The Trial of Donald the Imbecile
For many it can be hard to pin down and fully characterize his behavior to any one thing. Would it be fair to say that he alternates between criminally incompetent and just outright malicious?
It’s hard for me to understand — I’m truly puzzled — why people are so hesitant to call him a Murderer. As though calling him that were improperly harsh; as if he first needed to kill another hundred thousand individuals. Something must be confusing people. Does he seem somehow cute, so ridiculous and so out-of-touch with the world — as if we were talking about a chipmunk. I mean, you don’t bring a chipmunk to trial…
On the other hand, his idiotic tweets and his latest deranged executive orders create confusion and chaotic non-understanding — like a natural disinformation machine.
Can we bring such a creature-machine to trial? Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and try him like a human being — responsible for his actions. (Many have called him, incorrectly, a dog.)
Pre-Trial Introduction.
That being agreed [i.e., that Trump should face trial as a human being], to me it seems like much of his tweeting and chatter is designed, consciously or non-consciously, to mislead, to create distraction, to set up camouflage and above all to make further deception possible…
This is Trump’s default, the position his switch has been set to, perhaps all the way back to dinosaur time when he had a deal with the meat-eaters…
Prosecutor’s Question: 2nd degree or 1st?
But a harder question, what has his ability to create confusion and make possible deception been used for? Is — or was there once — a goal? Hard to answer that question when the individual lacks beliefs or values other than repeated, excessive self-glorification.
Is it easier to grasp his motives if instead we look at what he avoids? How about thinking? To be sure he avoids that. How about brooding over difficult decisions? How about listening? Reading? Trying to understand what’s happening, what’s needed, what’s the problem?
Okay, so maybe that approach didn’t work either. Well, what if we instead observe what his actions are and what these actions do…. Might that lead to greater clarity, and maybe some insight…?
Or should we just give up on this hunt for motives; maybe, like Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, he is a “motiveless malignity”… In that play, when Iago is finally exposed and caught and the others feel they need to understand his motivation to ‘explain’ these horrific evil acts, Iago declares he will not give any clues: “What you know, you know.”
Final Preparation.
But the Trial is already under way and we must prepare. There’s plenty of material, so let’s say we skip his first 3 years as President, no matter how ugly and horrible his behavior, based on or hidden behind his absurdities: the treatment of immigrants, the poor, Black people, Latinos and other minorities, the LGBTQ, the people who live in the cities, in the big states; the attacks on journalists; and the endless lies, small, medium and — his favorite kind — huge.
No matter what happens from here on out, we will have to live with much of this damage — like the hijacking of the Supreme Court, where the building’s frieze still reads “Equal Justice Under Law” — for decades to come.
But now it’s this year, 2020, and here comes the coronavirus. Trump says it’s nothing, we’ll blow past it in no time. He doesn’t dare to risk scaring Wall Street by creating a breakneck program to make up for the lack of ventilators and masks. He doesn’t even want to do too many tests, or create test kits for the virus. Sadly, and criminally, Trump had already cut these public health programs, leaving us in a sorry, unprepared state to face the most deadly plague in 500 years…
And before we go to the Trial itself, we need to introduce one more party, Trump’s close friend the Stuffed Snake, Ezra by name, the former Secretary of Abuse. Ezra’s remarkable turn against Trump strengthens the Prosecution and disables much of the defense attorney’s cover.
Let us now join the Trial in progress, on the third day of testimony, in the Manhattan District Attorney’s courtroom.
PROSECUTOR: As a result of Mr. Trump’s criminally incompetent behavior, we are required by law to charge him with 394,208 counts of second-degree murder.
MAN IN AUDIENCE: You killed my wife and my mother!
OTHERS IN AUDIENCE: Murderer! Killer! Lock him up!
[Judge bangs gavel.]
JUDGE: Quiet in the court!
RUDY GIULIANI: I object, Your Honor. As Trump’s attorney I cannot let stand a maximum sentence that would take my illustrious client into not the next Ice Age but the one following. That is cruel and unusual punishment!
[The medical workers in the back row shout him down.]
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Dog! Bastard! Filth! You’re evil!
JUDGE: Quiet please!
PROSECUTOR: Furthermore, we note that more than 100,000 of your victims were in New York City — a fact that we consider no accident, considering that New York has a large disproportion of minorities, LGBTQ and liberals. That makes this a hate crime!
RUDY GULIANI: I object, Your Honor! My client is beloved to 120 million people —
WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: And despised by the other 200 million! —
RUDY GULIANI: Your honor —
[Shouting in the crowd drowns out Giuliani]
RUDY GULIANI: Your honor —
[Judge bangs gavel]
PROSECUTOR: Call Mr. Stuffed von Snake, Ezra by name, to the stand.
BAILIFF: Mr. Stuffed von Snake to the stand!
BAILIFF: Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
EZRA: What’s that?
PROSECUTOR: Never mind. — Isn’t it true, Mr. von Snake —
SNAKE: ‘Snake’ will do.
PROSECUTOR: — Mr. Snake, Ezra by name, isn’t it true that Trump has repeatedly supported the police when they kill Black men?
SNAKE: I doubt it. He never thinks about Black people, and not much about men either. In recent months he’s mostly focused on women, especially if he thinks he can buy them. It helps him feel that maybe he’s not so fundamentally repulsive.
PROSECUTOR: Do you mean to say that he doesn’t buy men? Doesn’t he need their loyalty somehow?
SNAKE: [Rolling his eyes] Oh, please. You’re wasting my time.
PROSECUTOR: Isn’t it true that Trump told you, Mr. Stuffed von Snake, Ezra by name, that, in order to win the electoral vote, he needed to reduce the population in certain big states?
[Snake turns a palm up and down, as if “yes and no.”]
PROSECUTOR: Don’t you know evil when you see it, Sir? Even a Stuffed Snake should be able to tell, that if the man wanted to liquidate ‘excess’ people from, say, California and New York, his handling of Covid-19 should be construed as murder, bald and deliberate, murder in the first-degree! Yes, not to mention tens of millions of attempted murders.
VOICES IN AUDIENCE: Murderer! Killer! Lock him up! Let him be lynched!
JUDGE: Easy now. [Pointing his gavel at the middle-aged man who proposed lynching] Easy, fella.
PROSECUTOR: Now comes the George Floyd catastrophe… and another boatload of evidence.
SNAKE: He couldn’t stop himself, the moron. His instincts were on full view during the protests. A pig is a pig I guess.
PROSECUTOR: A pig is worse than a snake? — Aren’t there snakes that eat pigs?
SNAKE: We Stuffed Snakes have an extremely limited diet…
PROSECUTOR: Enough snake-banter. Now,Mr. Snake, didn’t Trump ignore the tragedy, in a long line of similar tragedies, didn’t he dismiss the outrages and fears — in order to threaten looters, foster discord and division, repeat the slurs of his Russian trolls and make himself the “Law and Order” candidate?
SNAKE: Fake news Buddy.
PROSECUTOR: Furthermore, Mr. Snake, Ezra by name, didn’t Trump tell you that he plans to claim he has won the election regardless of the people’s popular and electoral votes? Isn’t it true that he plans to dismiss the results as one more hoax — created by the Deep-State Enemy-of-the-People-Media?
SNAKE: So what? So what if he does?
PROSECUTOR: Isn’t it also true that he has done his best to make sure those in his base stay well-armed, and possibly able to impose his desired verdict on the nation?
SNAKE: Sez who?
PROSECUTOR: Sez you, Snake-Boy! Remember, you wrote all this down for us…? Remember that little plea bargain we worked out?
SNAKE: Izzatso? Oh, you mean when you waterboarded me?
PROSECUTOR: No, that’s your bag of tricks, not ours. [Turns back and drinks water from his glass as the murmuring in the gallery subsides and the Snake smirks.. Facing the witness again…] And moreover, Mr. von Snake, didn’t a member of the White House staff, William Barr-Doe, a.k.a.”The Hatchet,” discuss with you the possibility of postponing the election?
SNAKE: My memory fails. Nine out of ten doctors say, Stuffed Snakes historically have limited gray matter.
PROSECUTOR: Call William Barr-Doe to the stand!
BAILIFF: William Barr-Doe, a.k.a.”The Hatchet,” a.k.a. “Crook,” to the stand!
[A Listerine/Xanax commercial is aired, followed by a promotion for the revival of “Ozzie & Harriet,” as William Barr-Doe makes his way to the witness stand.]
PROSECUTOR: Mr. Hatchet, aren’t you a —
WILLIAM BARR-DOE: The surname, Sir, is Doe. Or maybe Barr-Doe.
PROSECUTOR: Yes, of course, Mr. Doe, sorry. Isn’t it true that you, William Barr-Doe, a.k.a. “The Hatchet,” are a member of the White House advisers who tell Trump what to do?
DOE: I decline to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.
PROSECUTOR: So you want to take the 5th so early? Well, let me at least ask you, why were you willing to join the Trump administration?
DOE: Because I was an opportunist, you idiot!
PROSECUTOR: What precisely, Mr. Doe, was your job at the Goebbels Lab? Isn’t it true that you were tasked with developing new and better lies, lies that could stand up to a salvo of 88mm truth?
DOE: Will you stop?
PROSECUTOR: Call Savanarola to the stand!
[Buzzing in the courtroom as no one appears. The Judge receives a note from the Bailiff, bangs his gavel.]
JUDGE [reading note]: “On account of his execution Savanarola has withdrawn and pledges his delegates to Trump.”
PROSECUTOR: Call Dr. David Goebbels to the stand!
BAILIFF: David Goebbels to the stand!
BAILIFF: Dr. Goebbels, do you solemnly swear blah blah and all that?
GOEBBELS: Of course [rolling his eyes]
PROSECUTOR: Dr Goebbels, were you disappointed that Trump didn’t get the country into a war of some kind, preferably a nuclear exchange with casualties in the tens or hundreds of millions?
GOEBBELS: What if I was? What’s it to you?
JUDGE: The witness must answer the District Attorney’s question.
GOEBBELS: [to the Judge] Get lost you old codger!
[Judge bangs gavel]
PROSECUTOR: Dr. Goebbels, isn’t it true that you defended Trump only because you are executive director of the Opportunist Party? And that, considering your deviousness and carpetbaggery, when you began to see that Trump was on the way out, you couldn’t wait to make a few denunciations?
GOEBBELS: Oh I don’t know… Maybe. It’s not like I have any principles to worry about, unlike you tenderminded bleeding hearts, ha!
PROSECUTOR: And in particular, wasn’t it in fact you, Dr. Goebbels, who revealed that Trump was in discussions toward a possible postponement of the November election? And that you have managed to bring this idea from the lunatic fringe like you — to the mainstream!
[AUDIENCE murmuring erupts, Judge bangs gavel.]
GOEBBELS: If I were you, Hotshot, I’d be smarter and more careful what I said — considering all the dirt that we have on you!
PROSECUTOR: Yes, I’ve received these threats before…
GOEBBELS: We know you stole a Hershey bar from Safeway when you were 7. And didn’t you squeeze your babysitter’s breast when you were 9?
PROSECUTOR: Your surveillance systems are impressive, we get it. You certainly have the power to embarrass me, or anyone…. [Takes a measured breath as Goebbels gloats.]. What exactly is your job at the Goebbels Lab? Isn’t it to invent new, principle-free methods to support bad values?
GOEBBELS: A libel and a slur! WE have no values! At the Goebbels Lab and the Department of Lies we have been trashing the Truth for years. We seek to deceive the voters about who is responsible for their suffering.
PROSECUTOR: Ever heard of Abraham Lincoln? “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” And Trump’s limit — and yours — has been reached…
GOEBBELS: We shall see, won’t we?
PROSECUTOR: Call Vlad the Impaler to the stand!
BAILIFF: Vlad the Impaler to the stand!
[Vlad takes a seat with his 7-foot Impaler standing to his right.]
BAILIFF: Do you…. Uh, go ahead, Counsel.
PROSECUTOR: Isn’t it true, Mr. Impaler, that under contract to the White House advisers, you provided threats to ‘encourage’ certain governors to call out National Guard from their states and form a Trump-friendly perimeter around the White House?
VLAD: Oh no, I was only a little… scratching their backs. [Smiling derisively and demonstrating the ‘scratching’ with his famous Impaler.] I don’t know anything about Trump or any electoral votes or any erections.
PROSECUTOR: Didn’t you in fact ‘encourage’ Trump when he loses the election to refuse to leave the White House and otherwise break the law?
VLAD: No, all that was his hare-brained idea. The man’s a jerk and a barbarian. He needs to get out more.
[Oops! — Your XFINITY-Prime Courtroom Correspondent has just learned (tapping his right ear) that in 45 seconds we will hear the verdict! But while we await the return of the Jury and the results of their deliberations, we get an exclusive look into the climax of the annual meeting of the Chester Glumly Nuboff Society where Trump is striving for a third consecutive victory. Stay tuned!]
The Chester Glumly Nuboff Medal.
This medal is awarded annually to an individual for having caused the most suffering in one calendar year. The 2018 medal was ultimately awarded to Trump.
Meanwhile, we see Enablers & Provocateurs LLC, Trump’s people, are sitting around in a lavishly-styled jail, no masks, all thinking of ways to insure, as a matter of pride, that he wins the title of Chief Sleaze. He could parlay another victory in the Sleaze competition into extra points in the Nuboff contest.
In the 3-way contest with Savanarola and Vlad the Impaler, Trump’s attorney tried to arrange for him to receive credits for suffering caused in 2 previous years by changing the procedure to use median instead of average suffering.
His attorneys also submitted numerous documents in support of his candidacy, including his favorite disasters, calamities, catastrophes and generally his best-known apocalyptic outcomes.
Yesterday when the 3-judge panel disqualified Trump by mistake, his Personal Thug & Terrorist Service (“PTTS”)” — just to be on the safe side — made sure to put in still another Supreme Court justice that they owned. And in the end, in the contest for the Nuboff Medal, Trump was finally awarded extra points for having achieved, for 3 years running, his first place finish as Chief Sleaze and Buffoon.
XFINITY-Prime Correspondent [breathlessly]: The Jury has returned!
The court officials are already filtering lazily back into the courtroom. But now the spectators clamor as they surge back in to hear the Jury’s verdict! Some elbow each other aside in hopes of gaining a front-row seat for this historic occasion.
JUDGE: [Banging his gavel over and over.] All right, all right. Settle down now. All right. [To the Jury]: Has the Jury reached a verdict?
FOREWOMAN: Yes Your Honor, we have.
JUDGE: Please tell the Court the verdict you have reached.
FOREWOMAN: We find the Defendant ‘Guilty As Could Be’ on all counts. In addition we find the Defendant ‘Guilty as Sin.’
Sentencing Phase.
JUDGE: Thank you, Forewoman. And thanks to the Jury for their time and effort. The Jury is hereby dismissed. Mr. Trump is hereby sentenced to Suffering Much Milder Than He Caused or Deserved. [Bangs gavel.]
The people are livid and cry out, “Justice!”
And when Trump is brought before the cameras in chains many call out “Lock him up!”
And when he cries out for “Pity” and “Mercy,” there is silence — and Wonder, that the long night of Trump… is finally over.
But it’s Trump’s old cronies who shout the longest and hardest to betray him, now that doing so has been made safe. As if in their unscrupulousness they can prove their separation from him by the cruelty and viciousness of the punishment they insist on. They call their group the Revengers, and they are not very compassionate or forgiving…
POMPEO, SECRETARY OF STATE: Trump should have double the punishment as the Minneapolis officer who murdered George Floyd! And if that police worm manages to squirm off the hook, we’ll automatically add another 20 years to Trump’s time. For God’s sake, we’re talking about a mass murderer!
Shouting and booing greet these attacks and the crowd drives off a woman with a “POMPEO 2024!” sign.
Now the scene grows more and more tumultuous.
Now a Gold Star Father who lost his son in Afghanistan — on an afternoon when Trump played golf at his Mar-a-Lago resort— shouts out a vivid dream. In the dream Trump — for killing so many individuals, women and men, old and young, black and white, liberal and conservative — at last receives punishment that he in truth deserves…
But these were punishments not to be visited on any human being, too horrible even to bring to any written or spoken utterance. So you can imagine how difficult a task your author must face, whose duty it is to provide a fully even-handed chronicle of these events…
First of all, let all of our gentle readership under the age of 59 return to their regular chairs and select a romantic comedy. The remaining cohort must resolve to harden their hearts before continuing. And remember, we believe this narrative is no more than a dream, a Gold Star Father’s imagined revenge for the oppression by — as he says when interrogated by the FBI — “a school bully.”
Oops, now even my publisher objects, oh so politely, to putting these descriptions (of what many, to be sure, would call torture) into words. Your author is trying to bargain with her, offering to “redact” (as is now fashionable) some of the most offensive parts. She denies having ties with Facebook-Trump but unfortunately —
“Lock him up!” and “Kill him!” shout the dream’s swarming audience members.
[YOUR AUTHOR: Ulp! She cut me off! I can’t— ]
“Auntie Em, Auntie Em!” screams this murderer in the dream. But his former helpers’ hearts have been hardened.
[YOUR AUTHOR: I guess that’s good-bye folks — ]
“Auntie Em, Auntie Em!” — [Louder! ] — “Help me, please!
The scene gets more and more tumultuous.
Well, the imagined punishment goes on and on, but this is only what the Gold Star Father describes in his sleep. When questioned by the authorities he says that he dreamt up this illusory retribution for a certain classroom bully who oppressed him for 4 miserable years…
DR FREUD: Hmmm, let me see, could the schoolyard bully deserving of major punishment represent possibly a high official in your nation’s Government?
Finally our secondary source manages to get hold of us for the non-classified piece of the briefing on Trump’s punishment. Our publisher considers this content nothing special.
SECONDARY SOURCE for Trump’s punishment:
A boy hit him with a ripe tomato, then broke an egg on him.
A well-dressed woman passing by tore a piece out of his suit jacket.
A Yemeni mother punched Trump in the stomach as hard as she could, doubling him over.
Next a Black man threw him to the floor and kicked the crap out of him, over and over.
“How does it feel, Dirt-Bag,” said the man, “to be on the receiving end?” Secretary Pompeo, who had tried to join the anti-Trump part of the team, experiences some kicks too.
An immigrant woman who had been separated from her toddler came up to Trump’s frightened face, denounced him and nearly spat on him. “Shame, shame!” she shouted in his ear as loud as she could.
A translator told Trump what she’s said, in Mayan: “We’d like you to have to live as a homeless person but for you that wouldn’t be safe…”
To be so dirtied and without power Trump is embarrassed and humiliated.
Others attached a harness to him and to a pickup truck and seemed to prepare to drag him through the streets. He begged them to be kind to him. But after merely gunning the engine they released him and enjoyed a long series of kneeslappers.
Trump appeals to the Supreme Court, “Brett, didn’t I save you from a life as a molester and rapist?”
But Brett Kavanaugh ignores him and says, chuckling to his golf-buddy, “What’s the big deal? Let him sit in solitary for 2 or 3 years, let’s see what that does for him…”
My publisher, still cool as a cucumber, assures me that this is nothing compared to how much Trump suffered in his unreportable punishment,
Now a figure emerges from the darkness in the rear. It’s…the LION KING! — future Secretary of the Interior in the Biden Administration!
GIULIANI and Miscellaneous Trump Enablers: Why are YOU here? [Scoffs.] What sense does this make?
LION KING: I represent the Earth as a whole: National Parks; the environment that Trump’s corporate filth have been poisoning; animals, trees, you know. Sorry to intrude into your Tirade but I couldn’t wait a minute longer! I can’t— [gasps]
GOOD PEOPLE coming forward and speaking as a Group: Couldn’t this bully at least — for all his ugly and cruel actions — have a conscience that tortured him?
DR FREUD: It doesn’t look like we can find evidence that he did, or if he did he would have long ago murdered it away…
DR JUNG: There are clues that this delusional type belongs to a certain subset that has turned against their creative psychic force and identifies with an archetype, blah blah and all that, known for having at the center of their soul, not a conscience but a big yellow cake that the subject talks with. The individual might go so far as to give the cake a pet name, e.g, “Greed B. Good,” and to believe that they themselves are in fact the cake.
GOOD PEOPLE: What in the hell is he talking about?
LION KING [standing with Good People]: I don’t get this cake thing. He’s still a very bad man. But the question is, how can we let someone so cartoonish and so easy to make fun of create such horrific suffering and destroy so many people’s lives — do so much damage to the nation and the planet, and be so all-around evil?
GOOD PEOPLE: Expose this killer, expose his handlers and enablers! And stop him!
Author’s Note.
Your author needs to acknowledge that the passages that we called a dream with the hoped-for punishment (and that our publisher in the end did not allow us to use), were stolen from The Unfortunate Traveller, a picaresque tale by Thomas Nashe published in 1594, when the plague closed the London theatres for a year and Shakespeare was writing Taming of the Shrew and Two Gentlemen of Verona. It is often called the first novel written in English.
© Jerry Kurtz 2020
