Donald Trump's Departure Was a Perfect Visual for His Entire Life
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Gone.
Fly away, little asterisk. You have done good service, and now you must rest. Soon, we will call on you again, this time to designate a former president*, or an ex-president*, as he prepares for his new career as a professional defendant. But, for now, you may sleep the sleep of the just and the justified. You have run the race. You have stayed the course. You have kept the faith.
Here is what the outgoing president* did with his last day in the office he so dishonored: He pardoned or granted clemency to 143 people, including Steve Bannon, the architect of chaos and disaster, and Elliott Broidy, who pled guilty to violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and was separately investigated for his activity around the president*'s one—and, god help us, only—inauguration. He apparently pardoned every crooked pol back to 1789. (Kwame Kilpatrick? Duke Cunningham?) It is entirely possible he pardoned Aaron Burr. I haven't checked the list that closely.
On the policy front, he revoked a rule so that his former henchpeople immediately could begin their careers as lobbyists instead of five years from now—a cosmetic provision that he passed during his Drain The Swamp phase, which was as much of a shuck as anything else he did. And he made it easier to discriminate against gay people, and women, and religious minorities. (He made it possible for homeless shelters to turn away gay teenagers. The cruelty remained the point right until the end.) As Air Force One took flight in its current role as a getaway vehicle, to the strains of "YMCA" and "My Way," he is said to have left a letter for President-Elect Joe Biden, which is supposed to have been the last change of tone in which we're supposed to believe. Wednesday was the last day on which Donald Trump became president*.
His departure, complete with the Village People and Ol' Blue Eyes, was a perfect visual for the man's entire life. This is one rocky motherfcker. His buildings are tacky. His living quarters are tacky. He is the glass grapes on the table. He is the Velvet Elvis Man. If there were ever a mural dedicated to his public career, it would be of dogs playing poker around a golden commode. He brought that ineffable instinct for repulsive kitsch into everything he touched—including, alas, the presidency of the United States. It's not his most dangerous flaw, God knows. But it was one that America, which has the damndest time distinguishing kitsch from class, most responded to about the notion of this grifting arriviste as President of the United States.
I go back to 2015, to one day at the Iowa State Fair. There was a platform about halfway up the midway at which the prospective candidates in the following year's election would come and speak. This guaranteed that a crowd would gather in the middle of the midway, and it became well nigh impossible to get your bacon pecan pie on a stick. Earlier, Donald Trump had asked the fair officials if he could land his helicopter at the fairgrounds. They turned him down, so he used a nearby ballfield as his aerodrome, and he began to offer people helicopter rides which, naturally, overflew the midway. Whenever the helicopter passed over, the eyes of the crowd went to the sky. This happened every 30 minutes or so, and it completely distracted the fairgoers from Scott Walker or Marco Rubio or whoever it was that was speaking. I should have made more of that at the time. These were people who, eyes skyward, worshipped the idea of The Good Life that Trump has been presenting to the American public since the days in which he was a tabloid joke in New York City. He was why their eyes went to the sky. I should have made more of that at the time.
So the last image of this plague-ridden farce of a presidency* is of cheap general-business music left behind in the wake of an ascending 747. And the eyes of an exhausted nation following it into the sky, a country full of marks who are only now realizing that they bought gilt and not gold, and that all their castles were made of sand.
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