You’re in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not
where to test your incredulity, there’s a new room
past the shrunken heads and two-headed rats:
The Trump II Rumpus Room.
Observe sculpted head of America First
shrunken to Trump First as when someone told Trump
that Renee Good’s dad votes Republican, and fearless
leader couldn’t resist: When I learned that…her father in particular
was a TREMENDOUS Trump fan,…I hope he still feels that way.
Or the two-headed Ripley’s whopper when Trump trumped
Trump on the world embarrassment stage,
time-machined back to toddler, mean-faced, throwing
fistfuls of sand in the eyes of, guess who? The Norwegians!
Because they made him NEED Greenland.
Because they denied him HIS Nobel.
Two-headedly confabulating the Nobel committee
with a country incidentally, NOT Denmark,
keeper of Greenland.
Mad king strutting and fretting the world stage,
even granting unhinged latitude,
hits his bullseye squarely under
obfuscating flak-filled skies
as his graft-of-grafts goes bigly for Olympic Gold:
1.4 billion dollars that we know of (plus surely scads more)
poured in the coffers of a POTUS within Trump II, year I.
Sing: the sun never sets on the gilded name, Trump,
stand by for his name on a Qatar golf magnificence,
and, history’s mortifying oddities, where up shall grow
a Trump tower? Why, Ho Chi Minh City!
To an American despot accrue the spoils.
Roll over in your grave, Ho!
With America roiling across our divides, so many
mourning our new Gestapo’s murders in Minneapolis,
a well-loved mother and poet, an exceptional male nurse,
both fallen helping, bearing witness,
oh, the cash register of our self-kinged king
night and day sings ka ching, ka ching.
*****
See Editorial Board, “Trump’s Cash Grab Undermines Our Republic,” New York Times, 1/25/26