At Oregon Country Fair this summer, my favorite New Orleans band introduced me to an old tune. “When That Man is Dead and Gone” was written by Irving Berlin in 1941 as a protest against Hitler. For obvious reasons, it’s taken on fresh relevance:
What a day to wake up on What a way to greet the dawn Some fine day the news will flash Satan with a small mustache Is asleep beneath the lawn
In Bon Bon Vivant’s cover, Abigail sang, Satan with his tiny hands. The already raucous crowd exploded with delight.
To imagine the death of one of modern history’s cruelest villains is cathartic. It won’t solve everything, but it will be a symbolic end to the horrors of this period. The violence and racism. The blatant self-dealing at the highest levels of government. The sucking up to dictators and tyrants.
Artist Unknown, Guadalajara (2026)
Oh, how the world will dance on the grave of that monster! But when that day comes, the oily stain he leaves on our institutions and public discourse will be tough to wash out:
The corruption he’s taken to new heights, using the White House to rake in billions of dollars
The countless lives he’s uprooted with ICE’s anti-immigrant crusade
The foolish tariffs which have made the prices of goods skyrocket
The experts he fired from the government with the disastrous DOGE cuts
The millions of deaths caused by the decimation of USAID
His obsession with building monuments to himself and throwing up his name on established institutions
The Catholic conservatives he installed on the Supreme Court who have expanded his power and overturned Roe vs. Wade, condemning many pregnant women in red states to death
The incalculable damage of his disdain for the environment
The expensive, deadly war in Iran he doesn’t know how to end
His old pal Jeffrey Epstein summed it up: “I have met some very bad people, none as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body.”
I don’t want the serrated edges of this era to become dulled by time and sympathetic authors of history. His name deserves to become a slur—a term for ignorance, dishonesty, corruption, racism, sexual predation, and rapacious greed.
A lot of these policies weren’t his ideas, of course. The Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Miller, Netanyahu, and other bad hombres pulled the strings of the easily flattered orange puppet. And for many years, I’ve sat with resentment for the Americans responsible. Witheverythingthat’s happened, how will I forgive non-voters for their indifference and MAGA voters for their cruelty and stupidity?
Republicans got curb-stomped in this month’s midterms, which helped a bit. Despite the rampant gerrymandering, promises of $5,000, and being encouraged by the president to “cheat like hell,” they failed so spectacularly that they couldn’t even rely on their usual accusations of election fraud.
But even as I celebrate this historic blue sweep, cleaning up MAGA’s mess will take a generation or more. The judges he installed at all levels of the courts. The reactionary incompetents working across government. The programs he dismantled. The corporate beaks he wet with his self-serving deals. The convicted criminals he got paid to pardon.
Reckoning with this embarrassment and devastation shouldn’t suck up all the oxygen in the room, but we can’t let it become another festering wound in our history. Cauterizing it will mean serving justice publicly to those responsible. And not just another milquetoast impeachment or felony conviction: there needs to be real Nuremberg-level consequences.
Then again, none of this will really matter when that man is dead and gone. With the amount of stress he’s under after the midterm trouncing, that day may come sooner rather than later. Like millions of Americans, I’ve got my dancing shoes and a chilled bottle of champagne at the ready.
