The English language is plentiful and rich. For centuries, its depth and breadth of words have inspired poets and novelists, academics and orators, providing much of the world’s most enduring literature. It’s a living thing, too; adding to its lexicon to meet the needs of passing time. And yet... And yet it harbors a frustrating lacuna: English hasn’t the words to accurately describe Donald Trump or the ruination he inflicts upon everything he gropes. We need new terminology, neologisms able to encompass it all.
Without resorting to pallid cliché, how can we describe a psychopathic, jealous, retaliatory egomaniac who looks at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, an institution named for a martyred and revered president, that celebrates the boundless spectrum of American art, and besmirches it with his undeserving moniker? Creepy? Repugnant? Sure. Abominable, nauseating, loathsome, sick? All of those. Overindulged toddler? Absolutely. A deeply damaged, resentful man who surrounds himself with greedy unethicants willing, for personal power, to funnel unearned accolades that, growing up, he neither received nor deserved? That, too, if a bit too clunkersome. Our language is inadequate to the demand. I’ve neo-ed a few logisms, but when it comes to a proper description of Trump, words fail. To employ a pallid cliché.
When I think of what he’s done to the Kennedy Center, I seethe and I mourn. I want to believe it can’t be happening; that his punitory nihilism, his toxic concatenation of arrogance, vengeance, psychopathy, malignant narcissism, jealousy, and fragility would have been arrested before reaching the steps. JFK was everything Trump will never be. He knows, and hates him for it.
I feel the same about what he’s doing to the White House, whose architectural perfection, its picturesque symmetry were meant to instill pride in every American, honoring not the men (and, someday, women) within but the nation it represents. What an unholy, pretentious atrocity he’s made of it. How tastelessly gross; what desecration of beauty that would have been embarrassing for any decent person even to have imagined, much less actuated.
“At the strong request of the military,” Trump lied, he plans to turn that vulgar, grotesquely outsized, self-celebratory, dictator-mimicking arch into a ridiculously unneeded platform for snipers and drones. To shoot at whom? To protect which place from what threat? Sure, Penile Pete might have yessirred Trump’s disingenuous justification. Maybe, absent all the principled ones he fired, a couple of subservient generals, too. In what way do we need that overbearing monstrosity overshadowing the hallowed resting place of America’s fallen heroes? Only in Trump’s disassembled mind.
Arlington Cemetery is reverentially quiet. Whispers tell its stories. Trump’s erection, shouting “Me, me, me,” would, as intended, drown out the hushed voices of those who deserve honor in ways he never will. For that, he resents them as he does all decent and admired people.
So we must assemble fitting combinations of words, like “sick, disgusting, pathetic, destructive, horrible, narcissistic, and catastrophic,” creating not-too-unwieldy ones to describe the shamelessly unrestrained monster among us. Trumpzilla? Too lazy. How about these: Sickastrophic. Disasickulous. Catastrothetic. Pathesicktrophic. Disgustorribathetic. Pathesisstructive. Or maybe none. Probably the original premise was right: there’s no way to adequately describe the apocalyptic horribleness of Trump, then and now. Even following a Blue Wave November, there's more to come.
We don’t have to wait that long. Trump’s “most transparent, free speech protecting administration” has, yet again, wiped its ... feet on our Constitution. Banning major news organizations from the White House, an act he actually referred to as “the ban on the free press,” merely because he doesn’t like their coverage of him, is a clear violation of the First Amendment. We’ve known since the first time he used the term, “fake news” means journalism that replaces right-wing propaganda and disinformation with accuracy and, when deserved, criticism. It’s no surprise that Congressional Rs pretzelled themselves into defending it. Trump was banned from Twitter, spouted Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo), deliberately and stupidly conflating the action of a private company with that of the government. Others were just as bad.
A free press, allowing even Fox, et ilk, is fundamental to democracy. But Trumpism rejects everything about democracy, like free speech, equal access to voting for all citizens, and competent, truthful leadership. The opposite of what’s currently emanating like greenhouse gases from the other Washington. It’s consticraponic.
If Democrats retake Congress, which, except for the unaccountable millions of dark dollars buying dishonest attack ads everywhere, ought to be certain, Trump won’t have his inhumane domestic agenda to sign into law anymore. So he’ll likely focus on his impulsive, egocentric, incoherent foreign “policy.” Which means more instability, death, and destruction in the Middle East, more distrust and withdrawal by our once-and-former allies, economic uncertainty, and higher prices due to ill-conceived tariffs and stemmed flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea. In his bragging, bullying, and embarrassing speech at the UN this week, he promised it.
Fradulunhingecreepathetoxidiomendadespoticorruptomaniacal.
