I want to play sockhim (oh, sorry, sockher) for President Donald Trump. In our world today, there’s nothing, it seems, he can’t fiddle with or kick around or, for that matter, sock. And whenever he feels it’s necessary (or simply has the urge to do so), he’s always been willing to sockthem, whoever they might be. If something then goes wrong, as with Iran and the global economy right now, thanks to his wild and wildly destructive acts, so what? He’s still Donald Trump and can do the equivalent again somewhere else in some other way the next second-minute-hour-day-week-month-year.

I’m thinking, of course, not just about his unbearable urge to bomb Iran for the 940th (9,400th?) time, as oil and gas prices surge once again, but about his relatively recent intervention in the soccer World Cup to ensure that one of the best players on the US team, who had committed a foul, was red-carded off the field by a referee, and then was denied permission to play in the next game against the Belgian team, could instead compete in that very game. And of course, since everything You Know Who does is headlined, you know just what happened next: The World Cup organization, FIFA, gave way instantly, that player was indeed in the next game, and the US team still lost to Belgium by a significant margin.

And Donald J. Trump just rolled right on. No matter what goes wrong, he never loses. (If you think otherwise, ask him and you’ll find out that you couldn’t be more off base!)

I sometimes try to imagine telling my parents, who died deep in the last century, about “our” president. The only way I could do so, I suspect, would be by comparing him to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Donald Trump of the early 1950s, who claimed that his opponents were “commies” and, in a distinctly Trumpian fashion, swore that he had a (fictional) list of 205 State Department employees who were members of the American Communist Party and later that the US Army, too, had been infiltrated by commies. His charges would be the focus of the 1954 televised Army-McCarthy Hearings, which did me the great favor (at age 10) of putting a television set in our apartment for the first time so that my mom, Irma Selz, then a well-known political and theatrical caricaturist, could draw McCarthy and crew for the New York Post.

At a time when this planet of ours needed rescuing (from us, of course), the American people reelected a man who continues to openly promise to send us—all too literally—to the blazes.

And yes, he was an all-American monster, distinctly clobbering various figures and destroying certain American lives. Still, in the end, he was condemned by the Senate and essentially drank himself to death, only affecting our all-American world for a few years and (at least in comparison with You Know Who) in a relatively modest way.

Historically speaking, Donald Trump, president (no less!) of the United States of America twice, puts him to shame. Of course, once upon a time (believe it or not), Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump had the very same adviser (at different moments, of course), Roy Cohn, who, in the (all too literal) end, may have helped create a president from beyond the grave.

McCarthy only had a relatively brief moment at center stage before falling apart in a big-time fashion. Donald Trump, on the other hand, simply goes on and on and (yes!) on, whacking away at so many of the rest of us—Iran being at the top of his list, right now—day after day, week after week, year after year, while our world begins to disintegrate under us. (Oh, sorry, my mistake even to refer in passing to climate change when “our” president considers it a........

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