The internet is a museum of memes for all occasions: Trump as a character from “Dune.”

The days preceding had shown so much promise. First there was the news that the arch-villain Jerry Fallwell, Jr., president of the conservative hatchery Liberty University, enjoyed watching his wife have sex with the pool boy. Then a sneak preview of the new book by former Trump mob lawyer Michael Cohen revealed that the president enjoyed sneaking off to Las Vegas to take in live sex shows that involved golden showers.

And I thought: This is going to be sooooooome kinda rockin’ Republican National Convention.

Well, you know how that turned out. While you were Googling “golden showers,” the convention was an utter disappointment. Same old racist, divisive, snarky, lie-loaded genuflection over a childish man whose psychological profile has been elevated, by experienced mental-health professionals, from an early-presidency diagnosis of malignant narcissist to what is now full-throttle psychopath.

How is it that someone can successfully identify generic pictures of a man and a woman on a test for dementia and proclaim it’s proof of his superior mental acuity? We could spend all day making a list of the president’s inexplicable behaviors. But if you can read, you already know them.

This weekend, we took a ride east on Rt. 104 toward Oswego. Stopping at a fruit stand for peaches. Cruising around the perimeter of Fort Ontario, a massive, star-shaped construction of dirt and brick built on top of a series of destroyed or abandoned forts dating back to 1755. I bought a few bags of smoking wood from an unoccupied stand at the end of a rural road, with an honor box to put your money in, because I don’t have the time these frantic days to take a walk in the woods and pick up fallen oak branches myself.

This region was clearly marked as Trump territory. Conservative pundits like to call it “Real America.” What you see are TRUMP signs. Not like those modest “Biden-Harris” lawn signs that are starting to appear around our neighborhood. No, TRUMP banners are king-sized bedsheet in scope. TRUMP flags fly from makeshift flagpoles of 2x4s tied to the awnings of trailer homes. The sides of weathered barns are painted with TRUMP as big as a drive-in movie screen.

Why? These Real Americans may be struggling. But they likely have access to the internet, television other than Fox News, National Public Radio and reputable newspapers such as The New York Times. These Real Americans must know that Trump does not care about them. That all of his actions as president – tax cuts, deregulation of laws protecting the trees where the possums live – are for the benefit of the wealthy, the one percent, yacht-sailing America. Trump is playing these Real Americans of Western New York for suckers.

There is no evidence that says otherwise.

Oh, look! Someone has posted on the internet a bust of Trump’s head! It’s made entirely of bullshit!

It is a fact that the bulk of American men and women who comprise the armed forces come from low-income families. Real America, as they say. But we know what Trump thinks of them. The people who lay their lives on this line, and sometimes lose those lives, are “losers.” They are “suckers.” Trump denies he has said these things. But many people in Trump’s own administration have confirmed that he holds this view. Even a Fox News reporter (you must always use the word “reporter” loosely in the context of Fox News) confirmed some of these statements.

And we know these words are consistent with Trump’s history: Remember how he attacked the Pakistani immigrant and American citizen Khizr Khan, whose son – a captain in the U.S. Army – was killed in Iran while protecting his fellow soldiers from a bomb-laden car in a suicide attack? Remember what Trump said about John McCain, who spent 5½ years as a prisoner of war, tortured after his Air Force plane was shot down over Vietnam? “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

Trump believes you are a sucker and a loser if you serve your country, rather than use the time to pursue personal gain.

There is no evidence that says otherwise.

Trump has ascended to the level of super villain, a White House version of the sadistic, unspeakably gross Baron Harkonnen of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune. Harkonnen is a man so weighed down in depravity that he uses anti-gravity “suspensors” to support his weight.

There is no evidence that says otherwise. Those who insist it is not so are Trump’s “suspensors.”

In recent weeks, we’ve learned that Trump refuses to acknowledge that the Russian government has placed a bounty on the heads of Americans killed by the Taliban.

Just days ago, we learned that Trump has been paying his legal bills with cash siphoned off of funds Americans have contributed to his re-election campaign. And this week the U.S. Justice Department, funded by your tax dollars, and run by the insidious toadie William Barr (the sadistic Piter De Vries, if you’re following the Dune analogy), has suggested that his people should take over Trump’s defense in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a woman who has accused Trump of sexual assault.

Losers. Suckers. Is that who he thinks we are?

We know Trump is a loser of fortunes, his bankruptcies say so. We know Trump is a sucker being played by Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jingping, and the Saudi Arabian King Salman bin Abdulaziz. All world leaders know the strategy: Stroke Trump’s ego, and he will follow like a puppy.

This holiday weekend, Trump supporters in Austin, Texas, gassed up their power boats, decorated them with TRUMP 2020 flags, and joined the “Trump Boat Parade” on Lake Travis. Their exuberance became a rescue operation after five of the boats sank. Fortunately, no one was hurt, so I did smile a bit at a social media post that noted how the image of the wakes from millionaire yachts swamping outboard-motor dinghies is a perfect metaphor for the Trump administration.

Only four paragraphs into this screed – thanks for staying with me! – I suggested we could spend all day making a list of the president’s inexplicable behaviors. Things that are already well reported. Yet people like you and me, guided by facts and science, sometimes can’t help but sift through his debris, like archaeologists searching for an overlooked shard of broken vase that will tell the story of a lost civilization. So our recreational reading is a list of well-documented Trump failures as compiled here by The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, in a piece called “‘I Keep My Promises,’ Trump Said. Let’s Check.” 

Hmmmm… Mexico isn’t paying for the wall…? He really said, in 2016 while running for president, “We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else…?”

Welcome back, suckers. That took a long time to read, didn’t it?

And Trump will release his tax returns when…? That’s been like trying to pull a sock out of my dog’s mouth.

Oh, plenty of dog analogies come to mind when I think of Trump. When consuming the morning news, a cacophony that announces the fall of America, I am a Rottweiler running wild in a candy store, snatching treats until someone throws a net over me and drags me back onto the sidewalk. Trump himself tells a story of cities on fire, Black people seizing control of white women’s suburbs, rising crime rates and the certainty of fraud in the upcoming election. Vote twice to prove it, he says.

To different degrees, these are imaginary scenarios, but they do beg the question: He’s the president, why doesn’t he do something about them?

And Wednesday morning, the news arrived that Bob Woodward’s upcoming book on Trump, Rage, reveals that Trump was aware of the deadly nature of COVID-19 way back in early February, but chose to “play it down,” as he says on the tapes that Woodward released Thursday.

Yes, as was the case with another Woodward nemesis, Richard Nixon, there are tapes.

On Woodward’s recordings of his conversations with Trump, the president blithely admits that he’s downplaying the dangers of COVID-19 because he doesn’t want to panic the nation.

As we approach 200,000 dead Americans, does that sound like a good idea? Honestly, when faced with impending danger, do people go running willy-nilly from their homes, screaming, like they’ve just spotted Godzilla lumbering down their street?

Trump wasn’t watching over our tender psyches. He was watching out for his political career.

We’re not living in a horror movie. COVID-19 is real. If something threatens your life, be it radiation-engorged giant reptile or a microscopic virus, wouldn’t you want to know? Wouldn’t you rather make the decision on how to save your life, rather than leave it to a grifter like Trump and his co-conspirators?

So allow me to add one more conspiracy that emerged recently. When Trump told a Fox News reporter – there’s that misplaced word again – that:

We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane it was almost completely loaded with thugs, wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that.

Whoa! That sounds like trouble!

The reporter (I’m at a loss for the appropriate descriptor), Laura Ingraham, asked for details.

“I’ll tell you sometime,” Trump said. “It’s under investigation right now. But they came from a certain city. And this person was coming to the Republican National Convention. And there were like seven people on the plane like this person, and then a lot of people on the plane, to do big damage.”

“Coming for Washington,” Ingraham said.

“Yeah,” Trump assured her, “this is all happening.”

So who saw these thugs? Wearing the black uniforms of what organization? Coming from what city? What Federal agency is investigating this? How did the person on the plane know that these thugs were going to “do big damage?”

No one has answered any of these questions. No one ever will. With Trump, each week’s conspiracies are launched by what “some people say…” Trump, who vowed to honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else, has spewed more than 20,000 lies during his presidency, according to a running count kept by The Washington Post. And in his tale of dark forces on airplanes, likely henchmen of the Deep State, he was lying again.

We’re all trapped in the president’s fantasy world. How do we get out of here?

Baron Harkonnen watches the television in his White House bedroom, observing this disaster unfold. He’ll tell us how we get out of here. Sometime.

By then, it’ll be too late.

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