Eat your heart out Donald Trump, you'll never be king

By Hal Brown

Remember this:

Animated link to Twitter below:

If you do a Google Image search for Trump as king or emperor you'll find numerous photoshopped images, some better than others (though the DonkeyHotey drawing in the upper left below is one of the most republished). Click to enlarge.

Donald Trump is an inveterate television watcher so I assume today he'd be hard pressed to avoid all the coverage of the ceremonies making Charles the King. 

In addition to the very British pomp and circumstance he'll see interviews with normal, let me underline normal, people who love him instead of people who are pathologically unhinged and who would never ever be allowed as guests into any of the castles where he currently rules supreme.

Being King of Mar-a-Lago is hardly enough for the man who has redefined the definition of grandiose narcissism to an extreme that if he wasn't flesh, lots of flesh, and blood, clogged with cholesterol as it probably is, he'd be a cartoon character like Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. 

He is only called President Trump as an honorific title probably by people interviewing him on right-wing media, or by those delusional people who think he's still president. 

In fact, my cursory research shows (Emily Post for example) that according to proper form he shouldn't even be called Mr. President. The correct form of address for a former president is to use the title of the highest post that he held before becoming president. unless they have a new position with another title.  

Whether Melania cares about what she is called in impossible to determine but she can never become a real Queen Consort as Camila will be. She was the Duchess of Cornwall so perhaps Melania can make herself the Duchess of Mar-a-Lago or something equally ridiculous. That is unless she buys into Donald wanting to be king and then I suppose she can insist she's referred to as Queen Consort Melania.

Detail from a painting showing
 Henry VIII on his 1520 expedition
 to France. Photograph:
 Royal Collection Trust

Back to Trump the wanna-be king: we can liken him to King Henry VIII. Let's compared the two...

While Trump never had his wives killed he did divorce two of them and cheated on his first wife, Ivana, with Marla Maples who became his second wife. 

He also isn't as fat at Henry XIII was, and he rides a golf cart rather than a horse. 

Consider this from the Grunge website:

No one remembers Henry VIII fondly. He murdered two of his six wives, divorced two more, lost one in childbirth, and died before he could murder the last one. When you ask pretty much anyone what Henry VIII was all about, they'll mostly just repeat some version of the above, because when you're a wife-killing, smelly egomaniac with zero redeeming qualities, it doesn't really matter what else you did in your life. People are going to remember you for being a wife-killing, smelly egomaniac with zero redeeming qualities. 

But Henry VIII was so much more than just those things. He was also greedy, paranoid, a hypocrite, a homophobe, a perpetual loser of wars, and gross. He was very, very gross. Did he have any actual, redeeming qualities? Not that we know of. If he did, they were overshadowed by all of the very bad things he did during his long, awful reign. What bad things? These bad things. Here's the horrible, messed up truth of Henry VIII.

Sound like Trump? There's more:

According to History, the court of Henry VIII was one of history's most opulent. Evidently, no one taught Henry the value of money when he was a child, because just one year after inheriting the throne at the age of 18, he blew most of the kingdom's annual revenue on Christmas parties. Yes, everyone loves an epic party, and plenty of modern people go into debt so that they can buy nice things for everyone on their holiday list, but imagine spending £13.5 million ($18 million) in a single year. Henry's holiday expenses included food, entertainment, and gifts.

That kind of excess continued throughout all of Henry's reign. In fact, he was so into parties that he expanded the kitchens of Hampton Court Palace so they filled 55 rooms. Banquets frequently served up to 14 courses to 600 people and included dishes like grilled beaver tails, whole roasted peacock, and boar's head. So you could say Henry ate his kingdom's fortune, and that would actually be close to accurate.

I wonder if the God-king's swooning sycophants think it should be their deity being officially made King of England today. More to the point, I wonder what King Tut of Trump Tower is thinking today.

You can make comments by scrolling down the the bottom of the page.

Here's some:

I am trying to promoted my stories which now only appear on this blog since I have been banned for life from putting them on Daily Kos.  You can read my take on why this happened here. At a minimum these stories for about 80 reads but a few between one and two thousand. Typically they had 10-30 or so comments but a few got over 200.

You can read all of the 1,700 plus stories except the one that got me booted off the site without explanation here. Because I didn't save it I had to recreate the gist of it from memory in my blog story about what happened.

Below are screen images of the most recent series of stories (click to enlarge and go to this link to read any of them):

Anything you can do to share my blog with your friends will prompt my gratitude. 

I am also putting links to my stories on Twitter here, on Instagram here, on my Facebook page here, and on the private Duty to Warn Facebook group started by Dr. John Gartner which I encourage you to join.

Digby, Dana, and Rick, my favorite columnists

My two favorite columnists are Dana Milbank and Heather "Digby" Parton, and runner up Rick Wilson. The later is known by her fans simply as Digby. After his most recent column I could nickname Milbank as Dana the Divinely inspired.

Above: Dana Milbank (left) and Heather "Digby" Parton

 

Heather "Digby" Parton who writes columns several times a week for Salon and publishes on her blog, Hullaballoo, and Dana Milbank who writes a regular column for The Washington Post, are my two favorite  columnists.

Unfortunately you need a subscription to the Post to read Dana's columns. This is his most recent column:

Dana, speaking for God, country, and I suppose you might as well throw in an apple pie a la mode... 

... begins this column this way:

And, lo, it shall come to pass, on the eighth day of the eleventh month of the Year of our Lord 2022, that Our Heavenly Father shall gather the inhabitants of His Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, from the Sacred City of Filial Love to His Earthly Paradise on the Monongahela, and from all other dwelling places therein; and He shall say, “Riseth up ye and goeth to the polling places; and therein casteth ye thy ballots in such manner that the Heavenly Host doth thunder, ‘Yea, Doug Mastriano, assuredly and verily thou art a cuckoo bird.’ ”— the Gospel according to nobody in particular

He concludes:

Will the good people of Pennsylvania succumb to conspiracy lunacy masquerading as scripture? Or will they, and voters everywhere, decide that this is just one more sign that the false prophets of MAGA have gone entirely too far?

God willing, voters will know them by their fruits. 

His Washington Post column tops their Opinions section above the conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt who is also a Fox News regular. I never gift Hewitt with a click. You can see his Wikipedia profile here and compare it to Milbank's profile here where you can see that Milbank is no stranger to experiencing the consequences of pushing the limits of snarky satire. For example from Wikipedia: Milbank and Chris Cillizza appeared in a series of humor videos called "Mouthpiece Theater" which appeared on The Washington Post's website. An outcry followed a video in which, during a discussion of the White House "Beer Summit", they chose new brands for a number of people, including "Mad Bitch Beer" for Hillary Clinton. Both men apologized for the video and the series was canceled.

The brief Post profile describes Dana as sketching the foolish, the fallacious, and the felonious in politics. Here's his Twitter page.

Then there's Digby. Her Salon columns, fortunately, you can read here without a subscription. These, as of this posting, are her three most recent ones:

This is Digby's Twitter page.

To say Digby is as prolific as she is clever is an understatement. On her blog Digby's Hullaballoo she and colleague Tom Sullivan (he is a North Carolina-based writer who posts at Hullabaloo and Scrutiny Hooligans and a former columnist for the Asheville Citizen-Times. His posts have appeared at Crooks and Liars, Campaign for America's Future, Truthout.org, AlterNet, and TomPaine.org.) Between them they post several stories every day. 

I like Digby's shameless self promoting reference to herself as "what rugby sez.." It reminds me of the photo of myself I used on my Twitter page.

Here are a few choice examples of the snarky wordsmithing which has made her one of my two favorite columnists. It is from her recent column about Trump's MAGA judge not being able to save hIm:

• It will be interesting to see if Trump's lawyers make the case that he magically declassified all those documents with a Vulcan mind-meld when he was still president as his minions have been saying all over television ever since the search.
• Trump himself has not intelligibly addressed this latest state of affairs but he has been emitting periodic primal screams as events unfold.
• They would be safer in Central Park because Donald Trump doesn't live there, an easy target of all of America's adversaries who know he has all the common sense of a bath mat.

My runner up  for favorite columnist is Rick Wilson. 

Wilson is a Lincoln Project co-founder who is sometimes on MSNBC.  I wrote about him in a Daily Kos essay here. He's not as funny as Dana and Digby but he does have a scalpel sharp wit but  sometimes it is a bit too cruel for my sensibility.

Here's his Twitter page:

Here's my most recent tweet which reeks of a probably futile attempt at self-promotion. Perhaps Dana, Digby, or Rick will retweet it...

Do you have a favorite columnist? Do you read Dana and Digby? Scroll down the page to make a comment.