The Trump Years

I expected Trump to rip a hole in the fabric of reality so we could look through it to a deeper truth about the human experience. And he did exactly that.
      –Scott Adams

With minds still in a spin that we’d gladly forget,
On General Soleimani and Jussie Smollett,
And those years of disease, those years of confusion,
Either swelling a crowd size or concocting collusion,

He called the news fake, and lo, it became so,
Was there ever such power since God started this show?
God lit the darkness, but Trump lit the fuse,
Only the metastasis of chaos keeps him amused.

Whom he poses with today is disposed of the next week,
In that spinning black whirlpool down that dead-end creek.

We observed what that orange-tinged tar-baby did,
And now we aspire to out-juvenile the next kid.
He yanked each and every one into his vortex,
Put that in your pipe to enlighten your cortex.

The Covington kids seemed like good ones to demonize,
If you can’t catch the big fish, be content with the second prize.

All the sources that we trusted and loved so well
Said “Just click on us to hear the next bombshell.”
Bombshell after bombshell was promised all those years,
Some bursting in air, some just clogging our ears.

Yeats doubted the future of the human soul
For weasels fighting in a hole;
Trump pried open our minds to rip off the veneer –
What swirls inside is a climate of fear.

Yet we now notice the same (if that’s any defense)
In the mind of artificial intelligence.

Old Cronkite had conjured a belief in community;
That 46 we elected is the deep fake of unity.

Yes, a showman lurched over toward political spaces,
He said, “Heere’s some entertainment! – check them angry faces.”*
And now that we’ve done those years pointing and jeering,
Let’s together all hold hands, like at the Kavanaugh hearing.

* Scott Adams once said that Trump, coming from an entertainment background, had combined politics with entertainment, and that those who get upset at him are part of the show.

      30 May 2023