What’s the Difference Between Donald Trump and a Poop Train? The Media Reported Truthfully on One of Them.

I have written a number of times about how much I hate Donald Trump. At least once was well before he became president and one was in the days immediately following his election. My feelings haven’t really changed much although his stature in society certainly has. The reality is that no matter how we slice it, no matter how much people cite his changing politics and past relationships with powerful men on whatever part of the political spectrum, Donald Trump has always been a hot, steaming pile of garbage. But not just any garbage. He is middle of August New York City garbage when workers for the Sanitation Department have been on strike for weeks. The kind of garbage that you can smell, taste and feel seeping through your pores as you walk down a shadeless sidewalk at noon on a 95 degree day. A pile of trash that has been absorbing and reflecting heat for weeks so the fetid stench assaults your senses from every single angle. It runs down the streets in thick, gooey streams and floats through the air, invisible. That is the kind of garbage that Donald Trump is. He is soiled diapers, dead rats, rotting meat, liquified vegetables, used tampons and discarded chicken bones all mashed together and served to you daily compliments of Twitter, your racist uncle and every single news outlet available. He is everywhere and not going anywhere. He is that poop train that got stuck in a small Alabama town. Was that caboose stuffed with millions of pounds of human excrement stuck in bureaucratic purgatory a parallel to our lived reality? Perhaps. After all, it took months for Parrish, Alabama (population 982) to get that train a’moving and here we are, 2 1/2 years into a Trump Regime with no obvious exit and no definitive end in sight. Purgatory? It’s more like hell.

And it is a hell that he understands better than any of us. For all his idiocy, immaturity and bluster Donald Trump knows one thing: he knows how to create loyalty and then squeeze everything he can out of it. He was right when, in his campaign for the presidency he said,

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.

It is incredible. Imagine it, the President of the United States of America shoots someone dead on Fifth Avenue, in broad daylight, the incident is caught on camera and nothing happens. Nothing. I didn’t believe it when he said it in Iowa back in 2016 but I believe it now. I believe that Trump could kill someone and that still wouldn’t make his reelection impossible. I don’t think it would really change all that much at all. Donald Trump could stand atop that poop train and declare that the entire town of Parrish does not reek of tons and tons of actual shit but instead smells like butterfly bushes, jasmine and rosemary. It would get reported as news and people would believe him. He is only as strong as the loyalty given him and he knows that – that is how he has always operated, it is a tried and true approach. It isn’t about love. Instead, it’s about an unquestioned, unshakeable adulation that allows him to operate the way he has always operated: completely unfettered and unaffected by all his misdoings, by the ways he has wronged people and by any sort of moral or ethical code. Our president, much like the poop train, operates outside the law and outside of common decency.

So what do we do about it? Oh, I don’t know. We could and perhaps should take a page out of Beto O’Rourke’s book. Following the recent shooting in El Paso a journalist asked O’Rourke if there was anything he could do to fix the problem. O’Rourke responded,

What do you think? You know the shit he has been saying. He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals… I mean members of the press – what the fuck?!

Set aside for a moment the fact that Beto O’Rourke should for sure sit down the 2020 race for the presidency and instead use this moment to enter the 2020 Senate race to unseat John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. He would be much more useful in that role and has a much better chance of winning that race than he does the presidency. But either way other candidates, politicians and all of us normals need to seize on Beto’s feelings and start taking the media to task. I know there was some stuff with Russia and whatnot that led to us having Trump, but do you know what else helped? The media. And if we don’t do something and keep taking them to task we will end up with Trump AGAIN.

This went in a different direction than I anticipated but I guess I will sum it up by saying this: media awareness about the presence of the poop train and how inhumane having it sitting there stinking up a town for months on end was effective in remedying the situation. The poop train moved and New York no longer sends its shit down to Alabama. If the media can help move the poop train along, then it would stand to reason it could also help remove the shitbag currently fouling up the Oval Office, when he decides to take a break from racist Twitter rants and rounds of golf, that is. So, let’s hold their feet to the fire. That’s how we win.