The Orange Man Baby is faltering in the polls but if he wins God Help America
First the good news: Donald Trump now trails Kamala Harris in most national polls and in the key swing states. The bad news? Er, there is none, unless of course you are his idiot supporters Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Robert Jenrick, who I hope has just kissed goodbye to his chances of becoming the next Tory leader by saying he would like the Orange Man Baby (copyright Daily Star) back in Pennsylvania Avenue.
If you still have doubts about the suitability of a 78-year-old serial liar, fraudster, woman-hater, fantasist, tax-evader, bankrupt, rapist, golf cheat (yes, that bad) to be in charge of the free world then watch A Storm Foretold on BBC iPlayer.
This brilliant two-years-in-the-making documentary focuses on the role of Roger Stone, a wannabe gangster Grade A shit who was the architect of
Trump’s refusal to accept the result of the 2020 election and the subsequent storming of the Capitol building which left four dead on the day and several more by suicide in the next months.
Stone, a 71-year-old Republican lobbyist and so-called strategist, was convicted in 2019 of, inter alia, witness tampering and making false statements and sentenced to 40 months in the pen. Whereupon Trump commuted the sentence and then gave him a presidential pardon. Surprise, surprise.
His form goes back a long way; he boasts of being a ‘dirty trickster’ while working for Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972 though as a 20-year-old at the time it is doubtful he played a significant role. Not so four decades later.
Stone, who is rarely seen in the documentary without a seven inch cigar and a vast pneumatic bleached blonde PR woman (make the Freudian connection if you must), made a bee-line for the Proud Boys and the Oath Takers, the two main far-right headbangers who led the Capitol attack heavily armed with guns and tattoos. His campaign slogan was Stop the Steal and his mantra Attack, Attack, Attack, Never Surrender.
It is criminals like Stone to whom Trump is drawn. And happily it’s not working right now. In fact his campaign is floundering badly and relies on the usual lies, smears and insults. So desperate has he become that he is complaining that Joe Biden’s withdrawal in favour of Harris was unfair and even unlawful! And he is seriously upset with Tim Walz for calling him and Vance ‘weird.’ That has rung a bell with voters and hit a nerve with the sensitive Trump flower.
Harris and Walz are ‘third rate lunatics’ and communists or ‘dangerous liberals’; their abortion policy would allow ‘unplanned new born babies to be murdered’ and the dictators of China, Russia and North Korea are to admired as strong. Just like him. His followers are not voting for a politician, they are members of a cult. The Church of Donald, all true believers.
But maybe we are seeing the last desperate thrashings of this nasty and very stupid egotist who cannot believe he can lose. And if he does what then? Another Roger Stone-directed insurrection? It might not come to that, there are reports that he is now so obsessed by the prospect of losing that he might pull out citing some Big Lie (he doesn’t do little ones.)
Less than three months to go before we find out. God Bless America? More like God Help America.
*****
Last Friday we were at a charity cricket lunch to hear that great and decent all-rounder Chris Woakes talk about his career and pay a fine and heartfelt tribute to the brilliant Graham Thorpe. We now know that the depression that stalked through Thorpe’s life finally was so bad that he jumped in front of a train.
I know first hand just how devastating depression can be and the toll it takes on people far outside the family. In 1982 my closest friend, with whom I had worked in Belfast and on the Express in Manchester (where we shared a flat) died in the same manner as Graham Thorpe. I had called him to arrange a drink two days before he jumped in front of a fast train from Hastings one dark wet Friday night.
The man had everything to live for but depression makes no allowances. A glittering future at the BBC working on The World at One, a great wife and two young children, both of whom have made notable careers, his daughter as an actor and the boy, after Cambridge, as a distinguished foreign corr for The Times.
But like Thorpe and the 7,000 other suicides in the UK annually, depression wins. It is a chemical thing and the one thing no depressive wants to hear is Pull Yourself Together. My chum was clever, funny and devoted to his family. But the Black Dog was a constant and hungry interloper.
We went to the inquest and it was there I learned of the wider devastation such deaths bring. The helpless train driver who saw the horror played out in front of him probably never drove a train again and those from the emergency services who are left to pick up the bits, literally, never get used to the sights they see.
As for me, I think of him to this day and wonder just how far he would have reached had he lived without the one thing he couldn’t shake off.
*****
Don’t you ever wonder just how plain stupid people can be? I refer of course to the dunderheads of Bromley Council and Veolia, an $20 billion US conglomerate. The waste management company is responsible for the street cleaning in Bromley and environs and decreed that employees were not allowed to accept gifts from grateful residents of clean streets. As in the case of Paul Spiers, 63, who is so admired as a road sweeper in Beckenham that 200 people raised £3,000 to send Paul and his brother on holiday to Portugal.
The silly burghers of Bromley refused to intervene so a bright spark at the On the Beach travel company saw an opportunity. It devised a competition open only to street cleaners aged 62 to 64 and named Spiers. Must like Elvis and work in Beckenham and be loved by locals. All legal and of course the splendid Elvis enthusiast Mr Spiers won.
I hope On the Beach I hope will benefit in spades for its generosity and ingenuity. But here’s a question: When did Bromley councillors last accept a free lunch or tickets to some poxy event? And Veolia? One rule for them, another for the poor bloody foot soldiers.
Oh nearly forgot, Bromley Council’s head of waste management and street cleaning earns £135,958 a year.
*****
Banksy has been busy this summer with a series of wonderfully witty animal themed art works throughout London. The man is very, very clever and a brilliantly original artist. And if you want proof that he is one of the best social commentators alive go to his Art of Banksy exhibition now at 100 Charing Cross Road. We have seen it and came away astonished at his range.
He would have made a great newspaper cartoonist.
*****
If it wasn’t so serious, it would be hilarious. Putin bleats that Ukraine has attacked and taken Russian territory, all 368 sq kms of it. Slava Ukraini, Slava Zelensky!
ALAN FRAME
15 August 2024
