The evolution of events that has led up to the past few days has been hard to put into perspective. More than the events of the weekend, large parts of the population are swinging inside their own heads in their view of Barack Obama in the context of their entire time with him. For many it may be hard not to experience it similar to the moment when you realize that your quiet card partner hasn’t been just sitting there but has actually lined things up to win the game. He laid his trump out for all to see, and when someone has them all there isn’t anything anyone can say about it.
That is just straight-out whiplash territory. A more stark juxtaposition of characters you cannot imagine.
Lemme get this straight:
About ten million people – three times more than Beck at his height (and a much more mixed crowd) and a full 3% of the US population (and probably 4-5% of the voting-age population)- were focusing on The Donald in all his trumped-up Hollywood campiness – and were jarred in the face with
Which just scares the hell out of you at the best of times, much less when you are munching popcorn and indulging yourself with some frivolous trash TV. They all know The Donald is trying to be President – and maybe some of them like the idea of having a President who would actually tell the Saudis to go fuck themselves – and into that happy Rambo fantasy they have the mental image of the scariest fucking person in the world. The collective asshole-puckering of ten million Americans trying to match their self-admitted state of momentary self-indulgence with the image of the wacky host of this show they mostly watch in secret as the only thing between them and Arabs With Knives At The Foot Of Their Beds (right at the foot of their beds) caused a greater change in the earth’s rotation than the earthquake that wiped out half of Japan.
As their brains sloshed around inside the cases of their skulls, the slowly came to realize that the Root of All Horror which they had so intrinsically feared for a decade (and in the case of anyone under 25, effectively their entire lives) had suddenly become the object of infinite variations on themes like this:
Many of them, like my hard-right-Independent brother Brad (of Blaskboards fame – order now!), who had been foaming mad at the government and openly searching for a 2012 GOP replacement at the helm – had an immediate flashback to the memorable moment only the day before when Obama tore Trump apart like face-to-face in public like an old hand gutting a salmon on a riverbank (Brad loved it, says Obama has a future in standup if he wants it). Let’s just relive that, shall we?
OK, so ten million vast biological supercomputer networks are processing all of these various vectors with their staggering Delta-Vs and coming to realize that the aforementioned boogeyman’s house – and not theirs – now looks like the video below and they can start openly dancing in the streets.
And then all of them, now surrounded by every other person in their immediate proximity, watches their President come on and nail the smoking corpse to the ground with a three-foot oak stake and a eighteen-pound sledgehammer.
Some may have a memory of the last time their President had taken the podium at the Whitehouse Press Dinner, a struggling President making a game attempt at getting a sustained laugh from an audience tense with sluggish finances and gushing Gulf oil. All still held an at least somewhat tarnished image of their President that had gotten folded and spindled and mutilated to varying degrees with the wear and tear of familiarity, and in all but the most vehement hands it seemed all the sudden to look at lot more like this.
I do not believe it is possible to have any hand in the precise timing of these events. That seems so clear that so far I have not heard any even wild speculation from the usual suspects that Obama intended to trump Trump exactly like that. But for that demographic of Americans who were watching that show at that moment the combination of the cards that their President had been patiently playing all along were laid on the table.
You just can’t argue with someone who really does hold all the trump.
