Everybody rushed in after the fact to be first with the goods on how Trump pulled off the biggest electoral upset in modern presidential history. I was already ahead of them though. I had been covering the political briar patch with a steady diary approach for four presidential election cycles, both terms of W, the meteoric rise and weird re-election of Barack Obama, and of course the first flutterings of the Republican country club riot over replacing him. I had three blogs to draw from over that time, and a couple+ books out of it, including one demonstrating that I had Obama figured out long before even his fiercest beltway critics caught on.

I recognized the unique potential of Trump to win the whole thing early, in June of 2014. I could prove it. Why has it taken me this long to do my own book about the most spectacular politician of all our lifetimes? Two reasons. I didn’t realize I had produced so much material about Trump, the blog in which I did most of it having been essentially shut down by technical problems(?) in early 2017. Out of sight, out of mind.

There’s also the matter of my 24-48 Rule regarding Trump himself. It was hilarious but odd to me during the campaign and afterwards that so many smart observers raced to react instantly to whatever Trump did or said and then explain to us with great confidence what it all meant. They were always wrong. The ground is now littered with the careers of those who were smarter than Trump, better persons than Trump, and insider shrewd in every area where he was a bumbling loudmouth newcomer. I learned quickly not to offer explanations right away but give even the most provocative Trump events a full day (24 hrs) or two (48 hrs)) to marinate and start exhibiting their unfailingly Machiavellian consequences. Contrary to Facebook conventions, I know, but patience has served well there since the inauguration in particular.

Some things, like the big picture of Trump and what he was doing with the arc of his political life, required more than 24-48 hours of course. So I gave them 24 months from when he started running in earnest. Now I’ve concluded that the blog diaries represent a revealing slice of what the hell was going on in 2016 and 2017. They’re very different from all those other books, which are full of a lot of writing and quotes and bullet points and blaring headlines. Maybe right about a lot of things but very much after the fact. In Rē Trump is an account from when it was all actually going down.

My book is full of pictures and rock videos (not all Stones, either) and prizefights and partially dressed women and jokes at everyone’s expense, including my own AND Trump’s. There’s actual writing too, as well as reference to things you might not expect, like the antikythera device, the works of P.G. Wodehouse, bad words, the nature of reality, Ted Knight’s greatest role, the Inland Taipan, the Brutalist School of modern architecture, and a big chunk of horselaugh observations about the politics of Y2000.

Availability and price? Right now and for free. There’s no way to get this into print or even to Kindle with so much electronic content. It is absolutely an Internet book and an Internet experience. So I give it away with no regrets in hopes some of you might enjoy it. Here’s how you access it.

Personally , I would not begin with Part 6 but Part 1. Consider it an impressionistic prelude to what would come. A contextual explanation of what Trump tied into that created a new breed of voter. We have always been a people who have a romance of themselves, no matter what slings and arrows are hurled at us. Movies, music, heroic stories, ideas of freedom, have always been intrinsic to that sense of romance. We have always understood, regardless of what the elites say, that violence in the movies and music have always been figurative, symbolic, cathartic, and necessary. What did Trump connect to? A concatenation of government-imposed force and sufferings. He became in his gold-tinted life an apotheosis of what one man could do if he wasn’t Harvard and Harvard Law but a free spirit turned loose.

[It worked. All these years later, he turned out to be an astonishingly successful President. The romantic sense was not wrong. Doomed maybe to constant persecution, but he turned out to be as brave as his supporters had hoped.]

IN RĒ TRUMP

Part 6 — The Trump Term in Office

From Instapunk Rules:

Part 5 (Jan 27, 2016 <– > Feb 16, 2015)

Part 4 (May 6, 2016 <– > Jan 27, 2016)

Part 3 (Nov 12, 2016 <– > May 13, 2016)

Part 2 (Mar 17, 2016 <– > Dec 31, 2016)

Part 1 (Dec 13, 2016 <– > Mar 24, 2016)

REMEMBER TO USE THE “SMALL BACK BUTTON” TO TOGGLE BETWEEN THE BLOG ENTRY AND THE LINKED POSTS.

I’ll be adding this to my other Internet book offerings at my writing website Laird Ink very shortly. Plenty there to look at besides this.

I was doing my nightly bedtime reading of the Vatican 2 documents, which I find soothing and conducive to harmonious alpha waves, when I stumbled across this strikingly poetic passage that just begged to be read aloud. I therefore had Maria read it to me after she finished the dishes and put my kids down for the night. She has a lovely voice and a lilting Latin rhythm to her reading. I didn’t even hear her leave to go home to her own family. The last I did hear was this beautiful passage:

“It is in accordance with their dignity as persons-that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility-that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth. However, men cannot discharge these obligations in a manner in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom. Therefore the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature. In consequence, the right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it and the exercise of this right is not to be impeded, provided that just public order be observed.”

It was fresh in my mind when I woke the next morning. It had stirred some memory of poesy in me, of the soul immersing variety. I had a particular quote in mind, a lost stanza, as it were, I needed before proceeding with my prosaic diurnal duties.

I called a Monsignor with whom I have been close friends for many years. He recommended contacting his own son, a bright artistic lad we had both come to know soon after the revelatory paternity test. “Well, Tom, he’s what I’d call a Scholar of the Life Lived,” said my friend cryptically. So I took his advice and rang J__ up on the phone.

I read parts of the inspiring document and he chuckled, “I’ve got the poem you’re looking for.” And he did. Here it is:

“In me you see a man alone. Held by the habit of being on his own. A man who listens to the trembling of the trees. With sentimental ease. In me you see a man alone. Behind the wall he’s learned to call his home. A man who still goes walking in the rain. Expecting love again. A man not lonely. Except when the dark comes on. A man learning to live with, memories of midnights, that fell apart at dawn. In me you see a man alone. Drinking up Sundays and spending them alone. A man who knows love is seldom what it seems. Just other people’s dreams…”

From Frank Sinatra’s gorgeous, deep, and extremely devotional album of the same name.

I hummed the melody through my long public transit commute to the office. Even beatboxed it a bit to myself, the silent solo of my life’s own unique drumbeat. People ask me how I remain on such an even keel, never losing my temper or, seemingly, my way, despite the temptations of disagreements at work or in politics. I can be alone, unruffled by the petty maelstroms of others, quite unresponsive to them on any secular level, because that is MY freedom of religion and Vatican 2 tells me so. With a little boost from the Chairman of the Board himself, now in his own appointed place in God’s kingdom. And so I give my thanks for the me I’m free to be:

“Deus, cuius misericordiae non est numerus, et bonitatis infinitus est thesaurus: piissimae majestati tuae pro collatis donis gratias agimus, tuam semper clementiam exorantes…”

Amen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTCFd_coas8