The deafening silence of Trump

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/06/2021 (1954 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I have a confession to make, and some of you are not going to like it.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to blurt it out — I miss Donald Trump!

Seriously, my life just has not felt the same since the bombastic alleged billionaire lost the 2020 election and was punted out of the White House.

(Warning to Extremely Right Wing Readers: If you do not agree Trump lost the last election, you probably will not want to read the rest of today’s column.)

It’s not just that life has become boring now that Trump has been forced to retreat to his private Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, although it is definitely a tad more on the dull side.

Imagine if every day of your life, the moment you climbed out of bed, you were greeted with a spectacular train wreck. Then, suddenly, one morning, you hop out of the sack, peek out the window and … Gasp! No train wreck!

That would be enough to throw any reasonable human being off their stride. But there’s a lot more to missing Trump’s roller-coaster presidency than simply not getting that daily shot of adrenaline the former president provided.

For me (and a lot of people like me) Trump was the North Star I used to set my moral compass, the yardstick that allowed me to determine whether I was still in full possession of my faculties and standing on the sane side of the spectrum.

Every morning, after reading the paper in the tub and knocking back a cup of coffee, the first thing I’d do was sit down at the computer, Google Trump’s name, and read whatever inane or deeply offensive quote he had just uttered — “I would bet if you took a poll in the FBI I would win that poll by more than anybody’s won a poll” — just to see whether it caused me to become outraged and turn a shade somewhere between purple and crimson.

If that happened, it was a sure sign my mental faculties were intact and my inner compass was set to True North. Then I could safely sit down and hammer out a column making fun of whatever Trump had said, and pointing out that his hairstyle looked as if an injured woodland creature had climbed on top of his head and died.

These columns, without fail, would prompt an angry flood of email from readers —you know who you are — who believed Trump when he described himself as, and here’s a direct quote, “a very stable genius.”

These emails always contained several correctly spelled words and made the central point that I was an idiot and had no business sharing opinions they did not agree with.

With Trump in forced exile, however, I no longer have a reliable way to set my moral compass, leaving me adrift in a sea of relative sanity. I have tried Googling Joe Biden’s name in the morning, but it just doesn’t have the same crazy cachet.

I mean, even if the new president says something I don’t agree with, he says it in a calm, reasonable, low-key manner that does not make me want to kick the nearest puppy.

Biden’s daily utterances are not the sort of thing that political junkies want to discuss around the office water cooler or in a local coffee shop, assuming health rules allowed you to hang around the local coffee shop.

Consider the following scintillating political conversation I just made up:

First office worker: “Hey, did you hear what Joe Biden said last night?”

Second office worker: “No.”

First office worker: “Me neither.”

Less than a month ago, it looked like I’d be able to once again get a daily dose of Trump’s special brand of truculent lunacy when he launched his blog page, “From the desk of Donald J. Trump,” to fill the void left when he was banned from virtually every social media platform on the planet.

Trump touted his blog as “a beacon of freedom” in a “time of silence and lies,” which gave me hope it would be a fresh source for his rambling and false statements about how the election was stolen by the forces of evil.

But this week, those hopes were dashed when Trump suddenly pulled the plug on his “beacon of freedom” after just 29 days in existence.

“It was just auxiliary to the broader efforts we have and are working on,” Trump adviser Jason Miller told CNBC. “Hoping to have more information on the broader efforts soon, but I do not have a precise awareness of timing.”

It has been reported the guy who refuses to admit he is the ex-president elected to cancel his own site after being roundly mocked for the dismal traffic it attracted.

Q: If Donald Trump hit the caps-lock key and no one was around to retweet it, would it make a noise?

A: Apparently not.

It is also being pointed out that Trump’s blog didn’t last as long as the presidency of William Henry Harrison (31 days) or the lifespan of the biggest marketing flop in history, New Coke (79 days).

“When your blog is shorter than Lori Loughlin’s prison sentence, then you know it was a fail,” one social-media wag sagely tweeted.

The great news for columnists like me is that Trump has not launched his campaign for 2024 because he continues to insist he didn’t lose in 2020. He is reportedly telling people close to him that he expects to be reinstated as president as soon as this August.

Maybe my moral compass is out of whack, but how can you not miss a guy like that?

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca