The Incredible Shrinking Man

Trump is morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, economically, and logically lame, and literally all of it is his own doing.

by Rich Herschlag

Every day he gets smaller. And every day he punishes us for that fact. His diminution is the elephant in the room, and the elephant is anorexic.

As of this writing he has, legally at least, 1,207 days left in office. As you’re reading this the number is fewer. Assuming good health, for you and me such personal countdowns are rarely tragic. Whether it’s a countdown to a job change, a full blown career change, or ample time to carve stuff out of driftwood, the simple passing of time is not normally a death march. Moreover, most of us can be generally proud of what we’ve done with our lives.

None of this is true for Donald J. Trump, for whom the calendar is a plank and its end a freefall into a shark tank. This fate is far more than the product of his being, in political terms, a lame duck. Trump is morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, economically, and logically lame, and literally all of it is his own doing.

The laws of economics aren’t as hard and fast as the laws of physics, but they are deterministic nonetheless. When you decrease the availability of critical labor and smack billions of dollars in mandatory fees (you know the word) on longstanding imports, you decrease the national economic output. You can play musical chairs for a while with the results, but eventually someone has to sit down in a chair already taken.

Trump shrinks from this. He tries to obliterate the data, bury it, call it fake. But there is simply too much of it and too many folks on the ground who can’t make the rent or afford their medications.

Every day, Trump shrinks from the Epstein scandal. No matter how many times the Republican controlled Senate or the soon-to-be renegade House, or Pam Bondi, or Kash Patel kicks the sordid can down the road, with each passing 24-hour news cycle Trump’s guilt becomes more apparent. Every 360 degree spin of Earth about its axis is a small jaunt closer to some inevitable day of ultimate, irrevocable infamy at which point even brainwashed evangelicals shed Trump’s unseemly corpse and an Access Hollywood-WikiLeaks eleventh hour rescue is several bridges too far.

With each passing day the executive corruption mounts, the new debt piles up, and the global order teeters. With every 1,440-minute sweep all this chaos is visible on a zombie commander-in-chief with swollen ankles, plaque-lined arteries, and eerily pallid skin. Like a wannabe vampire he has enriched himself at the expense of America’s children, whose blood he sucks in the form of funding for education, healthcare, even formerly sacrosanct mandates like vaccines. These social cancers take a while to metastasize, but child mortality is a chicken that will come home to roost one day at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Today is the first day of the rest of Donald Trump’s inevitable downhill run and the most recent day of a life lived so poorly and antithetically to any standard of basic decency it’s nearly cartoonish. Today is also the best day compared to all those that will follow. This dark reality is the Trump administration’s zeitgeist, and the resulting desperation informs its members with every waking and sleeping hour. Every moment of Trump’s shrinking persona is a hapless, transparent attempt to exert some sort of futile control over an unruly world that will soon leave him behind like yesterday’s cable news crawl. For his sycophantic staff having long ago traded their professional and personal fortunes for a brief run in the driver’s seat of a careening Formula 1 racecar, the boss’s low key panic is a psychopathic clarion call to yet one more mercenary act of utter depravity.

While to many folks in dire straits physical death holds at least some promise for its metaphysical possibility of salvation, Trump’s recent wistful comments regarding his own exponentially remote shot at Heaven exhibit a realism entirely absent from his own policy making. His self-doubt is valid. On that lofty, ethereal plane known as the Next World there is something much worse than sin, and that is leading others to sin. For reference, please see the Gospel.

In the 1957 sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man, Scott Carey finds his physical size waning a bit every day, providing him both the time and the agony to ponder his fate in the universe. Carey’s torture is both emotional (he becomes too diminutive to be of much use to his beloved wife) and abstract as he gradually disappears from a world he once thrived in. For Donald Trump, the slow, steady disappearance is much the same and no less avoidable. In 2025 we watch this pathetic drama play out every diurnal cycle on our phones, albeit in color and ad nauseam. For Scott Carey the saga ends with a question mark as the protagonist eventually finds he is even too small to be caught by giant insects or constrained by standard metal bars and screens. For the Incredible Shrinking Man in the White House there is also a question mark, but this is life, not Hollywood, and one day there will be no more sequels.

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