By now, fifty percent
of the country thinks
you’re doing an awful job.
They’re not wrong.
Scandals and violations follow you
like stray cats,
pissing in your footsteps
crapping on the White House lawn:
your minions colluding with Russians and
possible treason
to fix an election you couldn’t win,
the Emoluments Clause
hanging over your head
like some gold-plated sword,
your children
moving into the People’s House
rent free,
exempt from all the rules,
—and you, acting like some penny ante dictator
with absolute power
and a magic pen.
Your appointees are on a revolving door—
in one day, out the next
either by whim
or avoiding the Law.
Few of them
have ever been anything other
than capitalist dictators
in their own fiefdoms.
The rest of the seats
are still vacant.
It’s a wonder
we have a government at all.
Thank goodness, or the Founding Fathers
who thought this all out,
for all those bureaucrats you hate
who soldier on
without leaders,
doing the right thing,
smoothing ruffled foreign feathers,
translating your word salad,
putting out your fires,
mailing checks.
Like your minions,
you have no idea what you’re doing,
or that you’re
no longer your own man and
have no golden parachute.
We should strip you of that pension, too.
Your tweets to your base
show only what a blowhard
and a showboater you are.
And vision? Make America Great
Again is just a slogan.
There is no plan, apparently.
And your only musing
on what you’ve wrought is
I thought it would be easier.
-Lee Kottner, Harlem, April 30, 2017
