So Much Scum

The dark heart of the Trump administration

Somehow I am constantly astonished not only by the unutterable repulsiveness of the Tangerine Gang, but by how many of them there are.

I have had a number of jobs over the years: my first was working night shift in a distribution warehouse, with maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty people each shift. They kept themselves to themselves - it was oddly lonely work - and many of them were coarse and vulgar, but from my limited interactions they seemed to be, by and large, fairly ordinary, decent folk.

My next job was in retail, a small store with perhaps a dozen employees. One of them - Roger was his name - fancied himself something of a ladies’ man, always looking for the next ass to tap, but he was good natured and good humoured and always managed to stay at least one step below the threshold of “Predator.” The rest of the staff were good people with whom I occasionally socialised.

I worked in computers for several years after that, and that was when I started to come across people I actively disliked - boorish, small-minded, intellectually stunted people with unpleasant demeanours - but they were substantially in the minority; maybe one jerk for every fifteen nice co-workers.

I tell you all this because, in my own personal experience, truly awful people are much fewer and further between than one might think. Most people just want to get along and have an okay time doing it. They joke; they grumble; they chat. In my more optimistic moments I believe that people are basically good and decent and want to be accepted.

Which is why the Big Fat Orange Presidency is so baffling and horrific to me. Because these people are exclusively horrible people. The absolute worst of the worst. You could find the least objectionable person in the regime and they’d still be a hundred times more repulsive than the worst colleague I have worked with in all my years of graft. (I’ve had some completely reprehensible customers before, admittedly - but that’s bound to happen when you deal with thousands of people over time.)

As anyone who has ever drained a dirty kitchen sink will tell you, scum has a nasty habit of rising to the top. You still have to deal with it when the sink is empty, because it coats the bottom of the bowl and needs a good scrub to get rid of it. And when this nightmarish horde of emetic filth finally gets turfed out of the White House there will be a lot of scrubbing to do.

The next humanoid with any fragment of decency to inhabit the office of the Presidency is going to have to be tough. The Congress will have to be tough. New laws must pour down from Capitol Hill like the Niagara Falls. The very first one should be:

“Nobody convicted of a crime may be eligible to run for President.”

Just think: if the Founding Fathers had just added that to the Constitution we wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s absurd to think that they added that language in about pretty much any other office in government, but not the President of the United Fucking States. Perhaps they naïvely thought that nobody with a criminal conviction would ever be proffered as a suitable candidate, or certainly that nobody would be dumb or morally bankrupt enough to actually elect them. Now we can see that the political barrel truly has no bottom.

A plethora of other laws spring to mind. How about: “Any President who defies a court ruling shall be immediately removed from office and prosecuted.” Too much? I think not. A President swears an oath to uphold the law, not defy it. A breach of the oath of office should be met with instant termination of contract.

What about this one: “All Presidential Pardons must be approved by an independent committee before taking effect.” Make the President actually justify a pardon, and let a delegation make the final judgement. That would stop the kind of abuse we have seen in the last 16 months, where mass pardons of violent criminals allow these filth back onto the streets to commit yet more crime.

How about getting rid of the Presidential veto? A President is supposed to enact the will of the people; the veto completely negates that will and allows the President to act unilaterally. The Congress has Article I power: if they pass a bill, the President must enact it, or be removed.

Yep, the next POTUS - and the next Congress - is going to have their work cut out for them.

Everything bad that he has done (which is pretty much everything he has done) must be reversed. His name should be stripped from everything upon which he has put it. Anything he has built should be immediately demolished. The East Wing should be restored, just as it was before. Every last trace of his tiny-handed work should be erased.

But we can’t write him out of the history books. If we don’t remember the horrors he has wrought then we will not learn from them.

But his name should have a REALLY big fucking ASTERISK next to it.