Raising a Ruckus: How It Will Be in Trumpastan


Allen RuckerPresident Trump. How do you like the sound of that? Future News Flash: “Today President Trump described German Chancellor Angela Merkel as old, fat, and ‘someone should do something about that mustache!’ At the same time, he lauded North Korean despot Kim Jong Un as ‘someone he could work with’ because ‘hey, he’s a winner and I like my winners with bowl haircuts.’”

Couldn’t possibly happen, right? Not a chance in Hades that such a shoot-from-the-hip, trash-talking zillionaire could really be president? Well, think again. Do not sell The Donald short. There is apparently a deep, national vein of anger and disgust for anyone Trump decides to pick on. He seems to be able to channel America’s 3 a.m., f-you, Charlie, psyche. No more patina of niceness toward anyone who is not white, mad as hell, and most likely, in the parlance, a “low-information voter.” Mark my words: In a Trump presidency, it will be open season on gimps.

First of all, to Trump, gimps are funny. They walk funny, talk funny, and don’t know how to wear nice clothes. Everyone knows by now how Trump, in describing disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, waved his arms like an AirDancer in front of Subway. Big laugh. Or how he nailed wheelchair-using columnist Charles Krauthammer by calling him a loser “who just sits there.” Booyah! “Take that, little man who dared to call me a rodeo clown. That’s why I called my new book Crippled America. The whole country is full of lame crybabies just like you!”

The thing about Trump’s unvarnished attacks on the disabled, not unlike his attacks on Megyn Kelly or John McCain or every person on earth with brown skin, is that no one not being insulted seems to care that much! Television and newspapers can play up these smears like they were an offense against God and his voting bloc will go, “So what? The man speaks his mind. Those gimps are a pain in the keister and finally someone has the guts to say so.”

After decades in which your ordinary Joe American would open every door for someone in a wheelchair and tell them that they were doing “just super,” the truth finally comes from the man who has no governor on his mouth. If Trump should win the presidency, then all civility toward the disabled among a huge swath of Americans will be out the window. Soon it will be, “Open your own door, gimpo. I’m not your house boy, and while you’re at it, get a job weaving baskets or something and stop sucking off the government!”

Trump hates losers. If you are so cursed as to be in a wheelchair or otherwise impaired, you are ipso facto a big fat loser. And probably stupid, since losers are generally stupid and vice-versa. And how are you going to help make America great again? In fact, you are standing (or sitting) in the way. No crafty Chinese diplomat is going to cower in the presence of some guy in a wheelchair arguing about tariffs on rhino tusks.

Trump is in many ways the real American id, or childish bully, no longer taking orders from the American superego, or grown up. For decades that collective id has been browbeaten into biting its collective lip in the presence of people who wear towels on their heads, sit around all day in front of Home Depot hoping you will hire them, talk a street patois that you can’t understand, or wheel around the mall shouting, “Excuse me, I’m rolling here,” like they own the place.

Think of a classic American play like Cat On A Hot Tin Roof or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Characters in these dramas tend to be perfectly nice to one another until they’ve downed a quart of gin and then, watch out! Trump has a gift of doing this kind of mean-spirited truth-telling without the need of getting plastered. He is already plastered on himself. He says anything he damn pleases and his adoring crowd whoops and hollers.

If you use a chair, stay indoors and/or buy a weapon. If Trump becomes president, they’re coming after you. They’ll be rounding up all of the nation’s losers and shipping them off to Canada. That’s a whole country of losers — or as they say up there, hosers.

In Trumpastan, we are all hosers.


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