Fear And Loathing In Washington - Why The Left Is So Deeply Afraid Of Donald Trump

Bob Muzelle thought he was afraid of nothing; but of course that was nonsense.  He was so afraid of getting killed in the Vietnam War that he became a conscientious objector thanks to his desultory but recorded Quaker background.  It didn't take much to convince his draft board to give him an exemption, for his father, the local optometrist had given the examiners new glasses for decades.  As far as being a Quaker, it ran in the family and not much more. 

Bob did his CO duty, the equivalent of rolling bandages on the home front in WWI, but his sinecure was even easier.  He was a second year law student, assigned to the JAG, Judge Advocate General, and served his term of service as Brigadier General Hyman R. Lofton's aide de camp.  This position was usually referred to junior officers of the Army, but once again, the Garden City draft board's commander, a close friend of his father's, made a recommendation to the General, and Bob's position was secured. 

Other Yale graduates served in combat in Vietnam - volunteers all, either in the military tradition of their families, out of derring-do, or simply a patriotic sentiment to counter the rising student demonstrations against the war.  Most of them were killed - Second Lieutenants, always first over the wire, rarely came back home alive - and few remembered.  There was one, John Walton, who distinguished himself in the battle of Khe Sanh, won a silver star and a commendation for the Medal of Honor. 

Bob was jealous of Walton, and wished that he could have swooped down from home, kill a hundred North Vietnamese regulars, and be feted; but that airy vision was just fantasy.  If he took a hard look at himself, he was no war hero.  He had run from bullies, took the taunts of his classmates (Bob was fat, unathletic, and clueless about girls, the trifecta of adolescent animus), and did everything with caution, preparation, and without risk. 

After serving his two years in the Army, Bob joined the Civil Rights and Peace Movements, reupping his service with the Reverend Baxter Ames, Chaplain of Yale, socialist, activist, hero of the Left and always on the front lines demanding an end to the war, and the final restitution of the black man. 

Joining the Ames brigade was a natural for Bob whose Army service, such as it was, gave him a certain authority to speak out against the war and to speak for the heroism of the black man on the front lines. The black draftees were actually little more than cannon fodder, sent into battle by racist officers only two generations removed from segregation and slavery; so Bob was making it all up, but it went down well with the idealism of his audiences. 

Bob spent his life in The Movement just as he did during his Army service.  He was never on the front. lines but always serving those who took Bull Connor's ax handles and attack dogs first hand.  He never had to prove either his commitment or courage, and hoped that he never would have to.  The idea of being thrown into an Alabama jail, buggered by black murderers and abused by the trusties hired to guard them was terrifying.  

Fast forward to the present day, the era of Donald Trump.  Bob had burnished his record as a progressive's progressive and had been called on, even in these, his elder years, to speak to the young about their duty to oppose the hateful, despicable, traitorous government of the President. He was loud and insistent, drawing on decades of prepared speeches, spiced with local lore, anecdote, and homily. 

Yet there was something truly threatening about a man who had shown will, determination, and defiance during the Biden years during which he had to fight many unfounded, frivolous, politically motivated lawsuits at once, all of which he met with bullying rancor.  Not once was did he appear contrite, apologetic, or politically concerned.  He was being pilloried, racked, and tried by a cabal of Salem witch hunters, and he would never give in to them.  And vengeance would be his. 

Now that the President was in his second term and no matter what the outcome would retire in sybaritic pleasure, the just rewards of a long, successful career in business, Hollywood, and Washington. Since re-election was not in the cards, he could do whatever he pleased with impunity. He had never paid any attention to the howls of the Left about bigotry, racism, homophobia, or misogyny. in the first place.  The Left was nothing but a failed, discredited, craven, and hysterical mob - irrelevant, ignorant, and stupid. 

When a politician like Trump - and there haven't been many like him, if any - wields his sword, it is time to duck, not engage.  What he was doing was not simply refuting the Biden era policies of faux peace, unrealistic social equality, diversity, inclusion, and identity, but taking them apart one by one.  The Musk-led DOGE Anschluss down Independence Avenue to rid the nation of a paper-pushing, mindless bureaucracy was only the most visible assault.  The deployment of ICE troops was an even more militant statement of his intention to return the country to its foundational roots. 

Yet these physical, visible actions were only to show his resolve.  Beneath the Sturm und Drang, he was busy dismantling every other progressive reform that had been effected during the Biden years.  He was ridiculing gender reform, calling out the inner city as a sinkhole of ignorance, violence, dysfunction, and perennial irresponsibility, bombing offending nations, and unleashing the private sector in a Robber Baron-like laissez-faire capitalist panzer attack. 

'What will he do next?', wondered Bob's minions in his 10th Street walkup office, a comedown from the old days of bright corner offices, but an expression of the tenor of the times.  The old school, hands-across-the-water, black and white arm in arm across the Pettus bridge, sit-ins and freedom rides epoch was over and done with. 'Black folk don't need no whitey', said LaShonda Evans, formerly of Black Lives Matter, but now the spokesperson for Democratic Socialists For Racial Justice. 

Bob had been marginalized, isolated, and forgotten in the Trump onslaught and the retrenchment of his formerly collegial progressive redoubts. The conservative Trump juggernaut with the President at the helm was destroying all sensible, humane, and charitable programs; and the cabal of businessmen - Musk, Huang, Ellison, Page, and Brin - was turning the nation into a terrifying, robotic, nightmarish landscape.  

If this unholy alliance were allowed to continue, climate Armageddon would soon be upon us - the rich would float on rising tides in their mansions, while the poor were inundated and washed away in the dark night. The nation would once again be owned, managed, and run by privileged white men. 

In Bob's worst funks, he had his doubts.  He had spent decades doing nothing, producing nothing, creating nothing; and only criticizing, carping, and hectoring like and old maid.  Meanwhile this genius cluster had revolutionized humanity! Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and recombinant DNA would usher in the post-human generation and create a new world of unlimited possibilities - world where the mind is freed from brick and mortar, the body freed from pedestrian tasks, and an almost unfathomable universe opened up. 

He feared Donald Trump not because of his assault on the gender spectrum.  If he was being honest with himself he would admit that the whole idea of trans-this and trans-that was ignorant folly.  He knew that the bureaucracy was a fat, happy, bloated sinecure for has-beens and do-nothings; that the black man was not worth his weight in salt; and that socialism had died with the crumbling of the Berlin wall. 

Bob feared Trump because he was like Yale classmate John Walton, KIA Medal of Honor candidate - a doer, a courageous front-line hero, a man of action.  Trump would stop at nothing to reform the world in his image, and people like Bob would be swept away like trash, unwanted, irrelevant bits and pieces.  Bob was nothing compared Brin, Musk, and Huang.  He was a little man, an empty man, an insignificant man who had wasted his life badgering others, living in a suburban split level, cutting coupons, and working late.  No arm candy, no yachts, resorts, skiing vacations in Gstaad or summers on the Vineyard. 

What was Bob afraid of this time?  Of being remembered as a catcalling cipher. 

Which he was, but as the Yale Alumni Magazine reported in a short obituary, 'He tried to do good'.