Trump Arraignment Euphoria
"I knew enough from my brief coked out Atlantic City days to be suspicious of my Trump euphoria, but I basked in it nevertheless"
by Rich Herschlag
The first time I did cocaine was Labor Day, 1983. My cousin took the day off from his cab driving gig in New York City to drive down to Atlantic City, where after a summer of dealing blackjack I had one day to go on my lease of a room in a small house near the beach. My best buddy from college decided to remain a spectator as my cousin and I did lines off the living room mirror on the floor. I was skeptical. I had spent the late 70s and early 80s studying physics and learning how to hit a curveball and couldn’t imagine catching up with the beautiful people in one fell swoop on a sunny afternoon at the Jersey Shore, nor did I think the high would be anything beyond that of solving a difficult quadratic equation.
And then the white powder hit me. Years of lost cultural participation, missed sexual exploits, and unrealized spiritual revelation all coming back to me in a few golden minutes. The three of us–one still sober–were a late afternoon spectacle on a beach slowly being deserted for the season. Never known for being much of a Frisbee player, I made circus catches in midair, sometimes completing a full body flip successfully, other times finding my head buried deep in the warm sand, either way feeling no pain and performing at the very edge of my athletic ability. Probably beyond it.
Before it was all over I took notes on my euphoria. My profoundest self-doubts were replaced with the feeling that after all the ups and downs I had landed precisely, karmically where I needed to land and was doing exactly what God intended. Everything that hadn’t killed me to this point had not only made me stronger but had steeled me for accomplishments and revelations I could now only catch a faint glimpse of on the horizon. Any joy I had been shut out from was merely rapture I had unconsciously decided to withhold from myself and now finally could be fully, voluntarily revealed. Any shortcoming in my prowess was the product of fear and misguided modesty now gloriously stripped away. Any barrier between me and the other sentient beings roaming the planet was the outcome of people erroneously trained not to stare directly into the sun of all-encompassing love.
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And then it ended. By seven PM I felt winded and hungry and reheated a slice of Sicilian pizza. Suddenly once again I was a guy with no car, no girlfriend, and $638 in the bank, looking to kill one last year of engineering studies before it killed me. Ironically, for 21 I might have been a bit on the mature side. To me, just barely on the other side of the daytrip, the cocaine high was deceptive, misleading, flattering, outright dangerous. I could see why the substance had captured so many minds, souls and wallets in a civilization of folks taught they had to fight for their bread and prove their own worth every waking hour. That’s when I realized I had the potential to be a coke addict and vowed never to try it again. Except for twice more in the following months when it was thrust under my nose by a couple of resourceful women, I stuck to it.
These ancient thoughts and revelations came back to me over the past couple of weeks during and after my Trump arraignment euphoria. In the hours following the indictment I experienced a preternatural glow that belied my current reality–my dad fighting a horrific disease, a project at work that went maddeningly sideways, fatigue from repairing and liquidating our modest rental properties as a means of bowing out of the rat race, a neck so stiff I have trouble parallel parking. I knew enough from my brief coked out Atlantic City days to be suspicious of my Trump euphoria, but I basked in it nevertheless.
Basked in the feeling that seven years of teetering on the brink of banana republic-dom had ultimately served to inoculate us. In the sensation that our brightest days as a nation lay ahead of us and were too blissful to fully grasp. In the conviction that as a writer and concerned citizen I had for the better part of a decade dutifully and effectively participated in one of the greatest if not the greatest internal defense of democracy ever witnessed on the face of the earth. In the belief that a ragtag, bickering motley crew of American citizens had finally come together in a moment of mass sanity to eradicate a malignant tumor by means of legal, pluralistic chemo.
And then Wednesday came. Yeah, I get it. Seventy-four million Americans voted for Trump in 2020 after a memorable tour de force of crime and arrogance, and he still has most of their hearts and minds, speaking generously of course. It’s not that they’re simply willing to ignore treasonous assaults on the US–a lot of them relish it. We are on a runaway train of mutual distrust, and far from uniting us in a sense of civil desperation, almost half these folks would throw me off that same train if they took one look at my Spotify playlist. Meanwhile that sociopath is out there promising pardons of January 6 rioters, and his fake primary opponents are out there promising to pardon him.
So what exactly in this instance is the drug I’m vowing never again to take? After all, I’m not in control of when the next indictment drops, nor when jury selection begins for this one, nor for that matter of any single detonation among the dozens of legal landmines scattered out there. The political cocaine will arrive when it arrives, and with mirror-to-mirror media coverage, snorting it will require little more effort than breathing.
For me the answer lies in the fact that the potential addiction in this case is a mental rather than a chemical one. Snorting real, honest-to-goodness cocaine is voluntary at first, but then the serotonin uptake inhibitors take over. You’re giddy even if your dog has to be put to sleep, and when it’s over you crash. Trump indictment euphoria is different. It’s like energy–it can be stored for later and used when needed. And it will indeed be needed later. Maybe when Aileen Cannon throws out damning evidence. Maybe when Trump’s legal team du jour manages to delay a trial by months or even years. Maybe when a lone MAGA juror instigates a mistrial. Maybe when Trump wins the Republican nomination.
At that time or any other like it, when I fear we’re backsliding into the Fourth World dictatorship the worst among us crave, when that sickening feeling I first experienced November 8, 2016 comes for me on some random day, I will reach into my arraignment euphoria savings account for a small withdrawal and remind myself the Grim Reaper is indeed coming for Donald J. Trump and his partners in crime. In the meantime I won’t let myself get too high.
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I’m not sure my own “euphoria savings account”will have enough of a balance to see me through if, by some awful twist of fate”, tfg moves back into the White House. I honestly don’t know how I would survive that.
I’m sorry, I just heard fake LSM state that Trump had a rally in a town of 5,000 but there was 50,000 people there really you could not tell that by the crowd. How are these folks getting to these rallies huh fake LSM.