The Trump To Remember

Rebecca Solnit on fortune’s fool

If you haven’t read Rebecca Solnit in LitHub “on the corrosive privilege of the most mocked man in the world,” do so right now:

The American buffoon’s commands were disobeyed, his secrets leaked at such a rate his office resembled the fountains at Versailles or maybe just a sieve (this spring there was an extraordinary piece in the Washington Post with thirty anonymous sources), his agenda was undermined even by a minority party that was not supposed to have much in the way of power, the judiciary kept suspending his executive orders, and scandals erupted like boils and sores. Instead of the dictator of the little demimondes of beauty pageants, casinos, luxury condominiums, fake universities offering fake educations with real debt, fake reality tv in which he was master of the fake fate of others, an arbiter of all worth and meaning, he became fortune’s fool.

Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump

This is the one. It’s the one I will come back to over and over like that one Ask Polly, and I will read it again and again until it soothes me like Klonopin.