Donald Trump’s new horse farce
Ridicule is oxygen to Donald Trump. He needs it to survive. It is the other, uglier side of his desperate, fathomless addiction to self-aggrandizement. Ridicule is that second piston stroke, the one that drives everyone else down while the first, shameless self-promotion, drives him up, doubling the distance (in his mind) between himself and the rest of us, driving his putrid, ego-enlarging engine endlessly on.
Trump makes no connection between the liberality with which he dispenses ridicule and the irony of his inequitable outrage when it is justly aimed right back at him. Ridicule is a weapon he reserves exclusively for himself and, when used against him, is dismissively and indignantly relegated to “fake news.”
You can bet that when, in the lexicon of Trump self-assessment, Trump insists that, “No one is more pro woman than me,” the diametric opposite can safely be inferred: no one ridicules women more than Donald Trump does. Were it not so infuriating it would be funny. That a fat, bald (yes, Trump really is bald on top) horse’s ass should refer to Stormy Daniels as “Horseface,” or that he would dare to disparage anyone’s looks for any reason at all, is an irony so obvious that only Donald Trump himself and his fawning claque of lickspittles could miss it.
Trump’s shameful history of verbally attacking women, particularly for their looks, is too disgracefully long to fully catalog here. His latest attack on Stormy Daniels was sufficiently repugnant to cause GOP Congressman Ryan A Costello to tweet: “To say this is unbecoming of any man, let alone the POTUS, is a vast understatement, and to say this enables teenage boys to feel they have a license to refer to girls with such names is obvious. It’s all very embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing” is only the beginning. It is a disgrace, an infamy, an indignity, a scandal. That vile, vicious, racist, self-proclaimed sexual assailant illegally infesting the Oval Office is a unique American calamity. The epitaph Trump has earned will be a final justice etched in ridicule. And it can’t happen soon enough.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.