Why size really matters to Trump
I don’t want to get immoderately Freudian here, but I have to wonder sometimes what Donald Trump is overcompensating for when he constantly obsesses about crowd size at his rallies — and other places. Word on the street is Trump is in a rage and staffers throughout the nation’s Executive Mansion are fleeing in terror. The short-fingered vulgarian is looking for someone to disembowel. Turns out his Tulsa rally was a failure by the only metric that matters to Trump: size — and Trump is in a monumental fury about it. Somewhere Freud is chuckling.
Trump needs Sean Spicer to explain why six thousand people is really nineteen thousand, because this is a problem that a sharpie won’t fix. Or maybe he just needs to read the memo on the Streisand Effect and be cool about it. Whatever the case, Trump apparently won’t take an easy shortcut, that a bunch of Zoomers punked him online by ordering reservations to the free event. That actually might be the whole truth of the matter right there, but that just won’t do. It will mean that somehow Trump got “owned by the libs,” or something.
So Trump sent Mercedes Schlapp onto Fox News to explain to Chris Wallace why up is down and it’s all Joe Biden’s fault. And Antifa’s fault. Maybe it’s a plot hatched in the basement of a pizza joint? It isn’t so much that Trump can’t let things go any more, it’s the predictably childish way he goes about it. Everything has to be explained to death, from why the storm really is headed for Alabama to why he didn’t have trouble negotiating a ramp to why his rally wasn’t under-attended. In so doing the mere act of taking a two-handed drink from a glass becomes sip-of-Watergate. Nobody can make a bigger storm in a teacup than Trump.
I doubt all this is much comfort for the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives of the 122,247 (as I write this) Americans who are dead because of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. They don’t even merit a mention from the man who promised to be president of “all the people” in his inaugural address. At the moment the only thing that matters to Trump is he couldn’t fill an indoor auditorium with a modest 19,000 persons capacity. The death of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks will just have to wait. The actual tragedy is Trump is president of the United States and he can’t outdraw Sha Na Na. Your baby girl is dead and you think you’ve got troubles? Trump can’t get it up. His crowd size, that is.
This is what happens when you put a thin-skinned, insecure, child-raping, murdering sociopath in the Oval Office. Every insult, every hurt feeling and perceived slight must be addressed before the nation’s business can move forward. And since the perceived slights never are adequately addressed the nation’s business never is. Trump is still crowing about the impotent, partial travel ban from China he made in January, as if the five minutes of work it took him to do that ought to satisfy everyone and make us all gushingly grateful to this selfish, insecure monster.
Millions of people are going to die because Donald Trump is insecure about the size of his penis. The only shame is we cannot get rid of this repellant monster today, we must wait until November, and then we must wait a further 78 days, to be rid of him once and for all. But if that is the only option open to us then we must take it and we must take it together. Failure is not an option. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.