I Give Him Eighteen Months in Office

3-1? ​       

He’ll get bored.

I’m bored of him already – his infantile speech, his lack of curiosity, his practiced reality-show squint, imitating an adult with normal thinking patterns.

Imagine how bored he will be, after people explain stuff to him.

“Sir, this is the rule.”
“Mr. President, yes, the Senate can actually do that.”
“Yes, those lawyers do have a legal right to question you about your holdings.”

This is a guy who stood in front of adoring multitudes out there and pounded one fist into his palm and said he’d like to punch somebody right in the face.

Not that easy, in reality.

In a brilliant column, David Brooks described the man’s statements as “usually just a symbolic assault in some dominance-submission male rivalry game.”

How did he get this way?

“Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” – Philip Roth, “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

I say it was some father issue.
Or something at boarding school.
This is a troubled human being. But a strange minority coalition saw the candidate in its own personal fun-house mirror and put its money and fears and superstitions and prejudices on this lumbering figure. Diamond Jim.

Most likely, soon he will say, “Who needs this?”

:Eighteen months,.I keep telling my friends

The real question is, how does it end?

It could be impeachment -- the old John McCain making one more mission for his country.

But boredom, confinement, anxiety, fear, could lead to resignation: I’m outta here.

Then there is the Big Mac Theory.

  6-1?

I’m not a betting man. Won’t even place a two-dollar bet in the pressbox at the Derby. Long story.

But I’m curious about the odds of him lasting in office.

Last November,  I found some odds on-line from the British bookies (some people will bet on anything.)

The odds were 3-1 or 6-1 that the new guy would not last four years. Might have been wishful thinking.

However, my cursory glimpse at the current web discloses no new odds. Why is that? Better to wager on soccer – when will Chelsea lose? Important stuff like that.

I’m in denial, or withdrawal.
I can’t take cable news anymore. I put on the stereo and listen to the great Terrance McKnight on WQXR-FM.
​
I’m reading Dickens’ “A Child’s History of England,” refreshing my views of Richard III and Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell. (Dickens called him “A most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England") Fair and balanced. 

You’ve heard of “Waiting for Godot?”
I’m waiting for Céspedes.

Meantime, the best people I know are talking about not taking this foolishness lying down.
My wife is reading the Times, learning stuff on the tube. Making a plan. Fight back. Right on.

I read the great piece by Jelani Cobb in the current New Yorker: “The Return of Civil Disobedience.”

I remember how good people forced Johnson to slink away from a run in 1968.
Nixon finally got found out in 1974.


10-1

I give this guy eighteen months.
Then we get a nice, normal guy like Pence.
Oy.