OPINION:
Trump Derangement Syndrome is real.
I understand that the mental patients in the American political press are so deranged that they cannot appreciate the epic drama we are living through as former President Donald Trump pulls off the greatest political comeback in history. But they should at least be able to enjoy the cast of characters who have emerged from the murky depths to be his army of antagonists in this great play.
If Donald Trump is a carnival barker with his plodding elephants and trapeze girls in sexy, sequined leotards, this motley crew of Trump detractors is the freak show that sets up a tent down the road from wherever Mr. Trump takes his jolly circus.
The cast of characters makes the bar scene in Star Wars look like a church picnic in a small Southern town where ladies in white gloves enjoy fried chicken and Mabel’s famous tea sandwiches.
Always first to any free banquet is Big Tish James, a schoolyard bully if there ever was one. She thunders into the courtroom every chance she gets to try snatching a piece of pie from Donald Trump’s empire.
The best stage actors have large faces. Big eyes and a big mouth planted on a big face can project expressions to the very back row of the theater. Up close and in person, such faces can be a little startling.
Big Tish James has a face the size of a roadside billboard with a loud yap to go along with it — and yet it is perfectly apportioned to her body as she sits on the front row of the courtroom, hungrily eyeing all of Mr. Trump’s glittering gold properties.
Such an extravagant stage presence could ruin a play if allowed to overshadow the other players. Of course, that’s never a worry with Donald J. Trump — Don from Queens — the swashbuckling billionaire impresario of attention.
It’s the lesser bit players you worry about, such as Judge Arthur Engoron. He is the weak and pasty loser who plays the schoolyard geek. He has never made a friend in his life, yet somehow, he has caught the eye of Big Tish James. He is her project, and he will do anything she tells him.
In a later, raunchier revival of this play, Big Tish James will have Judge Engoron on a leash with a red ball strapped in his mouth.
While Judge Engoron’s stage presence is hollow, he more than makes up for it with his loathsome appearance.
Judge Engoron has shifty eyes and lips stretched taught across a wide mouth. He looks like Jabba the Hut on Ozempic.
Not that he is a man without irrational vanity. For some inexplicable reason, he styles his hair to look like Jacobim Mugato, the powerful and ridiculous fashion executive from the movie Zoolander.
All he needs is a miniature poodle to clutch sporting the same hairdo.
Others in the traveling freak show are freak show royalty who have been working the circuit for years — sometimes decades.
Nancy Pelosi, with her gobs of painted-on makeup, looks like Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games, guarding her ice cream fridge. Adam Schiff looks like a clownish gargoyle with a long neck. Chuck Schumer looks like he sleeps upside down hanging from a clothes rod in his closet. Kamala Harris is a cackling Hyena with teeth like a windshield.
Oh, it’s all a cartoonist’s delight — if only the political cartoonists would see it.
Jamie Raskin, the greasy lawyer from Maryland, looks like a crooked mortician from a Dickens novel who has a side hustle taking bribes from grave robbers for tips on the freshest graves with the loosest dirt. President Biden looks like a recently embalmed corpse, which may explain why Jamie Raskin is so friendly to him.
Perhaps one reason the political press cannot seem to see the Great Political Opera unfolding before them is that they have enough to field their own traveling freak show.
Jen Psaki is a naturally lovely young woman who was the last remotely sensible person in the Biden Administration before she sold out. Yet, for some reason, she still uses the Raggedy Ann make-up kit somebody gave her for Christmas when she was a child.
Joy Reid, whose parents were apparently stoned when they named her, goes on TV every night wearing an orange Trump wig — only to complain about Donald Trump. She’s like a boy named Sue, only the cruel joke is on the rest of us.
At night, Rachel Maddow comes on with her blocky glasses and cardboard haircut to give long, tiresome lectures about Democracy or morality or something. Early the next morning, Mx. Maddow returns to a set called Morning Joe dressed up in lesbian drag with a blond tart on her/his arm to basically repeat everything that was said the previous night.
Maybe after Mr. Trump wins re-election he can launch another Super Warp Speed Operation to find a cure for Trump Derangement Syndrome. Or maybe they could all try drinking bleach.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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