Lindsey Graham once asked Donald Trump for money for his senatorial candidacy and handed him a slip of paper with his phone number on it, a strip of paper Trump showed everybody on national TV.
by Talmadge Jarratee
Is anybody anywhere having more fun than Donald Trump? This is a man who loves to create raw abrasions and rub them with salt and giggle with demonic glee. He’s a big soft white slab of cowardice with a bizarre shock of carefully tended and glistening hay atop his head, a blow-hard bringing his fellow GOP candidates to their knees and savoring every second of it. A certified draft dodger, he had the gall to imply revered war hero John McCain was not a real hero because he was captured after being shot down in Vietnam. McCain’s capture and years as a POW made McCain a loser in Trump’s eyes. When McCain caddie Lindsey Graham delivered a sanctimonious speech supporting his hero and condemning the blasphemous Donald, the Donald had trouble remembering who Graham was, then mentioned that Graham once asked him for money for his senatorial candidacy and handed him a slip of paper with his phone number on it, a strip of paper Trump showed everybody on national TV and read off the number, causing Graham to change numbers after he was besieged by crank callers enthralled with the Donald.
According to Trump, Rick Perry from Texas needs an IQ test if he’s serious about running for president and wears glasses to appear studious and smart when voters question his mental capacity after displaying stunning stupidity in past debates. Jeb Bush is a nice guy, but he’s weak, would make a terrible president. There are 15 of these stooges vying for the big enchilada, and they are all distracted from slamming Obama and Hillary because they have their hands full with the bullet-proof Donald, who, unlike his rivals, feels no compunction to show his softer, compassionate side. When he was asked about his three marriages, always a political bugaboo, he softened just a might by adding that they were all nice ladies and still his friends and he loves women.
The Donald is an unabashed rogue. He is a lacerating bully. His vicious verbiage is gleefully out of bounds.
The Donald is an unabashed rogue. He is a lacerating bully. His vicious verbiage is gleefully out of bounds. As a ruthless businessman used to sycophants kissing HIS ass for money, he scoffs at the beggarly tendencies of his competition and announces he has 10 billion and doesn’t have to go skulking hat in hand to billionaires interested in holding the puppet strings. He doesn’t have to read from a teleprompter. He seems so imperious as to be immune from careful speechwriters terrified of insulting one group or another. The Donald doesn’t give a hoot and hell who he insults or humiliates or treats with snarling disdain when they muster up enough nerve to retaliate.
And oh how Trump thrives on retaliation. What he seems to enjoy even more is to watch the carefully calibrated and advisor-plagued candidates cringe and squirm after each one of his rancid salvos so filled with contempt for the common man, and especially Latinos, or, primarily, Mexican immigrants. Next to Trump, Rubio seems a slithering weasel, a little boy, while Mr. Walker from Wisconsin appears to be the whitest white man in captivity, so white he blinds you when you’re forced to look at him, so white in every way that those Obama-hating whites in their 60s and 70s are in love with him, even if he smacks of one of those white kids we all remember hating when they ran for school president.
The 15 stooges have tried ignoring Trump. This does no good, because Mr. Trump has so captured the stage as to reduce them to pygmies if they remain silent. If they maintain their dignity in measured tones, answering the Donald’s insults with judicious dignity, like Jeb, they seem even weaker and more spineless than suspected. If they lash out in outrage, the Donald quickly seizes on the fact that they are politicians with years of hypocrisy behind them while trying to be all things to all people, or at least all things to the tight-asses in their party whose votes they need for the presidential nomination. Does the empire-owning Donald with his OWN jet plane and entourage really care about religion? Abortion? Same-sex marriage? He quickly skims these issues and talks about belting around the Chinese, bombing the hell out of Iran, running the Mexican criminals and immigrants out of the country and building a 2,000-mile wall to keep their greasy asses out, and creating jobs while the stooges slither and stew and plague us with their stiff joyless cheesy smiles of losers maintaining a brave face after suffering a personal thrashing.
As a ruthless businessman used to sycophants kissing HIS ass for money, he scoffs at the beggarly tendencies of his competition.
The 15 stooges and their loyal pundits claim the Donald will eventually fizzle out, because there’s no way this verbal brute could possibly run a country, and people will come to realize this. The pundits analyze the Donald and carefully admit his strength, his popularity, admitting he has touched a sore spot among discontented Americans igniting them, uniting them into one frothing dogpack clamoring for change. Unlike the stuffed shirt 15, who expound on their wholesomeness while sporting their perfect little families, the grinning sexless maiden-like wives, the Donald admitted long ago he likes young women half his age and prefers sex with them over alcohol. What more could one appreciate than a guy who relishes young pussy? Unlike the straight and narrow dullards—Jeb leads this pack—who have craved office all their lives and limited any roguish tendencies in fear they might be discovered, the Donald has always swung wild with no concern for his image of a man who steps on little people and negotiates with those supposedly on his own exalted level, never backing down or back-tracking from his image as the ultimate winner and billionaire American business tycoon.
If the Donald is having more fun than anybody in America—hands down—the Democrats are right behind him, rejoicing as the 15 stooges quail and quiver and look to advisers in a desperate quest for answers as to how to deal with the meteoric and overwhelming and overbearing Donald. Chris Mathews, on MSNBC, grins and glows every evening while the gloom settles in among the Fox News crew of scowling tough-guy gasbags and snide blondes who try to deny the Donald is dragging down the Republican party and exposing the 15 stooges to America and the rest of the world as a disgrace, an absurd rendition of democracy so putrid and unlikable that its citizens wonder how the hell it ended up that we are forced to vote for these assholes. As we repeatedly claim we are the greatest country in the world, what must highly progressive and well-run countries like Sweden and Germany and Denmark and Holland think of the sniveling Republican reaction to the bombastic bilge tossed at them by the Donald? Has the greatest country in the world, as we claim, become a laughingstock to the rest of the world?
Perhaps so. Meanwhile, just keep following the Donald, as he licks his lips and snorts and stomps around like a middle linebacker in the National Football League anticipating another lily-livered Lilliputian taking the ball across the line of scrimmage—his territory. §
Talmadge Jarratee writes about politics and occasional sketches of San Francisco.
