If you are one of those readers who, upon certain occasions, needs to go into a padded room and just scream out, this is for you:
Trump isn't just a bad man — he's what leaks out when a society stops insisting on standards. He's the sludge at the bottom of the barrel that somehow climbed out and convinced people he's champagne. Every instinct he has is predatory. Every impulse is base. He's the closest thing American politics has ever produced to a human pollutant.
This is a man whose entire relationship to other people — men, women, children — is transactional, dominative, or exploitative. The documented behavior alone is revolting: creeping around dressing rooms full of teenagers, bragging on tape about grabbing strangers, rating his own daughter like she's a contestant in some deranged private pageant in his head. Everything about him smells like stale perfume and fresh coercion.
He radiates the energy of a man who has never once seen another human being as fully real. Just props. Just bodies. Just opportunities — especially the young, the vulnerable, the ones he thinks won't fight back. He is a lifelong predator who thinks the world exists to indulge him.
And now he's back in office, dragging the machinery of the state into the gutter with him. A government run by Trump is a government where files disappear, critics get "investigated," whistleblowers suddenly go quiet, and the powerful smile too easily when people vanish from view. He learned the strongman playbook and threw out everything except the intimidation chapter.
People talk about strong presidents. Trump is a weak man with state power — which is infinitely more dangerous. Weak men in high office don't govern. They retaliate. They weaponize insecurity. They turn fear into policy.
At least Hitler liked dogs. Trump doesn't convincingly like anything unless it claps for him or bends the knee. You have to work pretty damn hard to be morally outclassed by a genocidal maniac on the "basic mammal empathy" scale, but here we are.
Not since Caligula have we seen a leader so shamelessly revolve around his own depravity — and Caligula, for all his monstrosity, at least tried to be entertaining. Trump can't even manage that. He's petty without style, cruel without purpose, decadent without imagination. A small man doing enormous damage.
And Caligula at least had the excuse of madness. Trump? He's wobbling somewhere between malignant and mentally unraveling, and the country gets to play guess-which-mode-he's-in every morning. One moment he's lucid enough to weaponize his cruelty with surgical precision, the next he's slurring conspiracies like a drunk uncle who grabbed the wrong mic at a family reunion.
You can literally watch the mind flicker — bragging, ranting, forgetting, circling back, contradicting himself, then declaring victory over battles he invented five minutes earlier. That instability doesn't soften him; it sharpens him into something even more dangerous. A man who's losing his grip on reality but still clutching state power isn't a president. He's a rolling national emergency with hairspray fumes for a world-view.
If he were fully sane, we'd be dealing with a tyrant. If he were fully gone, we'd be dealing with a patient. Instead we're trapped in the grotesque middle zone — the twilight where ego, decay, and vindictiveness merge into one swaying, snarling spectacle of a man who shouldn't be trusted to steer a golf cart, let alone a country.
Whatever he is, he's not well. And he's dragging the country into the same psychic ditch he's been festering in for decades.
He leaves corruption the way slugs leave slime. Every institution he touches warps. Every person who gets close to him shrivels. His allies degrade themselves. His enemies multiply. His country decays under the weight of his insecurity. He is entropy in a golf shirt.
And let's be clear: there is nothing tragic about him. No Shakespearean flaw, no tortured backstory, no "if only he had chosen differently" nonsense. He's exactly what he wants to be: a cruel mediocrity who figured out how to capture power by appealing to fear, resentment, and the numbed moral nerves of a collapsing political culture.
Trump isn't a leader — he's a plague. A reminder that democracies don't fall to geniuses, but to bottom-feeders who discover that enough people will cheer while the country is marched into the dark.
The only creature he's ever shown real tenderness toward is his own reflection — and even then, only on days when the lights are flattering.
****
Juan Matute
C C R C
Claremont, California
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