The Trump Apology I’ll Never Get

"I was sorry I called you a POS Jew bastard and your wife a whore."

Image: source unknown

by Rich Herschlag

Dear Rich,

It’s been almost seven years since Donald Trump vaingloriously descended the escalator in Trump Tower, and just so it’s explicit rather than implicit I was moved to write you a thorough and heartfelt apology for everything. First and foremost let me say I was never actually going to come after you, whether in the parking lot, in the bar itself, or at one of your job sites. For the record, I think with my military training I could have taken you down in under a minute and rendered you helpless, though it is possible that with your athleticism you could have gotten in a shot or two before it was all over.

But none of that is important now. What is important is that I recognize these unprovoked physical threats were not only so wildly out of bounds as to have put me in the previously unthinkable crosshairs of law enforcement, but were also outrageously unbefitting treatment of someone who had helped me repeatedly over the course of my life.

I’m looking back now at the posted threads of our heated conversations in those early days, not so much marveling over your words of wisdom, but rather in disbelief now over my disbelief then. As you said, you worked with and sparred against Trump and his organization back in the 90s and in giving me your thoughts you were not simply regurgitating other people’s musings on Facebook and Twitter or even the corporate opinion of a talking head on MSNBC. Rather, you were reporting from direct personal experience and trying to be a canary in a coal mine. In  particular, your response post from September 18, 2016 during an exchange in which among other things I called you a “liberal pussy elitist cocksucker too busy composting the remains of a bean sprout salad to get his head out of his ass” comes to mind:

For now I’m going to overlook your menacing promise to put me in a headlock and snap my neck in front of my children in order to explain to you point blank that as objectionable as some of Trump’s proposals are, this political contest is about policy in only a distant, secondary sense. My perilous days in the Manhattan Borough President’s Office and shortly thereafter taught me the hard way that Trump and company are simply about acquiring power and money for Donald Trump and that this end entirely justifies any means. Such means are not abstract. They include a whole host of criminal activities and rackets taken straight out of an organized crime playbook, and they are used as freely as you and I use the toilet. Predicting precisely how that M.O. will come back to haunt you, me, and the United States of America is above my pay grade, but bet your last borrowed dollar from the Saudis the haunting has already begun.

I’m not trying to pat you on the back, Rich, but I am nonetheless shaking my head at the prescience of what you said, how you said it, and most impressive of all when you said it. As document after document emerges from the January 6 Committee it is clearer with every passing day that Donald Trump was at the center of a coup attempt not even his staunchest, most willfully blind allies and lackeys—Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lee, Kevin McCarthy, Sean Hannity, etc.—could entirely stomach.

This act of coordinated political terrorism at its most abstract level was a desire to subvert—in a few short hours—245 years of democracy paid for with the blood of millions of Americans. At its coarsest level the act was a cut and dried massacre of the same salt of the earth law enforcement officers who helped put Trump in the White House in the first place. As I watched these tragic events unfold on my flat screen TV I thought of your foreboding words above—the utter selfishness involved, the mob approach to governing, and finally the permanent stain on our shared history—and I was sorry I called you a POS Jew bastard and your wife a whore.

Much more recently I came to understand your insightful tweet of July 11, 2017:

Calling me a little faggot and assuring me I’m going straight to hell after being lynched by the Proud Boys does not change the fact that Donald Trump’s unseemly relationship with Vladimir Putin is far more than a dalliance. Any number of blatant truths—Paul Manafort’s appearance out of nowhere into the Trump campaign, the WikiLeaks dump hours after the Access Hollywood tape release, the financing of virtually all of Trump’s real estate projects by Deutsche Bank—tells us this was a candidate not simply influenced but owned by a corrupt foreign power with visions of reestablishing a lost, and yes, evil empire as your hero Ronald Reagan once so elegantly put it. This, one of the unholiest transactions in modern world history, is only half complete. When the other shoe drops—whatever that may be—we will all experience an epiphany, and may we all live long enough to revile it.

This, unfortunately, is an epiphany I now have several times a day as I watch Ukrainian bodies pulled from rubble and fear in the eyes of refugee mothers. My revulsion doubles with each spineless, pathetic equivocation from a man we once called leader of the Free World. And it triples with the knowledge that my one in-person and two mail-in ballot votes in a swing state on or before November 8 2016, contributed to this living nightmare. These shortcomings would all by themselves have been enough to cause the remorse in me to well up and annihilate most of my vital organs. But the knowledge that while acting as an accomplice I came this close to setting your carport on fire makes it even worse.

I don’t know exactly what got into me in the years 2015-21, and I may never know entirely. I guess the downward wage pressure, feeling of social displacement, lifelong arrogance, tendency to scapegoat people of color, loathing of my alcoholic father, struggle with ED and the subsequent breakup of my marriage, the hunting accident, the OxyContin addiction, and the blind faith in anything I read on the 4chan site each in their own way made a small contribution. Whatever the case, I realize now that at the very same time I envied and even hated you for your breadth of knowledge, empathy, and slowness to anger. Moreover, I despised you for taking me in all those years back when I had no place to go, loaning me money you barely had, and believing in me when I didn’t even believe in myself. You will be paid in full the moment the IRS releases my RV.

Yours very truly.

You-know-who

Read the latest for Banter Members:

Don't Effing Tan Your Balls

Maybe do this instead…

IMAGE: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – Before we begin, let’s be clear about this: I’m not a doctor. What you’re about to read here is for information purposes only and shouldn’t be substituted for medical advice from a licensed professional. Also, I’ve been on testosterone replacement myself for years, so the following is mostly derived from personal experience. 

All that being said: if you feel like you’re suffering from low testosterone, zapping your testicles with infrared or ultraviolet light won’t solve the problem. Ever.

But it’s a safe bet the suckers who watch his show will try Tucker Carlson’s testicle tanning advice anyway. After all, his audience previously tried hydroxychloroquine, bleach, ivermectin, and other ludicrous bro-science remedies for COVID – weird, given myriad actual medical treatments for it – and so it’s practically a given that they’ll get it wrong this time, too, likely tanning their scrotums in tanning beds or in direct sunlight and ending up with skin cancer on their previously unexposed junk.

Don’t tan your balls. Again, it won’t work and will only create problems far worse than low-T….

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