Bananas

Beginning in nonchalance, ending in farce.

Bananas.

All citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now 16 years old.

– Rebel Commander Esposito from Bananas, 1971

Three weeks ago in this space — and beyond that for 10 years, mainly on public radio and MSNBC — I enumerated all of the horrors that a Trump presidency holds in store with a GOP Reichstag and a Confederacy of Dunces in his cabinet.

My latest list had 16 items, including orders targeting public education, lawfare against the press, deportations, ruinous tariffs, deregulation of Big Energy and Big Finance and Big Business and the cutting of entitlements — you know, the whole MAGA agenda that I’ve been raising alarms over since back when my prostate functioned. The other day, I’m ashamed to admit, I sent a copy to a friend to boast about how prescient I’ve proved to be in such horribly short order.

But, I must say (resorting to an annoying cliche that I also employ with shame), Club Med Gaza was not on my bingo card. Trump wants 2 million people exiled and the territory converted into the Palestine Riviera.

Yes, tragedy has indeed become farce. Back in 1971, when Woody Allen’s feckless character Fielding Mellish joined a central American rebel army to impress his girlfriend with his commitment to justice and human rights, he wound up on the winning side of a revolution. But the moment the rebels seized power, their leader Esposito began issuing deranged executive orders.

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish.

Also, most famously, the underwear proclamation quoted above. Seemed funny at the time. Now, as another annoying saying goes, not so much. We are witnessing the destruction of our society by el Presidente Esposito.

From this day, the Gulf of Mexico will be called the Gulf of America. All citizens born here whose parents weren’t citizens are no longer citizens. We will own Greenland and the Panama Canal! Canada will be the 51st state. We will have no need for high-speed rail because plane trips cost $2. Windmills will be outlawed. DEI will be criminalized. The US Agency for International Development is a Marxist enterprise that will be dismantled and sold for scrap. The vice Sultan will be Elon Musk. By his third term in office, Trump will be on Mount Rushmore.

With Congressional majorities populated by wicked-witch guardsmen chanting “Oh-Eee-Yah! Ee-Oh-Ah! Oh, we love the ollllllld one!” and immunity conferred by right-wing Supreme Court zealots, immunity is actually impunity. The president cannot be prosecuted for any official action, the Republicans have already twice acquitted him of profoundly impeachable offenses, and he therefore has carte blanche to wreak havoc. And it’s only been three weeks. He is a psychopathic dictator dictating his ass off and the entire world faces ruin.

Here I offer one final apology, because I’m about to bring up another I-told-you-so moment I’ve mentioned in Bully Pulpit at least once before. It is an excerpt from a 2016 On the Media episode aired the day after Trump won the presidency the first time around. For the previous year, on the show I cohosted for 20 years, I had been madly raising red flags about the approaching category 5 political hurricane that threatened democracy — an anti-Trump activism for which my cohost Brooke Gladstone had expressed fatigue and increasing contempt. In this day-after episode I asked, “What happens if President Donald Trump does half the things he’s promised to do?”

GLADSTONE: “If you’re going to bring out the rhetorical heavy artillery, you do it in response to actual real things, not in response to his own rhetorical flourishes. We don’t hate Hitler because he made ugly speeches.”

ME: “I haven’t compared him to Hitler. What I have said is that the political process is looking exactly like Weimar Germany, which was a nation that made a bad decision, a historically catastrophic decision, based on exactly the same kind of fears and hatreds that have propelled Donald Trump into office. Now whether that demagoguery turns into something deeply dark, I don’t know, but I refuse to be put off the idea that the political forces aren’t a direct parallel to what got Hitler elected before he did a single ugly act.”

I then invoked the Katherine Anne Porter novel Ship of Fools, about a vessel full of variously marginalized passengers sailing toward Germany in 1933, pitifully rationalizing their optimism about their destination.

ME: “What I most hope … is that we are not all passengers on the Ship of Fools.”

GLADSTONE: “What the fuck does that mean?!”

It was neither the first time nor the last that I was ridiculed as a raving Chicken Little. But now that the farcical doom is upon us, and with it the cost of performative nonchalance and arrogant denial, congratulations to my former colleague. Now you know.