Soon after the 2016 election, I began keeping a journal on the Trump Crisis. Excerpts appeared in the Sun magazine in August, 2017. Here are further selections. (Some entries are tweets, for which I have retained the original capitalization.)
11/11
Academics must be excited about the Trump Presidency. At last, they have something truly new to study. I imagine researchers choosing their subtopics this week: “Neo-Fascism and the Postal Service,” “The New Authoritarianism and Walmart,” etc.
11/16
Tweet:
Hey, you fucking fascists! I’m a Jew! Come beat me up!
11/18
Hillary wasn’t running for President; she was waiting to be President. She thought her election was inevitable, like the iPhone 7.0. The voters punished her for hubris.
11/19
Trump is our first post-literate president. He writes tweets, which are all correctly spelled (mysteriously) but he’s never been known to actually read. Though he kept a copy of Mein Kampf next to his bed during his marriage to Ivana, she defended him by saying he never read it.
11/24
Meditation for White People
Close your eyes.
Pay attention to your breathing.
Listen to the sounds around you.
Continue breathing, aware of your inbreath and outbreath.
Now think of your own body.
Imagine that you have dark skin – brown, deep brown, even black.
Imagine yourself walking down the street, in the body of a black person.
Imagine how the world looks if you are African-American.
Imagine how the world looks at you.
Return to your breathing.
Slowly open your eyes.
11/30
“I’m glad I’m old,” my 97-year-old father said to me. “Hopefully I won’t have to live through eight years of this bastard.”
12/1
Trump’s Cabinet appointments are a juvenile attempt to demoralize us. Don’t fall for this! Remember the Trump Era Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the Fascism I cannot change, the strength to fight the Fascism that I can, and the correct political analysis to know the difference.
12/5
Plus I’m dusting off my most successful bumper sticker slogan:
I’M ALREADY AGAINST THE NEXT WAR
12/6
Explosion
The Bible
blew up in
my face.
12/7
When Trump shuts down Saturday Night Live, pack your bags.
12/9
It may be said of Trump, without irony, that he has a genius for stupidity.
12/12
In the 1960s they used bullets. Now they assassinate you with WikiLeaks.
12/25
Future White House sex rumors:
Trump’s a hermaphrodite.
Mike Pence is gay.
Melania was born male.
1/15
Racism is an addiction, like methamphetamine. There should be a 12-Step program for racists.
3/16
Misread headline: “Trump Budget Seeks Big Tit to the Military”
[New York Times; the word was “Tilt”]
3/23
Homework assignment: Civilian crime is down, but government crime is way up. Explain.
3/27
So far it’s been winter throughout the Trump administration – and it feels like an eternal winter.
5/12
I thought Trump was impersonating a half-mad English king – but no, he’s a fucking ROMAN EMPEROR!
7/10
One good thing about Trump being president: the stupid debate about whether racism still exists is over.
8/10
The last 17 years of the American presidency have proved that 1) black people solve problems; 2) white people fuck things up.
8/26
Actually, I’m for an ALL-transgender army!
8/30
Trump is making narcissists look bad. There have been great narcissists in history: Mick Jagger, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Aquinas, Leonardo da Vinci…
9/25
Trump is exactly like a Marvel supervillain: boastful, cocky, megalomaniacal, obscenely powerful. I just hope the Fantastic Four can defeat him in time!
Sparrow is usually reading Freud and Shakespeare. (He recently finished Totem and Taboo and The Comedy of Errors.) He lives in Phoenicia, New York. Sparrow’s latest book is On Certain Nights Everyone in the USA Has the Same Dream (Inpatient Press), a journal of his campaign for President in 2016.