Are You Still Gonna Pledge Allegiance to the Shithole Country?

Hello.

Yesterday, Donald Trump grunted and squeezed and flushed right down his cheap, faux gold-plated toilet the legacy of every good, and even every mediocre, president the United States has ever had. The coward of Vietnam, the boy-man with the bone spurs, ambushed the bravest person in the world and attempted to browbeat and humiliate him into caving into the desperate demands of a defeated tyrant, the real daddy Trump always longed for and now admires and bellies up to like a suckling pig.

The bravest person in the world — who may well eventually be hanged from a lamp post by invading marauders for his historic, heroic attempt to save his besieged nation — did not bend. In his halting but eloquently serviceable English, he reduced the president of the United States to a frothing, sullen tub of a bully who had been exposed for what he is. The vice president, an ignoramus, stood loyally beside his don. His toady secretary of state, who knows better, jettisoned what is left of his wisp-thin dignity and saluted.

It may well have been the worst thing a United States president has ever deliberately done. I can think of no comparable precedent. A more knowledgeable person — an actual historian — might come up with one. If so, it escapes me right now.

I had a different item on the agenda for today, but I will save it for later.

Today is the day all decent Americans need to stew in a swamp of our own shame, and contemplate our own complicity. We all own this, even those of us who despise Trump and voted against him. There should have been more of us. We should have persuaded our imbecile neighbors. More of us should have shown up. We all let this happen through our complacency. All still-saluting Republicans are invertebrate filth. The media is deeply complicit. We were weak; at times we were feckless. There should be no Pulitzer prizes awarded this year.

I don’t really have any more to say right now. I’ve been alive since 1951, and I have never felt this bad about the United States, which has officially entered the nauseating Trumpian echelon of shithole countries. He dragged us there but we let him do it.

I am not an expert in foreign affairs. I have no feel for how this is all going to play out, but I do know, absolutely, what it is about. We are soft in the middle, weak-willed as a country, having surrendered our soul to a con-man coward. In one revolting news conference, he squandered ten generations of fitful, attempted greatness. We no longer have the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of decency. Globally, we are a bad actor. We must now rely on Western Europe to save us. We can no longer rely on ourselves.

Sorry. Here’s today’s Gene Pool. It’s personal:

Please send Questions and Observations here:

Thanks. I still have an announcement for when I have the energy to make it.