You know how adverse circumstances bring out the best or worst in people?
I was stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike this evening trying to get to my sick mother, and taking half an hour to go four miles. Situations like that always seem to turn into four-wheeled Lord of the Flies moments, like the whole social order is ready for a Mad Max style breakdown…. For every person who placidly sits in their lane and inches forward, you have the guy who tries to get to the the off-ramp sooner by driving in the breakdown lane and inventing a second lane on a one-lane ramp, the woman in the Beemer who jams the corner of her car in front of you to make you let her in….. I even saw someone in a white Mercedes doing 40 smack down the middle of the grass median in the rain.
In short, arrogant and selfish people who cheat in order to get ahead of everyone else rather than playing by the rules, because they think they’re special.
That line of thought naturally led me to Donald Trump, because, frankly, that sort of driving is basically his life. If, like the late 20th century philosopher Tom Cochrane said, “life is a highway,” Trump has in his own words proven himself to be the never-grew-up-just-grew-old adult form of a spoiled teenager, blasting along in the fifth Lamborghini his dad bought him (having crashed the last four) weaving madly in and out of traffic, never paying his mechanic, making pedestrians jump for their lives in lit-up crosswalks, parking in handicapped spots, and telling his country club set that speeding tickets were for little people, the whole time with a blonde on his lap, with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cell phone in his other, on which he’s endlessly complaining about all the nasty women and other people taking up space on *his* road. In other words, a yellow-haired, orange-skinned overstuffed meat-mattress….
So let’s make “trump” into a word that means …. Ok I don’t really have a synonym handy but let’s just define it as “whatever that kind of crap is.”*
Someone cuts you off at an intersection? He’s a Trump.
Someone stops the checkout line in the supermarket because they want the clerk to go get them a second box of organic grape tomatoes rather than get out of line and do it herself? She’s acting Trumpishly. (or would it be Trumply?)
The girls who lean over your shoulder at a bar and spills Jager and Red Bull down your neck so she can reach past you and steal someone else’s beer off the bar for a boyfriend? Bunch of Trumping *ssholes.
The 20something banker suit who eats his entire meal at a restaurant and then shows off to his date by demanding the restaurant comp it because it wasn’t any good? Positively trumpesque.
Your neighbor blows his driveway snow into your freshly plowed driveway? F*cking Trumptastic.
The Audi-driving Gold Coast freshman lacrosse jock at the Orientation Weekend mixer who gropes every girl in the room one after another and calls them all whores? Classic Archer Trump.
The guy who backs up at 50 MPH in a parking lot to steal the hospital parking spot you waited for while a family of five packed themselves into a Dodge minivan? Grinchy-Trumpy-Claus.
The coworker who walks into your office, farts hugely, sighs in relief, and then walks out again without saying a word? Trump a DOODLE-Trump (this makes sense if like me you read Little Peep as a small child), or possibly Taco Tuesday Trump.
The coworker who you bounce ideas off of for something cool, and who then sells it to the bosses as his own idea and leaves you out in the cold? Double-reverse overhand no-look ninja choadegrapple Trump.
When your roommate sneaks brown-outed underwear into your load of laundry “just because you have a load going” Trumpdump
Secretive alien powers messing around with humankind’s fate without explaining why? MY GOD IT’S FULL OF TRUMPS
Axl Rose? Complete Trumplestiltskin. (and, I believe, Jenga)
We can do this. YES WE CAN!
This is America, people!
Brothers and Sisters and uncles and second cousins and the weird guy who mows his lawn at night!
We put men on the moon with computers less powerful than a ten year old flip phone. We invent and repurpose words ALL THE TIME (we even invented “repurpose” rather than reuse “reuse” or recycle “recycle”).** Hell, we even decided the last name of a former Republican senator was the new word for "that frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." Compared to that “Mike was such a f*cking Trump in the project management meeting today” is NOTHING.
“Bromance” is still and odious, stupid and unnatural abomination of nature and alien to all things good and pure, though.
So come on….. let’s make Trump a word!
#trumpisawordmeaningasshole
*I know “trump” is already both a verb and a noun; according to Merriam-Webster, in the card game bridge it means “a card of a suit any of whose cards will win over a card that is not of this suit —called also trump card” and the verb “to trump” refers to using such a card. By extension, any things that are dominatingly better than other things (like an aircraft carrier or Michael Jordan) can be called “trump cards.” That’s still close enough, if you think of trump cards being privileged assholes.
** Ironically, the word ‘neologism’ is Koine Greek by way of 18th-century French, but when it was adopted into English, ‘neologism’ was itself a neologism, or at least a loan word.
