gradually drift away from the cult. It is, after all, a personality cult, and allegiances to personalities are not transferrable to others. Trump has a unique talent - he's a carnival barker crossed with a demagogue, like the bastard offspring of P.T. Barnum and Hitler. He has been able to tap into and cultivate the worst impulses of people who already had dangerous attitudes - racism, white supremacy, xenophobia and "Christian" nationalism at the top of the list - with outrageous and offensive statements that expressed, loudly and publicly, what they were thinking and wanted to say themselves. He was able to make angry, privileged white people believe that only he could get rid of the bad people who they thought were keeping them down in some way (of course, equality looks like oppression to those who are accustomed to privilege). Obviously some GOP hangers-on like Cruz and Hawley hope to pick up those voters in 2024, but they don't have Trump's unique talent for mesmerizing throngs of angry, stupid people (Hawley just torpedoed his own chances, and Cruz is so oily and obnoxious that everybody hates him already). As of now, nobody else does either.

No doubt the current lunacy will continue for awhile, but I think that once Trump is no longer president and has to try to maintain his influence from Mierda-Loco (assuming he isn't in prison), that influence will gradually dissipate when it becomes apparent that he can't actually do anything. It will probably take a couple of years, but reality has a way of intruding into people's delusions. Those who aren't being prosecuted for trying to sack the Capitol will find that they still have to support themselves and their families and go about their lives. Continuing to carry the flag for some fat old washed-up ex-politician who can't do anything for them will eventually be seen as a wasted effort. Some might even recognize that they've been had. Many will continue to hold racist and otherwise Trumpist beliefs but at least they won't be storming government buildings.

I hope I'm not being unrealistically hopeful.

This is a man who seems to have no joy in his life. His only pleasure, if you can even call it that, comes from putting down anyone who opposes him, which his father apparently taught him is winning - and losing is completely unthinkable. He doesn't seem to enjoy music or art; he doesn't go to plays or concerts; he doesn't appreciate nature; he doesn't even like pets; he doesn't read anything but news items about himself; he has no real friends, just toadies and hangers-on; his wife doesn't seem to especially like him and all of his wives have been nothing but arm-candy for him (and he cheated on all of them); his relationships with his oldest children are weird, to say the least, and he seems to have none at all with the youngest; he has no hobbies other than golf, at which he cheats because he always has to win; and he's so absurdly vain that he is said to need two hours to do his hair and makeup. Everthing is superficial. He has to have the biggest, the best, the most expensive, the most ostentatious because he needs everyone to know that he's rich. His NYC apartment looks like Versailles redecorated by Saddam Hussein's pimp. He spends every waking hour fretting about the possibility that someone else might be richer, more powerful, more appreciated, more valued, and it drives him crazy. I can't imagine a more miserable existence. But in the process of trying to fill the bottomless black hole of his ego he is causing immeasurable damage, even killing people. So, yes, he's a sad, wretched specimen, but I can't bring myself to feel sorry for him except maybe in the Buddhist sense of compassion for all sentient beings.

You rarely see that level of bad outside prisons and psychiatric facilities. There is something so completely wrong with him that it's hard to wrap your head around it. He doesn't love anyone or anything. He doesn't enjoy anything that's not completely about him. His only motivation is to be seen as better at everything than everybody else; he likes golf only because as the owner of the courses he plays at, he can easily cheat. He doesn't enjoy the arts - he had a fake Renoir that he insisted was genuine despite the fact that the real one was hanging in a museum, but he had it not because he valued it as a work of art only so he could brag about owning a painting by a famous artist. He doesn't go to concerts, plays or other performances. He doesn't appreciate nature - he doesn't sail like Kennedy, ride horseback like Reagan, or even cut brush like Bush II. He doesn't like animals and doesn't have pets, unlike any of his predecessors (even Hitler liked dogs!). He doesn't do music (Clinton), he doesn't paint (Bush II), he doesn't write (Obama), he doesn't even read. He leads what seems to be a completely joyless life, full of nothing but anger and infinite insecurity. It must suck to be him.

with more functioning synapses than a squirrel's could believe any of them, but that's been true of Trump's press secretaries' lies from the beginning. At least Sean Spicer occasionally looked uncomfortable - the magnitude of the lie could be gauged by how angry he seemed while telling it. Outraged halibut SHS was perpetually belligerent, but that affect seemed to arise from indignation that reporters had the nerve to doubt and question her. In the case of soul-deprived spokesBarbie McEnemy, however, the most outrageous lies flow trippingly on her forked tongue while her dead eyes never blink at all.

hardly anybody except the medical researchers talked or wrote about it. You'd think there would be a whole lot of literature that addressed it, considering that it was much worse than this epidemic (at least so far), but the major authors who were active at the time barely mentioned it, if at all. A letter supposedly written by F. Scott Fitzgerald while quarantined in France turned out to be a parody that was created this year. In fact, authors like Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway pretty much ignored it in their writings. In 1939 Katherine Anne Porter wrote the novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which described her own experience with the illness - but there wasn't much else. The only other authors of note who wrote about the epidemic - years later - were John O’Hara (The Doctor’s Son, 1935) and William Maxwell (They Came Like Swallows, 1937). I wonder why? Was the experience so horrific that people decided they just didn't want to think about it? PTSD had to have been rampant then, too, considering that the carnage of WWI was part of the mix (and a significant cause as well). Will we react the same way?

They are carrying a whole lot of other right-wing baggage having nothing to do with quarantines and wearing masks in public. Have you ever wondered why we don't see PoC participating in these demonstrations? Why aren't they complaining about being out of work or having to wear masks? When restaurants shut down who loses their jobs? Waiters, waitresses, cooks, busboys and cleaners, that's who. Why are the protesters complaining that they can't get their nails done or eat at restaurants, while the people who do nails and work in restaurants - many of whom are PoC - are not also demonstrating? Just apart from the fact that a black man who showed up with an AR-15 would be promptly arrested if not shot, it's obvious that these protests are about a lot more than they claim to be, and none of it is good.

mostly men and mostly white, and, like so many movements that can exist only in theory, it relies on the absolute certainty of its proponents that they, and only they, are correct. There can be no other way to repair the failures of society than their way. No compromise is permitted; any compromise is incontrovertible evidence that the alleged compromiser has sold out to The Establishment. And The Establishment is anyone other than the revolutionaries themselves. This position has not changed since the '60s, when the Socialist Workers' Party recruited small groups of privileged white boys on college campuses who mostly engaged in pleasuring themselves, ideologically speaking, with Trotskyist slogans. Women were allowed to participate, too, by making coffee and running the mimeograph machine - as long as they stayed quiet and allowed groping. Most of these proto-bros grew up and figured out the bullshit, but Bernie just soldiered on for the ensuing forty years, banging his New Left drum and naming post offices in Vermont. At last a new crop of idealistic, rigid, bubble-dwelling young ideologues has made him their cult leader, and neither can give up the other even though The Revolution still isn't going anywhere.

Late at night, in the bowels of the White House, a spectral meeting is taking place. It's the weekly poker game of the ghosts of James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding and Richard Nixon. The Worst Presidents Ever.

"What do you think, gentlemen?" said Buchanan as he cut the cards. "Do you think this Trump will be joining us soon...? You know, I'm no longer the worst president ever. All the historians think he's the worst and he's not even dead yet."

"I expect he might be, what with this bug that's going around," said Harding. "You know, I've been getting grief now for almost a hundred years for my corrupt administration but we were a bunch of Boy Scouts compared to him. It'll be nice to finally move down a couple notches on the Worst Presidents list."

Nixon lit an ectoplasmic cigar. "When I lived here I did have a few problems. It's nice to come back and haunt the place but I hate to see it occupied by such a bunch of low-life grifters. Shit, I never made a nickel off Watergate."

Buchanan dealt the cards. Pierce looked at his hand and shook his head. "Crap, I never had much luck with this game when I was alive, either."

"I got impeached," Johnson said. "I didn't deserve it and I was acquitted. Trump got impeached and acquitted, too, but he committed more impeachable offenses than I ever even thought of. He's damn lucky this Senate had even less balls than mine did. Hell, all I did was try to fire Edwin Stanton. I kind of fucked up Reconstruction, too, but..."

"You were a terrible bigot," said Nixon.

"You should talk," Johnson replied. "I heard those tapes of yours. I wish I'd had tapes in my day."

Fillmore sipped his spectral whiskey and remarked, "Harry Truman once said I was a 'weak, trivial thumb-twaddler who would do nothing to offend anyone.' I'm still not speaking to him. But at least I was never a fucking Russian spy."

Nixon said, "We were all shitty presidents. But when Trump arrives I don't think I want him in this game. He'll cheat, for one thing. And he's an asshole."

Buchanan said, "Not only that, but he'll bluster and brag. The man has no class. I don't mind if that little Bush fella joins us someday; he's dumb and he's probably a terrible poker player but he knows some good jokes. By the way, Dick, you were an asshole, too."

"When Bush comes maybe I'll get to win once in awhile," said Pierce.

"Let's have a toast to me. I'm no longer considered the worst president in American history. Trump's got me beat by a country mile. I look like fucking Abe Lincoln next to him," said Buchanan. At that moment Abraham Lincoln briefly materialized and said, "No, Jim, you really don't," and vanished just as quickly. Buchanan sighed and muttered under his breath, "Damn, Abe still thinks he's all that..."

"I fold," said Pierce. "Trump. What a dick. He's already turned out to be way worse than any of us ever were. We merely sucked. He's....."

Nixon said, "That fat fucker is a disgrace even to us, the worst presidents ever. I don't want to wait until he's dead to tell him what's what, since none of the Republicans are gonna do it. Honestly, even the ratfuckers who worked for me aren't as bad as these guys. Too bad about my old pal Roger Stone, though. You know, I don't even want to play poker with Trump when he croaks. We should haunt him now."

Harding replied, "Brilliant! Let's do it!" He tried to fist-bump Nixon, but because he was made of ectoplasm the gesture was futile.

And so the ghosts of the Worst American Presidents started appearing to Trump in various places in the White House. Pierce tried to moon him but because he was transparent the gesture was not very effective. Although they enjoyed slipping through walls and making obscene gestures, after awhile the ghosts gave up and went back to their poker game because Trump was going batshit crazy without their help.

"Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour."