By Beau Elliot
It’s an old story, twice told. (Among the Hawthorne bushes, anyway.) Maybe by this time, it’s a story twice times 2 million told.
The emperor has no closure.
Well, OK, Donald “Valdimir” Trump isn’t the emperor — not yet, anyway. Something on the order of 70 percent of us can breathe a brief sigh of relieve.
Seventy percent, you ask? Really? Yes, polls show that 70 percent of Americans simply don’t like the Trumpster. Of course, polls now don’t mean a whit about what might happen in November, let alone what might happen in July.
And who, or what, is that “whit” that doesn’t mean much of anything? You ever seen a “whit”? Me, neither. Apparently, we’re both “whit-less.”
In any case, things are not going swimmingly for the would-be emperor. Actually, some cynics might suggest things are going drowningly for Trump.
(Yes, we know; “drowningly” is not a word. Real cynics don’t care if this little collection or that little collection of letters is a word or not. Real cynics eat little collections of letters for lunch. Which is why they burp so much.)
How drowningly? Well, the Great Bellower’s approval rating is down to 29 percent in some polls, which might be a lower “like” than eating chocolate-covered ants. Yes, some people do eat chocolate-covered ants, which makes me antsy, but that’s just me. The ants are considered to be a delicacy. Marcel Dicke of the Wageningen University in the Netherlands claims that 70 percent of the world’s people eat insects. He also notes that without knowing it, people consume around 500 grams of insect parts per year, given the FDA’s limits on insect parts in processed food. (500 grams equals 1.1 pounds, according to our best friend, the internet)
Whatever. I’m pretty sure the Trumpster is not considered a delicacy.
Especially not by women. According to a Bloomberg Politics, via FiveThirtyEight, 63 percent of women say they would not vote for Trump. Women, ahem, make up around half of the U.S. population. So that’s not exactly an excellent spot from which to start a general-election campaign.
All this comes when the Trump suit should be running victory laps around the country and bathing in champagne (or whatever the very rich bathe in — pre-eaten insects?). But he keeps stepping in barnyard sort of stuff. There was the quite clever insinuation that a federal judge was biased against him because the judge (from Indiana) was of Mexican ancestry, his self-congratulatory initial reaction to the Orlando tragedy (basically, “I told you so”), his worship of banning Muslim immigration to this country (including shooter Omar Mateen’s parents — who immigrated in 1980, when Afghanistan was embroiled in fighting the Soviet invasion and the U.S. was backing the rebels with guns and moolah; good luck on keeping Mateen’s parents out on what ever pretense).
All of this makes for a mess, or at least a good-enough mess that will do until the real mess saunters along (to steal a line from No Country for Old Men).
And what’s with the Trumpster taking a machete to the media all the time? The media made his campaign viable. The New York Times reports that Trump received (for free) $1.898 billion worth of media attention from television, print, and social media in the nine months through March 15.
So, if nature abhors a vacuum, how does Donald Trump’s brain exist?
