The Escalator to Our Hell
Ten years ago a blathering idiot descended an escalator and took us all to hell
Today is the ten-year “anniversary” of what was supposed to be just another day of American political comedy when a cosplaying troglodyte from the celebrity world of Mark Burnett1 descended upon us down a golden escalator and immediately launched into a tirade against Mexicans:2
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
I don’t remember if it was the same escalator where he hit on a ten-year-old girl.3 As the man of the broken people might say, “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, I dunno. But maybe so.”
Okay, sorry, it wasn’t the same escalator. I took a look at the article I referenced in my footnote.
That happened in 1992.
This was a different escalator.
Ten years later, we’re watching him attempt to build something quite different than the big hotels and bankrupt casinos of his prior years as a mostly failed businessman. (Quick question to Trumpsters: How do you bankrupt a casino?)
We’re watching him attempt to build a feudal, authoritarian theocracy that attacks American citizens on the street and sends them to foreign concentration camps.
We knew who he was on that day ten years ago when everyone thought he was just that weird idiot celebrity President Obama made fun of in front of journalists. Obama made fun of the idiot (and Fox News) not because Obama was mean-spirited, but because the idiot claimed, repeatedly, that the President of the United States was an illegitimate office holder born in Kenya.
Trump was an idiot then. He’s an idiot now. He was a serial sexual abuser then. He would be now if he weren’t surrounded by women like White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles,4 who enables his every whim but probably limits his conjugal visits to Laura Loomer and the occasional crucifix-bearing blonde Mike Johnson intern.
By the time of his nomination, he had accumulated dozens of complaints about his sexual behavior and had established a pattern of not paying the same kinds of blue-collar people, such as small contractors, he was attracting to his cult. Hundreds of suits against his companies were already on the court dockets for non-payment of services rendered.
Before he descended the escalator and began our journey into hell, he or his companies had racked up 4095 lawsuits.5
If you’ve ever wondered how he has mastered the art of delay within the court system, the answer lies in those thousands of lawsuits, most of which reveal him to be the defendant. These are defamation lawsuits, non-payment of services lawsuits, and anything else you can think of when contemplating what types of lawsuits companies can face from angry customers and vendors.
Nothing about who he is today is different from that day he glided down that escalator. He was a racist then. He was a serial sexual abuser then. He was an abuser of the court system then. He was a bad businessman then. He was on the receiving end of thousands of lawsuits then.
He had questionable seating arrangements with his own 15 year old daughter then.6 He was on the Epstein list then. He flirted with ten-year-old girls then.
70 million broken people didn’t care, and voted him into office anyway.
The only thing that has changed is us. We’ve become meaner, more anxious, more sick. We’ve allowed his approach to life to infect our children for the last ten years. The chilling effects of that won’t be known for some time, but we know that many of the young men who came of age during his first presidency voted for him instead of Kamala during this latest second round.
After that first horrific term, which included a devastating and avoidable plague, was over, voters received four years of blissful quiet as a professional with years of experience (too many, according to the usual 70 million broken people) tried to give them student loan relief and managed to usher through an infrastructure bill that reminded folks of FDR’s ambitions through a recalcitrant Congress led by increasingly cultish personalities.
Then, 70 million wackadoodles said, “Now that he’s a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, let’s do another round!”
And now, here we are. We are in a position where we will lose an entire generation of young, impressionable men influenced by an ongoing era of mediocrity, science denial, misogyny, prejudice, and general ignorance fostered by a man who considers knowledge and scholarship a public enemy.
Ten years of this.
And counting.
Thanks for reading! Please stay safe if you’re out in the streets protesting. Don’t give them an excuse to shoot you.
Notes
I may have lied about no changes made to the CSPAN screencap. If it is a lie, it is possible I added a clown face from a Creative Commons image created by Wikipedia.
The original elevator descent even featured music by Neil Young, who hates him, because Trump doesn’t give a shit about copyright, music or otherwise.
Footnotes
The producer who polluted the television world with the 14-year run of The Apprentice.
Gabbatt, Adam. 2019. “Golden Escalator Ride: The Surreal Day Trump Kicked off His Bid for President.” The Guardian. The Guardian. June 14, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/13/donald-trump-presidential-campaign-speech-eyewitness-memories.
Lopez, German. 2016. “Donald Trump Once Saw a Child on an Escalator and Said, ‘I’m Going to Be Dating Her in 10 Years.’” Vox. October 13, 2016. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/12/13265670/trump-10-year-old-girl.
“USA TODAY Network: Dive into Donald Trump’s Thousands of Lawsuits.” 2016. Lansing State Journal. 2016. https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/pages/interactives/trump-lawsuits/.
I miss Obama, loved rewatching that roast.