Dumbfounded, I watch
this presidential meltdown –
hardly the first –
the Finnish president looks on
as Trump, at his worst,
alleges treason against his person;
this ‘stable genius’ who coerced
the leader of a besieged nation;
withholding aid to trade with dirt
on an opponent and his son;
all this to pervert the next election
by making defaming Joe Biden
the price for Ukraine’s protection,
Niinistö keeps looking on,
willing his face to stay deadpan,
aware of the dysfunction
of the flailing, volcanic man
he is mere meters from,
but Sauli is a politician,
a lawyer by education;
when finally, he’s asked a question,
he, an envoy of diplomacy,
weighs words with decorum;
heralding US democratic history
and ending with the warning
to protect that great democracy,
Trump, as ever, is not listening;
too busy blustering, libelling,
maligning, misdirecting,
avoiding and gaslighting,
it may finally be backfiring
as he attacks the press,
calling them corrupt
as he thumps his own chest,
re-writing his own words as ‘perfect’
as he labels others ‘crooks’ –
he’s narcissist enough to believe it
if it would let him off the hook,
calling one critic ‘shifty Schiff’;
touting the tired old troupe
of ‘Jews being hard to trust’;
suggesting Schiff’s leading a coup;
he may as well have called him Judas,
Trump in some faux messiah role
making crude, antisemitic jokes
recorded live in the Oval Office
while denigrating the votes
of thousands of democrats
who put Schiff into Congress,
because that congressman gathered intelligence
that may lead to Trump’s righteous impeachment,
since 2016, the president’s men and their circus
fooled enough to keep Trump’s power current,
but tantrums in front of a world of observers
make his lies more aberrant, more apparent
as Americans ask “is he fit to serve us?”
I think of them, our dear cousins overseas,
with our own fool Johnson here at home,
wondering what’s happened to our countries,
all I can offer is, we’re none of us alone.
Antonia Sara Zenkevitch

Nice, it does seem like Johnson is working from the same playbook. Stoking division for personal gain. I don’t understand quite how either is still in power.
I agree, Chris. Johnson is a posh version of Trump and America and the UK face some of the same battles. I think the 2008 financial crash is one common factor. History says that in economic crisis divide to rule leaders rise.
WARNING: INCOMING RANT – The fact that Boris has suddenly decided that decades worth of underfunding and austerity measures have ended is disgustingly transparent. Personally I believe the issue is information. Public opinion for the most part has been controlled by a small elite who controlled the papers. Draconian yes, but whatever Ill feeling I had about that system, it kept extremism out and for a large part (ignoring some of the sickening tabloids) journalist did their jobs, information was mostly fact-checked. Fast forward to the social media age, everyone has a voice, the extremists (at either end) now legitimised by the fact they can preach publicly to like-minded followers can spout anything to a national/global audience, without any burden of proof. The effect is to undermine all information, Trump/Boris can only exist in an environment where facts are considered fake-news. Where information has been devalued to the point nothing matters. Add to this the sheer wall of noise created, that drive attention spans down, wholesale manipulation of the masses by state actors and you really do have the beginnings of a great dystopian novel 😉