Trump: the monster at our American door

I woke up before sunrise yesterday, and headed down the Pacific Coast Highway thinking about the CNN abomination in New Hampshire.  What is it that America saw on Wednesday night? What did the world see? 

CNN built a set for Donald Trump, and filled a room with his voters and sycophants. Next, CNN introduced Donald Trump and he walked out onto the set to rapturous applause. Then the tsunami hit.

It was a tsunami of lies that hit the truth like a wave of water crashing into a beach full of thatch huts. Everything was washed away in an instant. Certainly, Kaitlin Collins was. She was engulfed and drowned. There was nothing she could do. She shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

John Smith was the captain of the Titanic, and is best remembered for going down with the ship that “God himself could not sink.” A cottage industry bloomed in the aftermath of the disaster where Smith’s famous “last words” were stamped on anything that could be sold. Smith did go down with the ship — though it is doubtful that his final exhortation to “be British” actually happened.

In any event, George Bernard Shaw pointed out during the period of Smith’s fevered posthumous lionization that he should perhaps be best remembered as an incompetent who plowed his ocean liner into an ice field, on a moonless night, absent enough life boats, at full speed. Shaw’s basic premise was that what happened wasn’t very surprising, given how reckless the journey had been.

Of course, no ship was sunk and no audience members drowned during the Trump fiasco, but one couldn’t help but hear Smith’s faded words echoing through the CNN control room as network president Chris Licht faced the ice ahead with a steely “straight ahead, maximum speed” order. He strapped Kaitlin Collins to the bow, and arranged his panels in a version of Frederick Fleet’s crow’s nest where his contributors could be the first to see the debacle at hand.