Why, a happy belated birthday to you, Mr. President! Lookin’ good, Slick. Most of us only get to dream about installin’ a giant iron claw cage fight on public property when we turn 80 — You the man, Killah!
Go, Gaethje! Chin up, Topuria! Fight! Fight like you’re making America great again! Like you were raised under Eisenhower! Playing golf! In constant loop! On the TV! In living color!
Cage-side knockouts, inclement lightning, rain delays — we got it all!
Now earlier this month, surrounded by bales of hay in a Wisconsin barn, whilst perched in front of a tractor as a thunderstorm raged outside, Trump raged inside, infuriated over being mocked for petulantly walking out on Kristen Welker during a Meet the Press interview because she dared press for clarity on one of his favorite nonexistent issues: rampant voter fraud.
Uh huh. Per usual — Mr. One Trick Pony.
L’Orange at least came up with an inspired new blame for his uninspired repetition: It was Mother Nature’s fault. Apparently, the aeronautics show she was performing outside the barn proved far too much distracting commotion for him to concentrate on getting his lies straight. Inarguably, within the gilded gallows of TrumpWorld, wherever else in Wisconsin could one possibly expect to ever meet the press except a hayloft?
For all zodiac prognosticators out there, did y’all know that throughout our entire American presidential history, only one other Commander-in-Chief (Papa Bush) was born in the month of June? One supposes that this would seem to suggest very little cohabitational intimacy taking place in September. I suppose bringing all those sheaves in just sapped too much energy to waste the rest on more enjoyable recreational activities.
Interestingly, (or not), might I also point out that neither of our two June-born presidents were the progeny of manual laborers/ But fiddle! How I do digress!
Official summertime arrives this week — June 21 — and tradition has it that the livin’ has now gotten easy. Obviously, here in our summer of ’26, tradition hasn’t yet visited the gas pump or a grocery store, nor has it been watching the news lately. Everywhere a palpable sense of doom hangs heavy in the air. And, get this: Extreme anxiety is now the number one psychological disorder — of preschoolers!
According to the Pew Research Center, just 17 percent of Americans now trust Washington to do the right thing. Contrastingly, in 1964, fully 77 percent trusted our government.
Thus, within the span of my own lifetime, the total number of Americans who still have faith in our democracy’s long-term survival has plummeted a mind-numbing 60 percent.
In ordinary summers, we’d be stoked about the FIFA World Cup playing here on American soil, and welcoming visitors from other nations with open arms, rather than opening arms on them if they enter. In ordinary summers, towering arches supporting a 5,000-seat arena wouldn’t have risen on the White House’s destroyed South Lawn to host a mixed martial arts’ UFC cage fight.
In ordinary summers, musical talent would be flocking to participate in our nation’s 250th anniversary celebration — the DC250 — as opposed to stampeding a race for the doors.
Ordinarily, our man in the Oval Office isn’t raping the nation to line his pockets.
Oh, and as for L’Orange’s “nonpartisan” Great American State Fair, currently being assembled on the National Mall for this year’s Fourth of July festivities? At least six states have already reneged on their promise to participate — a number that seems destined only to rise.
Uncoincidentally, across the pond, Putin’s in a major snit. For the first time, he’s finger-shaking the nuclear option — having at last exhausted his steady supply of non-conscripted Russian men being fed into the Ukrainian War sausage machine. You see, in Kremlinland, there is no such boogieman as war. It’s just a bit of a scuffle, is all!
Hmph! A scuffle that has now been actively raging longer than even the entirety of WWI.
At last, too, Russia’s populace is no longer chugging his Kool-Aid blindfolded, what with the last highways connecting the Crimean Peninsula to mainland Russia having been blasted into oblivion by Ukrainian drones, triggering an unprecedented “fuel crisis.”
Translation: There’s just no fuel left in Crimea.
And it’s no great stretch to connect the dots between Ukraine’s successful drone offensive and L’Orange’s sudden need for a new ballroom rooftop Bond-villain “DronePort.”
To nobody’s shock (or awe), one in five Americans believe we live in a worse society than the hellscape George Orwell predicted in his 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. (The other four probably never read it.) And L’Orange now insists a DronePort be installed atop his ballroom pleasure palace “to bolster D.C. defense infrastructure as a vital security upgrade for the nation’s capital.” Yeah, whatever.
Meanwhile, Earth’s poles are melting so quickly that flowers now blooming in Antarctica.
This column — the first in my Good Old Summertime trifecta series — might inspire wiser men to steer clear of the pratfalls inherent upon mentioning even a single derogatory word about our treasonous Supreme Leader, the Orangutan L’Orange. Admittedly, going beige is tempting, but what a rainbow’s-bottom goldmine of depravity and sleaze he is!
At the dry cleaners the other day, I just happened to run into a fellow resident from my building whose opening salvo to me went, “Howard, loved your last column. But I have to ask you something: Do you ever get death threats?”
Rendering moi flummoxed for words is a rare accomplishment: “Uhm, well , not that I know of. The occasional fan letter here and there; otherwise, my editor tends to shield me from strangers’ premeditated depression attempts.”
We’re all gonna have to just suck it up and agree to face the truth, folks: With nearly three more years yet to go, we are mired chest-deep in this stinking muck of an administration hellbent intent on mimicking what amounts to little more, if not far less, than some greasy, Hollywood DOA ratings’ production satirizing a third-rate failed game show host’s parody of a VEEP sitcom revival starring the Kardashian producers’ casting-couch castaways.
Now, some of you will still be here when the Tricentennial rolls around. By then our nation’s 250th anniversary celebration will be but a distant footnote, with few even remembering who was helming this formerly great nation’s battered ship of patriotism — the only president in U.S. history to wear his crown with a smile more mischievous than as if he’d gotten away with being a feloniously convicted, twice impeached, treasonous stormer of our Capitol building.
Oh, hark: The peals of freedom’s bells, ringing sea to shining sea!
— Howard Lewis Russell
Next month I’ll tell you how I truly feel. Don’t hesitate out there to send me just whatever you’ve got, all you enraged Georges & Marthas of the Revolution: AskHoward@dallasvoice.com.