A Precious Tale

We are all the enemy now. We are all out to get Donald Trump.

Trump has become something akin to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, corrupted by the power of the White House. The White House has become his One Ring.

If anyone who even looks at the Presidency — at the White House — Trump lashes out in jealous rage.

“My precious!!!!!! Get your grubby hands away from my precious!!!”

His rants have no nuance, no restraint, no perspective, no logic. They lack even the barest of established facts. He used to base his angry tweets on something real, something he could claim was factual, but lately it’s as if he’s stopped caring.

He just lies and lies, and he doesn’t care that we know he’s lying. It’s as if he figures, if he can shoot people on Fifth Avenue, nobody is going to care that he’s lying all the time.

Why is he losing it?

Truth is, he never had it. Donald Trump lost the ability to tell himself the truth, to accept reality, so long ago that he probably doesn’t remember his last lucid moment.

His entire life has been such a thinly veiled charade that it would take the mental strength and agility of a Gandhi, a Plato, a Stephen Hawking to hold onto reality.

Trump is a dull intellect with the vocabulary of a fifth grade dropout. He ain’t Gandhi. He ain’t Plato. He ain’t Hawking.

He’s Cliff Clavin. He’s Herb Tarlek. He’s the used car salesman sitting at the end of the bar who cops a feel from the waitress every time she walks by. He promises to buy the next round, every round. But he never does.

And he’s in over his head. Waaaaaaay over his head. He’s got a job that has to weigh the needs of 320 million citizens and seven billion worldwide interested parties to the most powerful nation in the world. He has the launch codes that can send seven thousand nuclear warheads out to explode cities, killing millions or even billions of people.

And he literally only cares about himself. About his power. About his precious presidency, his precious White House. His precious.

To Trump, anyone who refuses to bow to him is trying to steal his White House. Steal his power. Steal his precious.

Neither Trump nor Gollum have the gumption to actually take over a kingdom, just an overwhelming desire to possess the power. Gollum was in the cave, using the One Ring to Rule Them All to catch fish for several hundred years, and nobody suffered.

But once it got out, it had to be destroyed. Not Gollum, who was merely a lustful tool, but the ring itself. I think it’s the same with Trump. He is not the problem; he’s just a lustful tool. The White House itself, the power, is the problem.

Gollum’s ring left in Bilbo’s pocket; in our world, it was social media that grabbed the ring and ran. Trump, foreign interests — principally the Russians — and the racist, alt+Right radical fringe used social media to grab the power of the White House. They did it by suspending reality and replacing it with a new reality, what KellyAnne Conway called alternate facts.

And, through social media, the maniacal lust for power spread to the masses. The nation has become so partisan that reality itself is getting shot on Fifth Avenue, and nobody cares.

We’ve become slaves to a reality that simply, plainly, does not exist. Only the power exists. The precious.

So we get Sara Sanders lying her ass off every day. Mitch McConnell refusing to impeach Trump, because the “ring” gets him Supreme Court justices. Senators and Congress members, even the sane, human ones, struggle against the power. Jeff Flake had to leave the Beltway altogether to get away from the power of the White House, much like Gandolph recoiled in horror when he was offered the ring.

The other side isn’t rooted to reality, either, but they have a couple of leaders who have been leaving bread crumbs, so there’s some hope. But until we put reality back in front of power as a public priority, all the bread crumbs in the world are just litter.

Step one: stop believing the words of a man who trades on your trust, your gullibility, your FEAR. Stop being afraid of the other guy, the immigrant, the minority, the foreigner, the person of another color mother. Stop lashing out, and start reaching out.

Think of it like the end of a flood, and we were all trapped in the house, chained to our social media chairs. Now we can walk out the front door and look at our neighbors without seeing “democrat” or “republican” or “snowflake” or “white supremicist.”

We can see things like, “that family likes to bbq on a Sunday afternoon” and “her kids are good with their skateboards” and “that dammed dog shits more than it eats; how does it do that?” and “if I got a few things from the hardware store I could convert that vacant lot into a playing field for the neighborhood kids.”

If we stop seeing everyone else as a threat to power, we can remind ourselves that the only truly precious thing in the world is our shared journey.

Our lust for power is Trump’s source of power. If we stop lusting after it, his power will dissipate and his ringwraiths will slink away. And we can get our world back. Thanks for reading.