Trump likely wouldn’t listen to Marley’s Ghost telling him how he has led a twisted life, but we can still “speculate” on a Trump “Christmas Carol”

 

In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley, who informs him that he has been condemned to carry the chains he himself wrought from a life of greed and selfishness. In the case of Donald Trump, he doesn’t need a Marley, because he is Marley, although one doubts he will ever have the self-awareness to warn others who “idolize” him that his was the wrong path to take. In his lifetime Trump cheated and swindled countless people both because he was a “scrooge” in meeting his obligations, but because of his incompetence leading to numerous bankruptcies, it was always lenders and business partners who were the ones who felt the pain, not Trump. It is an open question whether it is better never to have been president—or to be a president who is forever recorded in the history books as the most dangerous and demented man ever to hold the office; that will certainly be the heaviest of the chains Trump will take with him into the afterlife.

But for the sake of amusement, let’s speculate if Trump received a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past—who might have been better off skipping the visit, because what makes Trump “happy” is disturbing business indeed. What happy memories can a self-involved narcissist have? We know that being a bully makes Trump  happy, and he is happy to see anti-Trump protesters getting beat on at his rallies and on the streets. We know that watching pro-Trump rioters storming the Capitol building made him happy. We know that seeing children locked-up in concentration camps made him happy. We know that insulting and dehumanizing others made him happy. We know that people lying, cheating and committing criminal acts on his behalf made him happy. We could go on and on with this. Why would the ghost wish him to relive this kind of past?

If Trump was then visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present, he would likely be confronted with his “handling” of the COVID-19 pandemic and his seeming disinterest that more than 400,000 have died thus far from it—as well as the subsequent economic costs to millions of Americans. He would also have to face his trucking in lies and racism that has created an atmosphere of division and hate that has torn this country apart. He would have to account for his role in the near violent overthrow of the democratic process. The ghost will also condemn Trump’s hypocritical “concern” about the welfare of working people in light of his Christmas gift to himself and his rich friends via the so-called tax reform law, as well as his attempt to kill affordable health care for all.  But most ominously the ghost will attempt to warn Trump of how his nurturing of Ignorance will destroy both him and the country if he continues his wicked ways even after he leaves office.

If Trump is finally visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, he should already have a “taste” of what that will be. Sure, the millions of true believers in the Trump cult will continue to supply him with the fiction that he is The Great White Messiah, who tried but mostly failed to “restore” total white supremacy in this country, and having failed to do so in the time allotted him, nevertheless bestowed upon his followers an alternate fact universe in which their feverish minds could inhabit, one in which it is “lawfully” permissible to violently act out their grievances in an effort to carry out the messiah’s prophecies. 

But the ghost may warn Trump of the possibility (or probability) that the Trumpist cult will die with him, and outside his family, he will be “mourned” only by those who are promised a free lunch. And perhaps when the crows of Trump’s crimes finally come home to roost, his equally selfish fry will greedily pick at whatever meat is left on the moldering corpse of his “organization,” his “brand” nothing more than a scarlet letter burned onto the foreheads of those fated to bear his name and “legacy.”

Perhaps in Trump’s demented and feverish mind he has already imagined such visits, and in “atonement” he is doing the only thing that a corrupt and morally-bankrupt person can do in a fit of belated “Christmas” cheer: assuaging his “guilt” by "gifting" pardons to other corrupt and morally-bankrupt people.