Trump, the gaudy (fill in the blank*) marketer elected out of hate via a system most Americans cannot describe, came into and will leave the White House a (________), (________), (________) man in need of mental healthcare, one who even his supporters of vaguely sound mind will struggle to find a single inspiring quote from, who will lie if they point to him as someone their kids should look up to or spend more than a minute alone with.

He’s a spoiled toddler in a perpetual tantrum and soiled pants. The world would have been better off with GPT-3 in charge. Yes, it would be regurgitating the Internet but it’d be more sensible. And more benign.

The shame of this presidency is multidimensional. In terms of civility and human progress, the casualties are enormous.

• Our collective decency, class, humility, talent, and discourse has been kneecapped.
• Due to his kindergartner’s approach to Covid, hundreds of thousands have died.
• His default mode for swindling has made the swamps of DC more rancid with corruption than ever.

Part of the blame falls on are his enablers and his abusers/users, who we warned you about.

They sucked up, then chalked up record abuse and set their short-sighted, greed-soaked agendas. Like them, most of the rest reacted as predicted, and still we can’t look away.

For all Trump’s pointlessness and grody-ness, we haven’t been able to treat him the way Lisa Simpson treated possessed corporate mascots. Sadly, among all his faults the biggest might be him merely being a spectacle, which is what he has always wanted most. His ceaseless distractions have not just given his sycophants reasons to get up in the morning, and they’ve even been much more than a black-hole on our time: they have so preoccupied us that they have kept good people from good work.

Think about the words, efforts, and brainpower of real journalists, doctors, scholars, historians, and policymakers, to name a few – so gripped by his fits and spasms. Baby should have been spanked and put in the corner. Instead all the “babysitters” jumped ship, walked the plank, or got arrested.

Think about the creativity of writers and singers, the effort of scientists and artists, all of them inspired in a miraculous process we can’t understand to create something from nothing – their energy wasted digesting his idiocy and misanthropy. This is tragic.

For context on what a waste it has all been, consider that five days have passed since Trump made his first public appearance after returning to the White House from his hospitalization for the coronavirus, defying public health guidelines to deliver another rambling screed to a crowd of hundreds. And here, in relation to Vancouver, thanks to Digital Fans, is how much of the Amazonian rain forest was lost in five days (at the 2019 rate):

Here is the loss compared to Paris:

How about Louisville:

And Dallas:

Imagine the better ways we could have used those five days. The last three-and-a-half years.

This one’s on us: the world is still going to hell and all we can do is watch a monkey fling shit.

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* your choices:

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Mentions:

• Bill Hicks
• Mitch McConnell
• Donald Trump
• Lisa Simpson
• Digital Fans
• The Brookings Institution