POTUS sings the blues (and makes me wanna’ holla!)
President Donald Trump has never been one to allow other people’s misfortunes to get to him. His enduring “virtue” — as far as he’s concerned — is his ability to focus on his own troubles to the exclusion of everyone else.
COVID-19 killing 3,000 Americans a day with 17 million infected is obviously bad, but losing an election to Joe Biden? Well, that’s a tragedy requiring his single-minded focus through Inauguration Day and beyond, because that’s how the long con works.
And even as the shocking details of the administration’s morally abhorrent “herd immunity” strategy for dealing with the pandemic leak out, there’s no doubt what his defense at a future Nuremberg-like trial will be: “Your honor, I had no idea what herd mentality [sic] was until one of my lackeys brought it up. He said something like ‘we want them infected.’ Those were his words, not mine. Unless it has something to do with bleach or water pressure, I always leave the anti-science to the experts.”
Despite his obvious antipathy for Black people, Donald Trump currently occupies a job that requires that he at least be capable of going through the motions that he can sing the blues.
Lincoln sang the blues with his second inaugural address to the nation. FDR let out a wail with his memorable “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” speech.
Through personal pain and mental anguish, Kennedy was constantly singing the blues. His successor, LBJ, was a Texas bluesman through and through. Nixon, for all his evilness, embodied the gutbucket, self-pitying side of the blues. Reagan tapped into the blues when he addressed the nation after the Challenger explosion as did George W. Bush when he stood in the wreckage of the World Trade Center.
Barack Obama literally sang the blues in the form of “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for the nine victims of white supremacist evil at Mother Emanuel Church.
Now, we all understand that Donald Trump neither knows nor cares about that magnificent art form or the ceremonial obligation to heal the nation or at least inspire it during hard times. He lacks the empathy and personal insight required to sing the blues with anything approaching moral authority.
Instead of channeling the collective sweat, dread, pain, sorrow and longing for justice and wholeness that the blues at its best represents, Mr. Trump, like a latterday Elvis (or Pat Boone), has created his own version: a solipsistic, rage-filled dirge capable of only one note — Wah!!!!
Unfortunately, there is so much material for a president to work with. America is in the midst of deep pain, both mentally and physically.
COVID-19 is the leading form of death in America right now. It has surpassed heart disease as our greatest killer. During dark periods like this, it has been customary for a president to dig deep and draw from either personal experience or insight into the human condition to connect us to each other and a national purpose.
Instead, we have to suffer through another three weeks of a whiny, delusional lame duck who has never taken our democracy seriously enough to even learn about the norms he shattered every day of his failed presidency. Still, despite his tin-ear for the movement of any kind of internal spirit of empathy, Mr. Trump’s circumstances remind me of the lyrics to “Long Distance Call,” by the late bluesman Muddy Waters.
“You say you love me darlin’/ Please call me on the phone sometime/ You say you love me darlin’/ Please call me on the phone sometime.”
Who can listen to Muddy’s aching plea to a lover who has “ghosted” him and not think of Mr. Trump moaning after midnight in the White House waiting for that call that never comes from North Korea?
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump had to deal with the indignity of watching his main squeeze for the last four years, Vladimir Putin, throw himself at someone who thinks he can replace him in the White House without a fight (other than the election).
“For my part, I am ready for cooperation and contacts with you,” Mr. Putin said in the most salacious, double-crossing commie way imaginable. Oh, how Mr. Trump must’ve howled in the dark over that betrayal.
“When I hear your voice/ ease my worried mind,” Muddy Waters continues. But the only voices on the phone for Mr. Trump are his sycophants, flunkies and stooges who tell him what he wants to hear.
He’s not in “love” with them the way he is with a certain North Korean dictator or a Russian president who understands him better than most and knows his darkest secrets.
“One of these days/ I’m gonna show you how nice a man can be/ One of these days/ I’m gonna show you how nice a man can be,” Muddy sang, dredging up a vain promise that had come too late to fulfill.
Is that what Mr. Trump felt like the day he fired his attorney general, an Eeyore-like apparatchik who saved his presidency by spinning the findings of the Mueller report in the weeks before the public could judge it?
Could those lyrics be an ironic reference to Mr. Trump’s retweeting of a vengeful desire to see the leaders of Georgia’s Republican Party jailed for not being clever enough to steal the vote from Blacks and liberals in a state no Democrat had won since Bill Clinton?
“I’ma buy you a brand new Cadillac/ if you only speak some good words about me,” Muddy sang. He could’ve been looking into the future at Mr. Trump bribing the morally obtuse Republican political establishment with tax cuts, the rollback of Obama-era regulations and three Supreme Court justices. Let’s throw in a quid pro quo made to Ukraine while we’re at it.
“Hear my phone ringin’/ Sound like a long distance call/ Hear my phone ringin’/ Sound like a long distance call.”
Hello? Vlad, is that you? Kimmy? Have you come back to me? I don’t understand. I thought we were in love …
“When I picked up my receiver/ the party said … the party said … the party said …”
There is an interminable wait as Muddy Waters free associates the disaster of the last four years of the Trump presidency:
“The party said, ‘[Donald Trump] Another mule is kickin’ in your stall!”
In this case, it just happens to be a Democrat! Wah!!!