The song is a lie he tells himself; he will not face death with stoic satisfaction. Death is the final insult, ignoble and unignorable. Death is no respecter of persons; it does not call you sir and meekly invite you to leave. Death escorts you off the premises. Mercilessly. Firmly. Finally.
So if now the end is near and he knows he faces the final curtain... First, he expected to be president for the rest of his life, but he meant more than four years, not less. So much less. It's not fair, he was cheated. He came in down eight years of what he's owed, and gets less than one? Cheated.
Just when he is finally free of constraint, just when he really is doing things his way, that's when death shows up to look him in the eye? He is seeing proof everywhere that Enough does exist, that it is within his grasp... but even if he gets it in his hands, he won't have time Enough to enjoy it
NB: I will not derail this to talk about the parallels to Netflix The Falling of Usher House, but they are there.
The truth is that even if he could have gotten Enough, no amount of time would ever have been time Enough for him to enjoy it, for it to count. Not really. But when he had a future, he could tell himself he would get it, and it would be. His victory was always there waiting for him, in the future.
Our silver lining lies in the fact that he is subject to physical reality; that any circumstances dire enough to overcome his will to deny his limitations up to and including his own mortality are also going to limit his ability to do things.
There is still a lot of room for people around him to say "sir, let me take care of that for you, let me make that happen" and enable a lot of atrocities, but the full range of what Trump *would* do for a final act, his response to a world that will no longer abide his presence... it beggars belief.
I tell myself there is no way he actually paid enough attention to the protocol for ordering a nuclear strike because he assumed someone would just do it if he told them to, and I tell myself that no one is going to fudge this of all things or help him make it happen as a final number.
I used to know the way it's supposed to work and reasons it should be possible, but I don't know the ground situation or what corners might have been quietly cut in the name of nuclear readiness when Mr. Sole Launch Authority needs everything in three bullet points.
TL;DR - if I should pray that he might pass quickly and quietly in his sleep, it would be a prayer for mercy. Just not for him. Or not just for him. One small mercy for a man who has none, one great mercy for the world.
Sorry for the doomposting. This kept me up last night, and I have been trying to make up lost sleep, but it was keeping me up this morning so I had to let it out.
I think about this more than I’d like and have noted that it’s not really a thing people discuss and I feel like that’s at least in part because it is such a catastrophic level of tail risk that people feel like there’s not much point when there’s so much else to be upset about
I also think that there's a small but very real risk in having these discussions publicly and widely, because most of his actions are influenced by social media, so if the right picked up on our fears and started turning it into Discourse it could get onto his radar in a way it might otherwise not
Yeah, also super true
What I also hope is that other countries have been discussing this and have decided not to retaliate to a civilization-imperiling level given that this would be the dumbest reason to imperil human civilization