Donald J. Trump sits on Trump Force One, about to fly to another rally and to the waiting crowds who want to touch, paw, hug, and kiss him.
He asks the steward for Wet Wipes.
Trump reluctantly picks up a newspaper. It’s everywhere: 91 criminal charges, including four felony counts for overturning a federal election, 13 for election interference in Georgia. In New York, he has to pay a woman $84 million. He throws the paper aside.
He picks it up again.
“I never touched her pus*y. She’s lying,” he tells the steward.
“Anything else, sir?”
There are the 34 additional felony counts against him in connection with payments to Stormy Daniels.
“Bitch!”
He opens the container, pulls out a wipe, and covers his face to hide it.
There are the 40 felony counts in Florida — “Why doesn’t DeSantis do something for me? Ungrateful bastard!” — for hoarding classified documents after leaving office and impeding efforts to retrieve them. He turns the page. There is also a civil fraud trial, including allegations of conspiracy, falsifying business records, and insurance fraud. He has been found liable for fraudulently inflating the value of his properties, and, if New York Attorney General Letitia James — “Another bitch” — has her way, there will be a $370 million fine, a lifetime ban preventing him and his sons from working in New York real estate.
His nerves are shot. He throws the paper down again. He can’t get comfortable on the plane. His pants are tight. He can’t remember names, facts, dates, connections. He sees himself in the reflection of the window.
“I still got it.”
People are snickering about how he smells, though, whether Melania loves him, what’s inside Ivana’s coffin that he hastily buried on his golf course, and whether he covets Ivanka.
He knows all this. People are nasty. He’s a punchline — a smelly, inarticulate, bigoted, unraveling punchline. The smart people don’t think he’s smart; the dumb ones, the ones who send him money, think he should win multiple Nobel Prizes.
“I should have.”
The New York Times, his hometown paper, still won’t give him a good story — never has.
“I’ll close them down in November.”
His former chief operating officer at the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, now imprisoned, has been cooperating with authorities in New York. His former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the man who was in his Oval Office on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, has been granted immunity.
He picks up the paper again.
Seven hundred years in prison, he reads, if he’s found guilty on everything.
He hears the pilot announce an arrival time in Florence, South Carolina.
“I’ll pardon myself when I’m re-elected.”
But a presidential pardon does nothing, he’s been told, about the state charges he faces — he can’t believe it, but it’s true — in Georgia and New York.
As the plane lifts off, he knows the stalling tactics will not work forever. A trial is going to happen.
“Bastards.”
He could lose in November. He could lose, he says it — he knows it — again.
Michael Cohen and Weisselberg and Meadows and the execrable Rudy Giuliani, who included him as an unpaid debt in his bankruptcy filing.
“They’d be nothing without me.”
The steward brings him a Diet Coke, a Big Mac, a piece of black-forest cake.
“Loser! I’m not paying Rudy sh*t! He didn’t deliver for me.”
Trump smiles, thinking about the hair dye running down Rudy’s face.
He stops smiling.
He unwraps the cake, breaks off a piece with his fingers.
His wife didn’t want him in the car with her on the way to her mother’s funeral. He’s ripped off students and charities. He has stiffed carpet layers and painters who did work for him at casinos. He has humiliated political opponents and the disabled. He has neutered and belittled political friends.
“F*ck them all, even Melania!”
For most, stress comes with a DUI, a denied insurance claim, a prostate or breast exam showing anomalies, identity theft, a lousy boss, a blown engine, a child on drugs. But what does all this do to a man like Trump, who thought he was untouchable, Teflon, someone who gave so much to a nation?
If Trump wins in November, Republicans will fear him, but unless he cancels future elections, a distinct possibility, they won’t have to deal with him after 2024.
History will do his biopsy.
When he dies, ex-presidents will not come to his funeral. He tells himself he doesn’t care. He does. He thinks about lying in a coffin.
Those who eulogize him will strain to find his humanity. His sons will spew invectives at those who didn’t support him. Ivanka will come to the service but won’t speak. Melania, if she’s there at all, will shed no tears. Democrats and Republicans will not come together outside the church, after the service, as they did when Bush died or after 9/11, to remind the nation we are one. Those who mourn him will be those who believe that prosecutors in Georgia, Florida, New York, and Washington, as well as E. Jean Carroll, Stormy Daniels, Serge Kovaleski, students at Trump University, the charities the Trump Organization defrauded — EVERYONE — was lying except him.
In The Godfather, Part III, Michael Corleone talks to the corpse of Don Tommasino, a man who decades earlier helped avenge the murder of Michael’s grandfather.
“You were so loved, Don Tommasino,” Michael cries. “Why was I so feared, and you so loved? What was it?”
But Corleone knows why.
Trump knows why.
When Corleone died, alone, nobody talked to his corpse.
The plane lands. Trump looks out the window and sees the red hats, the smiling faces, the contorted faces, the angry faces, the tattooed faces. The people are screaming, punching the air, bowing down to the plane.
“My people.”
They’re holding signs, pictures. He’s Superman. He’s with the flag. He’s saluting. He’s saving drowning children. He’s with Christ. He’s young. He waves through the little window.
“I am loved.”
Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter — quit laughing — and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. His latest book, “Jack Sh*t: Volume One: Voluptuous Bagels and other Concerns of Jack Friedman” is out and the follow-up, “Jack Sh*t, Volume 2: Wait For The Movie. It’s In Color” is scheduled to be released in February 2024. In addition, he is the author of “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later,” “The Joke Was On Me,” and a novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages.” See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2024
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