The fall of the delusional

Look at that face. Take a good, hard look at it.

Sure. He's trying to project strength and determination. Anger and rage.

But all that comes out is a bully who's been caught. 

Look at those eyes. Those are the eyes of a man who knows he's been caged. A man who knows he's been caught. A man who knows that his charmed life is at an end. He is trying to convey power and threat, but he has been shorn of those attributes. He is left only with pretense, and it's plain for all to see who have eyes and haven't been drawn into his cult. He is an empty, wet paper bag, about to be tossed into the garbage, not even worth recycling.

He began 2015 as a spoiler candidate. He wasn't supposed to win. He was supposed to get a bit of revenge against the skinny Black guy from Chicago for humiliating him while the world's most wanted terrorist was being snuffed out on the orders of his jovial, mocking tormentor, whose sang froid betrayed not a hint of the momentous event occurring at that time. A man who knew his number, who knew his utter emptiness, and who reveled in puncturing his unearned sense of self-importance. Oh, how that must have burned. How that cratered his soul. 

He would say the most hateful, odious things. He would rhetorically lay waste to a world which laughed at him. But that was it. He would lose and turn it into a money-making venture. He could go on with his life.

Instead, as a result of a confluence of improbable events, he won. He got the prize he didn't want. And then, as is always the case with him, he decided he did want the new toy. He was a man used to getting new toys and showing them off. He didn't think he'd get this one, an entire country to rule, but he did, and he wasn't going to let go.

A country to rule. Not govern. Not take care of as a citizen. A country to dominate. A country to punish. A country to turn into his plaything. His toy.

So, he did what he always had for his entire miserable life. He blundered in, unaware and not caring of law, custom, ritual. He surrounded himself with sycophants who lauded his world-historical genius, groveling like courtiers at the court of the Sun King. He tried to remake the country in his image, but was unable to. The country was stronger than him. The country withstood him. He didn't know which buttons to push to get his way. He lurched from crisis to crisis, his regime a hodge-podge of misfit toys, as broken as him, who saw in him their apotheosis. "If he can do this, maybe I, too, can."

After four long years, he was rejected. He was jettisoned. He was dispatched to the wilderness. But we should have known he wouldn't go quietly. He knew—he knew—that he would be held to account by his successor. He knew that millions brayed for his scalp. He knew that the only thing which had kept him out of prison heretofore was his position. Without that position he would lose his immunity. So he did what he always did: he cheated. He lied. He gamed the system.

But what in the world from where he came that would be seen as normal business, in the world which he tried to bend to his will that was sedition. Insurrection. Treason. And the country he wanted to rule stood up and fought back.

Ever since that day in 2021, he's been living on borrowed time. If he had just left—as he promised he would if he had lost to that "senile old man"—he may have been able to go back to his previous life. But this final crime was the proverbial last straw. It assured that he would be hounded until the country meted out the justice he merited.

And that's the path which led to this picture. An avoidable path. A path he didn't have to take. 

His tale isn't a tragedy. He has nothing of the tragic about him. He is no Hamlet, no Lear. His own decisions led him to that jail in Georgia. And he will serve as a lesson for others who wish to be like him. In that, and nothing else, will he be useful to the country which took in his criminal family from Germany. What a sorry epitaph.

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