nonsense from our past while hiding the illness that will almost certainly kill him, though Joe McCarthy’s illness was alcoholism, and Trump’s is most likely dementia. But the end for each is just as certain.
While Joe McCarthy held immense power for a time, once he lost that power, he was forgotten almost immediately. Five years after he drank himself to death, no one could find a McCarthy supporter anywhere, and those who supported him previously almost always denied ever doing so. This will be Trump’s fate, and likely very soon.
Trump is fading fast, and if my formerly MAGA neighbors know it, so does everyone else.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
We have to stop reading and commenting on those Pseudo Trump postings. While the ideas behind them are Trumps, the language is not. The man just discovered that “dumb” ends with a “b.”