“Donald Trump is the arsonist fireman; he sets the fire and then grabs a hose to claim that he put it out.” – Steve Schmidt, August, 2020
On January 20, 2017 Donald Trump said these words in his Inaugural Speech: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now…We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world…. At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America.”
20,000 lies later, Americans might be able to un-cross their fingers in November and finally utter the words: “The Donald has left the building”. But he’s not gone yet. He still has time to realize his boyhood dream of world domination…his personalized version of Hitler Lite.
When Donald Trump’s play, “American Carnage” began, we were in the audience and saw his benevolent efforts to seek friendship and goodwill with a couple of nations of the world – namely the dictatorships of Russia and North Korea. And we sat with our hands folded as he declared his allegiance to Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, and Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an. But, in order to fulfill the centerpiece of his inaugural promise – to defeat American Carnage – Trump had to actually create it first.
And create it, he did. He manufactured hate and violence with his support for white supremacy and his MS-13 rhetoric. He stripped America of a functioning judiciary and a functioning congress, so that all branches of government eventually had to come to him. And he set literal fires in large urban cities to encourage rioting so that he can pretend to extinguish the blazes he had created with his own rhetoric. His final act will be to establish the justification for declaring martial law so that his own Praetorian Guard can whip America back into shape the old-fashioned way.
And we are now back in our seats for the final act. The lights have dimmed, and Donald Trump is now delivering the greatest soliloquy of his life. It begins with these words: “This American Carnage starts right here and starts right now!” He continues with an impassioned rallying cry: “Americans, we can conquer this virus; we can defeat this act of germ warfare forced upon us by our enemy, China. My administration will patriotically and selflessly implement its final solution concerning the epidemic of Covid-19 in the United States. To conquer this deadly disease, we will activate the Swedish Model, known as the Herd Immunity approach. But, dear citizens, we must make sacrifices to truly Make America Great Again. We must sacrifice the lives of over 2 million American citizens so that rest of America can safely go to football games without any further inconvenience!”
The curtain drops, and we the people rise from our seats chanting “Four More Years”. We declare: “Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, doesn’t do it because it’s hard – he does it because it’s easy!”
No one in the audience considers the fact that Donald Trump’s final solution to this coronavirus represents twice as many American deaths as all the deaths that have occurred in all of America’s wars, including:
(according to combined data from the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/many-americans-died-u-s-wars )
But with the global success of American Carnage, identities have been formed, enemies have been defined, and reality has been carpet bombed. Donald Trump’s play will probably be translated into 30 languages. It could become the biggest hit on planet earth, as nascent democracies strain to outdo Trump with their own brand of tyranny.
We wonder: “Will America become a dictatorship? Will democracy be obliterated by a stable genius who “aced” his dementia test by repeating the words: person, woman, man, camera, and TV? Will Melania become a Nazi now that she’s got the outfit? Will Vladimir Putin become our next president and replace all the Confederate statues with his own statue – shirtless and astride a stallion?
In Donald Trump’s 2017 Inaugural Address, he said: “We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams. We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation.” He has literally failed at everything.
Nobody asks, is “American Carnage” a tragedy or a satire? Instead, it is said that Donald Trump made America great again the old-fashioned way; he crushed it.
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit, charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, you can follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs