What I wish I could have said about Trump

There are things I wish I could have said about Donald Trump, but at the time I couldn’t. I wish I could have said that listening to him was like putting your ear to a tin can on a string and discovering a decomposing squash on the other end of the line. The sound of amplified mush.

But I couldn’t. Nor could I say that his face had the eerie, vacant look of a crash test dummy getting a gangrenous toe amputated: something is wrong here, some law of nature is being transgressed. I could not say it was possible to fit his moral compass inside a fob hanging in a drawer inside a Sylvanian Family glory box.

I could not say that his foreign policy makes no sense. It’s Human Centipede: The Musical, with solo parts for the middle and back sections. I don’t think his administration is a dumpster fire – it’s a dumpster-fire turducken. A burning garbage receptacle fuelled by copies of Dumpster Fires for Dummies, inside a larger dumpster filled with crushed Wendy houses and their owners’ tears, floating in a giant dumpster filled with orange tan spray – all ignited by a single tiki torch. But nope, I couldn’t say that either.

Everything, without exception, is wrong – just plain off – with this dude. Adding to all this wrongness are the other politicians and groups and nations using his magnetic fakery to advance their own causes. They attach themselves to his broad flanks like fat, petulant ticks.

So, at the time of the interview, I wanted to say all of that. But you try articulating it in beginnerish te reo Ma¯ ori.

This year my full-immersion te reo class was asked to interview, and be interviewed by, fellow students. The topic assigned to several colleagues and me was Trump. It was an excellent exercise, challenging our knowledge and flexibility with the language. It pushed us to improve the sophistication of our speech in what is an everyday situation: talking about things that are happening in the world.

I know the content of the interview was not the important thing – it was simply a vehicle for using the language – but I wished I could have articulated what I really thought. The best I could offer was a few jokes about Trump’s strange orange skin and his awful hair. I’m still speaking at a child’s level. In this case, the hardest thing about learning te reo Ma¯ ori was my inability to throw shade with any level of sophistication.

But perhaps what I really needed to articulate, more than my contempt for the man himself (not to mention his followers), is the strangeness of life in Trumpworld.

It has been a bizarre experience, learning my language, experiencing profound changes for the better in my life, while watching one of the world’s superpowers headed in the other direction. Losing its mind.

The midterm elections in the US heralded a further drift into the expansive craziness that can only come from the greatest nation in the world. (They just do everything bigger.) Now with a check on Trump’s power – the Democrats seizing one of the nation’s legislative houses – we can expect the Prez to become more unhinged.

This year I experienced so much that was good in my own life, but it rubbed against Trump’s cosmic background noise of human skulls being played like bongos. Is this one of life’s strange new features, or a temporary glitch? (To be fair, Trump’s still not yet as bad – as deadly – as the previous Republican president. Just awful in a different, strange way.)

Iwish I could be like some people who don’t care about what happens in US politics. But every time the Right takes control over there, the world, including us, catches a cold. We end up sending troops to ill-conceived and flat-out wrong wars in the Middle East, or losing our coastline to the sea as US environmental protection efforts unspool. Will somebody think of all those wealthypeople baches?

But I digress. What I would have liked to have been able to say was that, even if one part of our life is solid, fulfilling, the rest of the dumpster can still be on fire. In this case I don’t think we can do anything about the horror show in the US except watch and hope that the nation’s worst impulses don’t win the battle. We pine for the empty rhetoric of the old American politicians; it’s still better than huffing the carbon monoxide of Trump’s fake news.

During my interview I wish I could have said – if only just to hear it in te reo – that humanity is still like a jigsaw puzzle. We never see the bigger picture but, as other corners fall apart, we need to hold together tighter. Every piece counts if we want to make humanity great again.