Look at him. An orange, bloated monument to appetite, his face lacquered into a color found nowhere in the natural world, his body packaged in an expensive suit with the general appearance of something money has preserved considerably longer than nature intended. A man born into wealth who has spent his entire life looking desperately hungry.
Hungry for money, praise, power and somebody, anybody, to walk into the room and tell him he is the biggest, richest, smartest, most important boy who has ever lived. Eighty years old and still waiting for the gold star.
So he covers everything else in gold instead. The ceilings. The furniture. The faucets. The fucking airplane. A man with so much money and so little taste that he somehow made obscene wealth look like a clearance aisle.
And then there is the face. Painted orange, perpetually scowling, lips pursed around some fresh complaint against a world that has given him almost everything and somehow failed to give him enough. Because there is never enough. That is the thing about greed. It does not eat because it is hungry. It eats because something else still has food.
Donald Trump has the appetite of a fire that mistakes being fed for being satisfied. Everything around him eventually becomes kindling, currency or a mirror. Their money. Their loyalty. Their dignity. Their country. More. He always needs more ~ More applause, more obedience, more people bending the knee, more enemies to punish, more cameras pointed toward him. An ego with the gravitational pull of a dying star and roughly the same prognosis for everything nearby.
And this week, while everything caught in that gravity keeps bending toward him, he walked reporters across the White House grounds to show them what he has made prettier. Fresh grass. New granite. A new helipad. Plans for his enormous ballroom.
He signed a piece of granite too. His name will be laid face-down beneath the presidential seal, where nobody will see it. He needed to put it there anyway. There is something almost painfully perfect about that. A man so desperate to leave himself on everything that even a rock buried beneath other people's feet must belong to him.
And while showing off what he has built, he said it would last “no matter what happens with the world.” The words almost feel too perfectly written for him. The world can happen somewhere else. There is granite to polish here. Grass to admire. A ballroom to imagine. The house can fill with smoke ~ the man holding the matches would still like everyone to come outside and look at the landscaping.
Meanwhile, Americans keep opening their refrigerators and discovering another thing they may need to throw away. Another recall. Another outbreak. Another tiny thread in the enormous invisible net of people and systems whose job is to notice when something has gone wrong. We rarely think about that net until somebody starts cutting through it.
And this is what is happening to our country now. It is being pulled apart thread by thread. A question no longer asked. A scientist no longer there. A protection quietly removed. A relationship severed. A guardrail ripped out while we're still barreling toward the curve. Each thread looks small enough to lose ~ until you look up and realize the whole fucking thing is unraveling.
And still the dying star pulls. Institutions, laws, alliances, truth itself ~ everything dragged toward the enormous gravity of one man's appetite until nothing is allowed to exist outside of him.
A dying star does not need to hate the planets around it. It destroys them simply by being what it is.
And somehow, millions of Americans looked at this profoundly needy man, this spray-tanned shrine to excess and insecurity, and saw strength. They saw the whining and called it toughness. They saw the cruelty and called it honesty. They saw the greed and called it success. They saw a man who cannot tolerate being mocked, contradicted, ignored, corrected or told no and said, “Alpha male.” Okay.
And perhaps that is why they love him so much. He gave them permission. Permission to stop apologizing for the things they once knew enough to be ashamed of. To stop wondering whether cruelty should embarrass them, whether selfishness should trouble them, whether another person's suffering should ask anything of them at all. He made their worst impulses feel righteous. He told people who had spent years being embarrassed by the ugliest parts of themselves that actually, those were the best parts.
Be louder. Be meaner. Care less. Take more. And if somebody weaker than you gets hurt along the way, well, they probably deserved it. That is the gospel now. Not sacrifice. Not compassion. Not loving your neighbor. Just an endless, grasping hunger dressed up in red, white and blue.
A movement built around people screaming about what they are owed while demanding everyone else learn to live with less. Less healthcare. Less education. Less safety. Less freedom. Less dignity. As long as somebody they hate loses something too.
Especially then.
And now we watch the country crumble around us. We watch the wrecking ball swing through things we thought would hold while the man operating it stops occasionally to point out how nice the lawn looks. And none of us gets to pretend we don't know how we got here ~ Millions of people looked at this orange, bloated monument to human rot, lacquered in bronzer and narcissism, saw the greed, the cruelty, the staggering emptiness of the man ~ and thought, yes. Give him the most powerful country on Earth.
And now the whole fucking world gets to find out what happens when you do.
I'm so grateful for you all. ❤️
If this put words to some of what you’ve been feeling, share it. Leave a comment. Send it to someone who needs to read it. Every time you engage with my work, you help push it beyond this little corner of the internet ~ and I’m incredibly grateful you’re here. ~ Judith
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