If The Observer were prone to feeling sorry for folks who further the aims of a corrupt authoritarian fanboy, we could almost feel sorry for those who Trump has chewed over and spit out during his six months in office. Almost. Yours Truly has had some horrible bosses in our day, as maybe you have, too. It’s the nature of work to put the most clueless and least empathetic ass in charge so the employees hate her or him instead of the name on the incorporation papers and thus don’t feel justified in ripping off office supplies, desk chairs and the occasional Jackson from petty cash. But that Trump. Lordy. He is turning out to be just as awful as we feared, especially when it comes to those who have sacrificed, either on purpose or by accident, for his cause: Spicey, Priebus, Flynn, Sessions, Comey, Republicans in Congress, poor folks out here in flyover country who bought his hokum, et al. Tony Soprano might have been a murderous scumbag, but at least Tony would have the decency to tell you why you were being whacked instead of firing you by Twitter.

The latest to climb onto the roaring pyre of this presidency with Donald the Unburnt was Anthony Scaramucci, a mini-Trump who, we somebody on the internet said recently, dresses like the owner of a Lamborghini dealership. When we heard The Mooch had been fired after 10 days — 10 days he began by stepping to a White House lectern and literally, repeatedly, professing his love for Trump – we must admit we burst out laughing, the idea of Trump letting go someone in whom he had proclaimed utmost confidence a little over a week before so absurd and so Trumpian that we couldn’t help but feel like a man who expects to wake up from a strange dream. Such is life in Trumpmerica, 2017. After a while, you pinch yourself so many times that you stop being able to feel the pinches.

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When the inside baseball of Scaramucci’s firing started to seep out is when we actually, sorta, kinda started to feel sorry for the guy. The hedge fund he sold (albeit for an obscene amount of money) because he wanted to work for Trump. The pregnant wife who divorced him rather than see her name attached, even tangentially, to a dim flim-flam man who history will revile as an abomination to the office he holds, barring Trump’s surprise triumph over alien invaders from Xerxon 5. The fact that Mooch missed the birth of his child because he was at the Boy Scout Jamboree, listening to Trump whip up young men pledged to be kind and honorable into gales of jeers for the press, the “sewer” of their own government, and his political opponent in a contest nearly a year past won. Yeah, Scaramucci is so smart he couldn’t understand that you have to say “off the record” before you call your ostensible boss a paranoid schizophrenic and invite the president’s pet fascist to gum his own wang. But in the end, a guy who actually bought a ticket on the U.S.S. Trumptanic and stepped to the bow to triumphantly scream “I’M THE KING OF THE WOOOOOORLD!” even though he could look over the rail and clearly see Rose and Jack floating on a door amid frozen corpses and chunks of iceberg was unceremoniously issued a cardboard box for office nick-knacks that hadn’t even had time to gather dust and marched to Pennsylvania Avenue. What happens to a dream deferred?

Like we said, we could almost feel sorry for the guy. Almost. But then again, not. He is ridiculously rich, after all, and while money cannot buy happiness, it can surely buy you stuff that makes you happy. Too, we all make our choices, and learn our lessons. Sometimes the lesson is, you’re a terrible person who makes decisions based on greed and power instead of love and service. Not that anybody who needs to learn that lesson is ever going to listen, because — as Scaramucci and pretty much everybody in Trump’s rogues Cabinet shows — failing to heed it can be insanely profitable. Those people can, however, be a lesson for others who haven’t yet sold their souls for a greenback dollar. And in that way, they can be of service to the greater good whether they want to or not. Even The Mooch.

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