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