Cherries and Golf Balls

Washington DC is famous among other things for its springtime cherry blossoms. The oldest grove of cherry trees, of the Yoshino variety with pale pink flowers, includes a cycle path and picnic area along the tidal basin near the National Mall. I saw Washington’s cherries at the height of their efflorescence once, on a visit to Christopher Hitchins one early April day long ago; we did not picnic among them, as it happens, but had lunch at a restaurant on Dupont Circle near his apartment. Most of the cherry trees were a gift to Washington from Tokyo, whose mayor, Yukio Ozaki, gave them to the city in 1912, but the idea of cherrifying the capital had started much earlier at the prompting of one Eliza Scidmore, and by the time of the presidency of William Taft (1909-13; uniquely, he was later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a precedent that would be good for Barak Obama to follow) Scidmore’s dream had become reality.

News that Trump proposes to replace that grove of cherry trees with a golf course comes as no surprise. News that he did not propose to have a golf course on the National Mall would be a surprise. It would be out of character for him not to wish to deface Washington DC further, as he has defaced the Constitution, the USA, the world. Like a dog marking territory with a raised hind leg, he has a pronounced vomeronasal organ, which in his case seems to be so hyperplasic as to have intruded far into his skull, displacing the frontal lobes of the cortex – said to be the seat of rational thought – such that it and the amygdala (seat of emotion) between them constitute 95% of the volume of his brain. As his brain is anyway in a state of advanced decay, the violent urges that govern his behaviour now consume him entirely. With dogs, the raising of the upper lip when snarling stimulates the vomeronasal organ to greater sensitivity; with Trump, snarling (cf. Truth Social) is a permanent condition.

Renaming everything ‘Trump This’ and ‘Trump That’, smearing the inner surfaces of the White House with kitsch gilt and gold, turning the Oval Office into a teenage bedroom with pennants and posters, recolouring the Reflecting Pool in algae-friendly paint, seeking to raise a very bigly Arc de Trump – twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial and next to Arlington Cemetery – are all very canine acts, as illustrated by the literature on intercanine communication which is chiefly effected by ‘anal secretions, pedal glands, deposits of urine and faeces, body odour, and rubbing themselves on surfaces’ (Trump’s rubbings range from women to the entire planetary surface). Which pretty well sums Trump up.

One speculates: Trump must be infected with Lyssavirus, the deadly organism that causes rabies. Nothing so well describes his behaviour as the adjective ‘rabid’. In humans infected by Lyssavirus quick action has to be taken by administration of Human Rabies Immunoglobulin (HRIG) 1, 3, 4. The wound through which the Lyssavirus was introduced has to be thoroughly cleaned. Unfortunately it is a disease that is fatal unless caught early. In Trump’s case November 2016 would have been the right moment, but alas. He has since bitten so many and so much that symptoms have spread right through the Republican Party in Congress and country, the Supreme Court, and all organs of the Administration, and its foaming-mouthed gnashings have not limited themselves to domestic affairs (ICE, voting rights, anti-discrimination initiatives, promotion of White Supremacism, defunded universities, etc.) but have spread to Venezuela and the Persian Gulf, undermined NATO, given Putin a free pass, threatened Cuba, Greenland and Canada, undermined climate-change mitigation efforts – one could go on, but: in short, have destabilised the world.

Ah, a critic might say: the suggestion that Trump is all hydrophobia, that nothing he does involves rational calculation, is disproved by the immense amount of money he and his family have made from their boutique money-gathering-and-laundering workshop at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, soon to have an outsize gilt-and-gold ballroom with a nuclear bunker in the basement. Well, agreed; an immense lust for money, unlike an immense lust for self-aggrandizement, requires a certain cunning to put it into effect, and this is the one thing he has been good at. In amongst the amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that inhabit his skull, a little clump of greed cells is firing smoothly: he made $2.4 billion in 2025 through various scams and schemes, monetising the Presidency to highly lucrative effect.

How is it that all the above has not yet resulted in Trump being removed, in a straitjacket, to the ‘Correctional Treatment Facility’ (the new name for ‘prison’) located at 1901 E Street Washington DC? A headline on the PBS News webpage reads, ‘Trump’s $2B income in 2025 raises fresh questions about profiting off presidency’. Huh? ‘Fresh questions’? This is beyond lame. One serving member of the military protested outside the Capitol this week demanding Trump’s impeachment and removal from office – one. This was Air Force Major Jason Watson, who joined Representative Al Green and members of the Removal Coalition to call upon Congress to do its job and get rid of a President who is manifestly out of control and doing dire harm. Instead of Trump being arrested, it was Maj. Watson who was arrested, charged with ‘crowding, obstructing and incommoding’. Since Trump’s offences make ‘crowding, obstructing and incommoding’ look like a game of cat’s-cradle solitaire, one dreads to think which medieval form of punishment would be most apt for Trump if the Mikado’s ‘let the punishment fit the crime’ were to be implemented.

OK, enough laborious satire. As with Swift in Gulliver, the truth is all there, only too painful and already too well-known to bear repetition in documentary mode. But the point needs to be made again and again that Trump is foetid proof of the US system’s failings. We see the courts and some of the states fighting magnificently to uphold the ideals of that system, but on the whole futilely; because above the lower tiers of the legal structure sits a suborned Supreme Court in Trump’s pocket, doing almost all of his bidding and only rarely (as with the birth-right decision just handed down) provoking a rabid outburst from their master. Congress has been castrated by a Republican Party so lickspittle, supine, frightened, weak and unprincipled that it has let a monster loose on the country and the world, despite having in its hands the tools to put things right. They, like the execrable Trump himself, will be scathingly treated by history, which will pile a Pelion of contempt on an Ossa of disgust, their obliviousness to this fact proof of how, like rabbits in the headlights of a megatruck roaring towards them, they are blind to everything but the need to save their own backsides. It is beyond pathetic. In the smoking ruins of the US a monument – even if the only thing then possible is a hut – needs to be erected as a Hall of Shame on the walls of which their names should be engraved for all posterity to mock and fleer at.

Among the necessities for reform that will prevent a repetition of this hideous epoch in US history, two stand out: the electoral system for both houses of Congress, and the defunct ‘separation of powers’ between the political-administrative and judicial systems. The Supreme Court has to stop being politically appointed. The electoral system has to break the stranglehold of two-party polarisation. Just these two reforms would make another Trump impossible. There is no question but that the planners of the coup that made Trump’s occupancy of the White House possible identified the system’s weaknesses long ago, and long ago set to work to exploit them. The planning began in the Reagan years, in reaction to the liberalising of the 60s. In the 90s Newt Gingrich and others spun the wheels faster; Obama’s election was a shock to them – a Black man in the White House! and a liberal at that! – now the knives were out. Trump 1 showed that unless you purge the administration and terrify the Party, unless you go whole-hog on whipping up the Base (that perennially-available 20% or so of any population which will lap up the chance to let their racism, sexism, xenophobia and disaffection rip), you cannot get the wrecking-ball you need. But they got it. The wholesale dismantling of the US and the world order is not the brainchild of the brainless Trump; no, his greed, narcissism and ignorance make him the perfect tool for the Project 25-ers to break things and remodel them closer to their hearts’ desires. Without the current electoral and Supreme Court arrangements it would not have been possible.

The multiplier effect was provided by the size of the US economy and military. At the moment of the coup both meant that the remodellers could wreck not just the US but – to the US’s advantage, so they thought – the world. I wonder what they think now that the US has lost another war, defeated by Iran, and that inflation, broken trade relations, the fantastic gulf between a billionaire class and millions of ordinary Americans working several jobs to pay rent and meet medical bills, the distrust of former allies, the relentless rise of China, the poison of Putin – in short, the mess they have directly made or indirectly enabled – stares them in the face.

So here we are. Makers of revolutions rarely inherit the hopes they had. Revolutions usually make things worse in the short and medium term; in the longer term, it is the rebuilding predicated on the desire to avoid revolutions that makes for progress. And in this case, rebuilding has to start with the Constitution.

I have a great deal of tenderness for Steven Spielberg – he paid my legal fees once: a whole other story relating to the Rose Theatre on London’s Bankside and suing the Department of the Environment and losing – so it is with diffidence that I express disappointment at Discovery Day, and propose to him a better idea than ‘ET really woz here’, viz. a movie about the unleashing of a pack of rabid dogs in Washington’s Mall during the cherry blossom festival, the aim being to clear it of people so that a golf course, straddled by an immense Colossus statue of Trump, can be built. As cinematic metaphors go, it might have a properly galvanising effect on the population of the US of A at last, before things get even worse. It would have to be fully graphic, though; terrifying fanged mouths dripping with blood and foam, mangled corpses, screams and howls, raging monster dogs flashing among the boles of the cherry trees in swift pursuit of mothers clutching their babies (he could economise by using footage from the Middle East, come to think of it), the pack led by a raving Trump with blazing red eyes, Vampire teeth bared to show gobbets of gore stuck between them, glittering claws unsheathed at the end of tiny fingers, running obesely among the cherry blossoms brandishing a golf club to which lumps of blood and brain adhere – because the horror show that has unfolded since the inauguration of Trump 2 hasn’t so far done the trick, and really! it is time something did.