Hughie Lee-Smith:
Futility
(1935–43)

"…an at least as effective
and perhaps even more appropriate Comedownance instead."

In 1968, during the famous Earthrise NASA mission, astronaut and apostle Jim Lovell declared how perfect Earth seemed compared to the void of space surrounding it. He later expanded on his experience by famously declaring, “You go to heaven when you’re born.” He explained that people look for a distant heaven, yet Earth already has the perfect gravity, water, atmosphere, and distance from the sun to sustain life, making Earth the literal paradise we are searching for. We humans seem to maintain a rather proud tradition of underestimating our surroundings and experiences. We seek Comeuppances while, perhaps, already in the middle of experiencing an unrecognized Titanic one. Who’s to say that this isn’t that? Never having experienced any corruption as extensive as that practiced by our incumbent, what form might his Comeuppance naturally take? Would we necessarily know it just because we witnessed it, or might it appear too stealthily for anybody to readily recognize its presence? Maybe the blesséd event has taken the form of a Comedownance this time, a different direction than anybody expected, yet at least every bit as effective as any alternative Comeuppance.

The evidence seems ample if subtle. Name one initiative that hasn’t blown up in our incumbent’s face this year? Yes, I admit that he continues to damage delicate international relationships and harm blameless innocents, but nothing even distantly hints that he’s managed to inflict anything like permanent damage to the social fabric. It appears much stronger for his contributions. His dream of initiating a new world disorder produced ample chaos, but the evidence more than distantly suggests that the coalitions that count have not failed, but strengthened. Further, those who had formerly seemed unconvinced of the many benefits of free trade relationships seem to have renewed their lagging faith, having now seen the cost of its even temporary suspension. The alternative provided by tariffs crashed and burned attempting to take off. Only our delusional titular head of state still believes he ever held a mandate, and there’s ample evidence that he only found it convenient to pretend he did, and never actually believed he had. His has been a performative presidency, and not one necessarily informed by any actual acting training or skill. He’s been one crappy king.

True to his self-saboteur temperament, everything he’s touched reacted with the rough equivalent of explosive diarrhea! He didn’t rewrite governance for the twenty-first century; he scribbled incomprehensible notes in a purloined teenage girl’s diary. He was never rewriting history, but parody. His ham-handed attempts to prevent the Epstein files from going public have amplified public interest and likely increased the eventual impact on him once they are released, and make no mistake, they will be released with great fanfare. Everyone already knows that he’s a pedophile. Actually reading the long-delayed evidence will only confirm what needed no proof other than the testimony to achieve that all-important conviction. It would be no great stretch of anybody’s imagination to declare that our incumbent currently awaits sentencing. That he will eventually be convicted of and sentenced to something has never really been in question, for he was never really a Teflon® Don, but a cheap spray-on substitute that easily scrapes off into food. He has always sloughed off rather than being non-stick.

A Comedownance seems much better suited to one who still believes that everything that glitters passes for gold, and that gold is best when molded into toilets. The one who tricked out the Oval Office to look like the interior of a mid-century Airstream travel trailer doesn’t warrant all that much elevation as he exits. His incumbency has been a downer in many dimensions. I can’t imagine how anyone could have mistaken his tenure for elevating, so a Comeuppance somehow seems just backwards to how his exit should progress. He seems like one of those sixties bands that still perform in casinos, the same songs that made them famous sixty years ago, to people who are more naturally entertained by nickel slots. People of decidedly little imagination still find his schtick compelling; those with their own monumental combovers also defy gravity. What once might have passed for gravity long ago passed beyond the levity boundary. It’s been a downward spiraling joke since about the time he first announced those failed tariffs. His incumbency has been a genuine joke, but not all that funny a one.

He’s done. The machinery of government moves far slower than the pace of even a lame horse, but it moves, and it moves inexorably. While we anxiously await the verdict from the midterms, we can be confident that the world as we once knew it hasn’t forgotten. It has seen worse, maybe not from a President of the United States, but far worse among the tin-pot dictator states that the more civilized states used to just create rather than emulate. It has been an inspiration witnessing this lame quack attempt to undo history, and so damned ineptly. It has been as if our incumbent stepped onto a downward express escalator when he took that oath of office he clearly never had any intention of fulfilling. He must have firmly believed that he actually was smarter than the system to which he would ultimately prove to be little more than a temporarily annoying infection. I suspect he never suspected that he largely served as an object lesson intended for history to remember. The reparations we’ll be paying over the upcoming generations should solidify the lesson for us all. His children should become familiar with the downside of wealth, even if he (hopefully) never lives to see the end of his own lack of administration. His trajectory was set to ‘down’ from the second he stepped into office. We were never likely to follow his lead. It has taken a while for our expectations to catch up enough to recognize that we were getting what we felt we had missed, not the anticipated Comeuppance, perhaps, but an at least as effective and perhaps even more appropriate Comedownance instead.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz