Alden Graves | Graves Registry: The kid in the dynamite factory | The Bennington Banner

By Alden Graves

“And I tested very positively in another sense, this morning. I tested positively toward negative, right? So I tested perfectly this morning. Meaning I tested negative. But that’s a way of saying it: positively toward the negative.” – Donald J. Trump

I always think that it’s a good idea to keep in mind that this is the guy with the nuclear codes. It’s a little like watching a 7-year-old wander around a dynamite factory with a flamethrower.

You noticed, of course, that he managed to slip in the word “perfect.” Like that phone call.

The Trumps, evidently, are as big on magic as they are on being perfect. Of course nothing beats the magic of being transformed into a business tycoon after being handed a quarter-billion-dollar estate. The two prodigal sons orbiting Donald Trump are evidently gearing up for the big showdown in the fall because, if the trellis falls, so fall the clinging vines.

Eric Trump, on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox propaganda outlet, offered the idiotic notion that the pandemic that has killed nearly 100,000 people in this country was little more than a concocted hoax and it will “magically disappear” after the election. Both Trump and Pirro appeared to be sober at the moment.

Don, Jr., as he is apt to do, decided to go a couple of steps lower, releasing a disgusting meme that suggested that Joe Biden was a pedophile.

Treading on moral high ground is perilous territory for defenders of this particular president and perhaps even more so for his eldest son. Don Jr. left his wife and five children to pal around with a professional opportunist who had reportedly been booted off the Fox network for “sexual misconduct” and abusive behavior towards other Fox employees.

This slimy pedophile route has been traveled before. The son of disgraced former national security advisor Michael Flynn, another hapless junior and a former aide to Donald Trump, promoted the repulsive fiction that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were sexually abusing children out of a Washington D.C. pizzeria. Honest, that what they claimed.

When I read about an incident like the so-called Pizzagate scandal, it reminds me of the kind of lowlife flotsam that wash up on the banks of the Potomac and somehow manage to insert themselves into the highest levels of our government. It also reminds me of what demented people are capable of doing. Nice doesn’t work on these folks.

There is a line in “Mississippi Burning,” Alan Parker’s 1988 movie about racism that I have quoted before. Gene Hackman played an FBI agent who is frustrated by the uselessness of attempting to solve the murders of three civil rights activists in the bigot-infested Deep South by choosing the high road and playing by the book. He rages at his superior, “These people are crawling out of the sewer, Mr. Ward! Maybe the gutter’s where we outta be!”

Don, Jr.’s implication, that he later dismissed as “joking around,” that Biden was somehow involved in child molestation is illustrative of the gutter rat level upon which the Trump family operates ruthlessly and, unfortunately, effectively.

I have been waiting for nearly four years for Donald Trump to bottom out. I am now firmly convinced that I have a better chance of finding the fountain of youth. Any man who is capable of hawking a potentially lethal medication to millions of gullible people has no bottom. A man who is willing to deny aid to desperate people in states that are encouraging voting by mail because he perceives that as a threat to his reelection has no bottom.

It is simply the way he is. Moral vacuity is as much a part of Trump as the arrogance and narcissism and they are traits he has passed on to his two eldest sons.

Is descending to the level of people who regard civility as a sign of weakness the only way to rid our country of this pack of greedy, soulless grifters? That is the question that is inherent in the quote from Parker’s movie and one that I don’t know the answer to. All I can tell you is that it worked in “Mississippi Burning.”

For most sitting presidents, losing a reelection just means the prospect of lucrative book deals and speaking engagements, a slot fairly high on the most admired people lists, good tables at restaurants, and a less-hectic, comfortable retirement.

For Donald Trump, losing could very well mean a jail term.

I sincerely hope that, when Joe Biden wins in November, he won’t do for Trump what Gerald Ford did for the last felonious Republican president by concluding that pursuing a criminal investigation would not be in the country’s best interests. Trump has blatantly used his office for personal gain and he has sneered in the face of constitutional laws. It would be in the country’s most vital and fundamental interests for Trump and his sycophants to be held criminally responsible so that what has gone on for the last four years never happens again.

One last point: I hate those damn masks. They are hot and they entwine with my hearing aids. I wear it out in public because responsible people have told me that I should. This ridiculous babble about the masks being an infringement of freedom is typical of the total disregard for others that millions of people in America continually exhibit; one that Trump has, in their pliable minds, validated. We don’t have the freedom to make other people sick no matter what Dr. Quack might say.

This isn’t, despite what they believe, the United States of Me.

Alden Graves writes a regular column for the Banner.