Breathed a big sigh of relief this morning when our fearless leader stepped aboard Air Force One for the last time. Speaking only for myself, this man’s tweets for the last four years have been like having an eternal chain saw revving in the back of the house. At first you think you can tune it out, but the noise continues to rise and fall, worming its way into your cortex until you can think of nothing but how to get away from it.
It wasn’t just the unpleasant tweets, it was their malice, their relentless repetition, and the dull stupidity of their messages that bored into my skull to the point that I scanned the news every morning for a signal that it would end. Like counting the minutes until my root canal was over.
Somebody was running a chainsaw in our back yard for five hours last week while I was trying to write. Eventually I resorted to hiding in the boiler room of my home—the most oppressive, bleak and dimly-lit room—simply because it was the quietest. So many of us were already house-bound and isolated from the Covid-19 pandemic. He gave us no relief.
In his last week of disgrace, after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, it became clear that this man was more in love with being President than doing the job. He retreated to stew about his electoral defeat, shunned even by his abettors in Congress, unable to tweet, unwilling to work.
It would make a great play or opera except for the necessity that the protagonist experiences a moment of self-realization in the last act. Every fictional despot has one. Not this guy.
I predict that he will be forgotten quickly. Less so, his damage to the democracy. His coddling of white supremacists. His lies. Congress will try to pass barriers to some of the things he did, but the embers of hatred are here, and unless we’re vigilant, someone else will fan them.
Writer George Hagen's Blog 