How Donald Trump’s downfall plays out from here
Contrary to popular opinion the hemisphere you live in plays no role in the direction water circles drains. The so-called Coriolis effect is widely misunderstood. It is a fictitious force too weak to act on fluid dynamics in small venues like bathrooms and kitchens. But in honor of the Fourth of July, brothers and sisters, I’d like to invite you on a small fantasy about it anyway.
After our protracted struggle against a racist, corrupt, anti-science, ignorant, anti-American, festering totalitarian rapist, we owe it to ourselves to indulge our imaginations. For some time now we have been watching Donald Trump circle the drain, as it were. It’s now time to watch him go straight down that drain — to move to Ecuador, metaphorically speaking.
The beauty about this fantasy is it almost certainly will come true. Trump will be arrested first by the city of New York. As the city of his birth it will be a delicious humiliation. But New York is also the town that invented and perfected the “perp walk,” a bit of excruciating extralegal mortification where the suspect, hands cuffed behind him, is marched past a phalanx of reporters and jeering and rubbernecking onlookers. It’s the price bad guys pay for daring to break the law in the Big Apple.
Even if Trump is arrested in Florida and extradited to New York, he will still be owed a perp walk. It will start at the airport and continue through every public venue he must walk along the way. The best part is the irony that the practice rose in popularity in the 1980s under U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. Rudy will probably get his own perp walk, too. But that’s another fantasy.
How many millions of views do you imagine Trump getting perp walked will get on YouTube? Whole celebrations will be organized around the spectacle of a hustled Trump in handcuffs played on a continuous loop, with the LOCK HER UP crowd forced to watch! I plan to rub that in every chance I get. That’s right, MAGA morons, I will say, there’s your boy, the guy who tweeted with Tourette Syndrome regularity the all-caps words LAW AND ORDER getting a little taste of the same, getting frogmarched around Gotham in bracelets. Sucks, no?
And then Donald Trump will be arraigned. And then he will be tried. And then he will be found guilty. And then he will be sentenced to years in prison. I don’t know where to begin with that, but I plan to show the MAGA crowd no mercy. For years they tweaked our noses and told us “F*** YOUR FEELINGS.” Well I now say “F” theirs. I now say that everything they said about their hero was a lie, and we know this to be true because the American justice system just proved it. The American justice system has spoken. Donald John Trump is in fact now just a common criminal. He is now in prison. Donald Trump is in prison. I plan to love saying that as much as I love saying Joe Biden is President of the United States.
Yes, after Trump finally goes down that drain, after he finally gets sent to Ecuador, metaphorically speaking, the narrative concerning him will dramatically change. Of course the MAGA crowd will insist he was railroaded and imprisoned for political reasons. Of course Fox News will be full of performative outrage about the alleged “Democrat coup.” (And I say it again: the red hatted haters will screech “How dare they lock him up” — without a trace of irony.) But Trump will suddenly acquire a new and obligatory honorific nonetheless, that of “convicted felon.” As in, “convicted felon Donald Trump was admitted to the prison infirmary today for angina,” or “convicted felon Donald Trump released a statement from Rikers Island today.” And so on.
It will be a glorious day, brothers and sisters. Ecuadorian Trump will be down the drain. It will be a day to savour every day and for years to come. After waking up in the nightmare world created by Trump, full of quotidian lies and hate and tweets filled with false rage and dangerous blame heaped on innocent heads by a malignant rapist and traitor, justice will finally be done. Justice, glorious justice will finally be done. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe. And have a happy and well-deserved Independence Day.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.