The president of the United States actually sounded drunk today in a news conference.  (Watch him try to pronounce the names of antivirals. Seriously. Go find a clip and watch it.)  This comes after weeks of either minimizing information about the pandemic or lying about it altogether.

The media is my only source of information about the health experts are saying about the incidence, transmission and seriousness of this disease.  When given a choice between news reporters and a slurred, drug-addicted, brain-addled and probably incontinent “president,” I’ll listen to news reporters.

Thank god they’re on the job.

Dear Mr. President:

You were wrongly acquitted. You cannot know that, I think, because your addled mind cannot distinguish between your own interests and those of the Republic.

But you are not truly a victor. The adulation of your following is fervent now, but it will not last forever. The world’s memory is long, and the books that you eschew will nevertheless labor to make you their detailed subject.

History will remember you as a dangerous, cruel and unabashed child — unfit for office, heedless of counsel, loathe to lead, pernicious to freedom and bereft of ability. Your mark upon it will be bleak. Generations will look back dismally at how someone so feckless could assail, from within its highest office, the world’s greatest Republic.

You are not truly a victor — not even now, in these few, vainglorious years of your imagined triumph, as you exult dumbly with your frenzied defenders, before the inevitable judgement of time and its binding verdict. The laurels that you clutch at will dry in their impermanence; the ink upon the page will dry as well.

History will remember. You are a hungry opportunist, stalking the halls of a White House where you are always an interloper, because you are ever beneath its dignity — like a drab vulture that drops lewdly to roost upon the Parthenon’s marble. It may squat at the monument’s apex — and presume in its animal mind that its crude claws are worthy of the perch. But its bone and charcoal feather are alien to the timeless stone. It can never truly be of that place.

After the passage of the bird’s arch shadow, those columns will rise, tall and uncluttered, and the sun will find all of their white architecture.

History will remember. Posterity will know. The Republic will recover.

Sincerely,

Eric Robert Nolan