Lame Duck?

I am loathe to use the term Lame Duck when referring to Donald Trump. The lame ducks I’ve come across in my experience as an animal lover and protector have been gracious beings, humble, and thankful for my attention and care. I once helped raise a passel of orphan ducklings, allowing them full sun and ample space on our front lawn in Berkeley in the early 80s. They were happy “lame ducks” who eventually were placed back into wild nature which they took like veterans. We had trained them to dive for food in our bathtub so they were well prepared for the pond we freed them in.

Trump is lame, all right, but has nowhere near the resilience or the look of gratitude of the disabled ducks I’ve encountered. He is conniving, boorish, self-absorbed, and unwilling to accept the reality of his present circumstance, something our little lame ducklings were quite adept at.

Not only is Trump unaccepting of his present status, he is arrogantly behaving like a vindictive tyrant who is unwilling to accept the will of the people. He seems to have little to no regard for the welfare of the country that elected him, and absolutely no compassion for the thousands who have Covid or who have already died from the pandemic. Instead he spends most of his time at one of his resorts playing golf.

Incidentally, as a golfer, I can tell you, golf is no consolation for a wounded ego, as Trump seems to suffer from. It is a game filled with far more misery than celebration, especially for an amateur like him. Of course, as has been noted, he is a chronic cheat, which ultimately wears at the soul of a golfer playing a sport which prides itself on the player being totally and unequivocally honest with himself.

So the Lame Duck designation? No, I wouldn’t want to insult the lame ducks out there. Jane Goodall recently said as much when asked if Trump was acting like the chimpanzees she so skillfully studied in the wild. “I wouldn’t want to insult the chimps,” she replied with, I suspect, a wry smile.

So without denigrating Trump too viciously, I’ll just call him the outgoing Trump, and hope, perhaps hope beyond hope, that he will refrain from his continual denial of the reality of his defeat and his efforts to sabotage President Biden’s initial forays into cleaning up the inordinate messes Trump has created in his thankfully brief reign.