The Zombie Presidency

You don’t need to know much about zombies to know that they’re, a) nasty, and, b) persistent. The first point is obvious; the second, instructive. They just keep coming. Individually unimpressive, relatively easy to deal with — Just bash ’em in the head! — they overwhelm by sheer force of numbers: Whack one and another’s already chewing on your ankle.

I was thinking about this the other day so as not to think about Donald Trump when I realized I was thinking about Donald Trump. And lo! I saw that like explained like, that a man spawned in the Petri dish of popular culture might be explained by an analogy drawn from the same source; that this same man’s rise from Celebrity Apprentice to the Presidency could be explained by turning to the Pool of the Equally Improbable.

Already I can hear the skeptics: “Now, hold on, the man’s way smarter than a zombie (Smart as a fox, even, as an ex-girlfriend of mine told me), and he talks better, too,” so allow me to clarify. The parallel isn’t to the man himself (though zombies aren’t big on compassion, either), but to his method. And its effects.

Think about it: The man doesn’t stop. He’s relentless. He overwhelms. Scandal after scandal staggers across the stage, and before we’ve had a chance to deal with it, another’s taken its place. Paradoxically, rather than multiplying our outrage, the sheer number dissipates it. It feels unnatural, a transgression against some natural law: one scandal can kill a presidency; twenty render it immune . . . to scandal.

But it’s not just the big, gaudy conflagrations — the Access Hollywood tape, the shameful food fight with the Gold Star Khan family, the public celebration of Russia’s hacking of the DNC, etc. etc. etc. — that we have to worry about, though they take their toll. Infinitely more difficult to combat is the round-the-clock assault of brazen, scuttling, in-your-face lies: facts that just aren’t, boasts based on nothing, denials contradicted by the candidate’s own words, accusations that are imaginary except for their teeth. It’s too much. No lie is ever admitted, much less retracted or apologized for. It’s already gone, expendable. If the press shoots it down, another climbs right over its body.

It’s a strategy employed by oak trees as well as zombies, incidentally, though I’m betting you wouldn’t be reading this if it was titled, “The Oak Tree Presidency.” Oaks, in case you didn’t know, regularly produce more acorns than can be eaten by predators. Called ‘Predator Saturation,’ it speaks to both Trump’s media strategy and the coming zombie apocalypse, a pairing we can expect to see increasingly often as our newly anointed slouches toward Bethlehem.

All of which leaves only the effects to consider. Since the bitten, as everyone knows, instantly transform into the image of the biter (see Mitch McConnell and the majority of the GOP majority), that leaves only the actual majority — besieged, exhausted, increasingly numbed — murmuring, “How can he say that? Can he say that? But he just . . . wait . . . no!”

What to do? Crude assaults suggest equally crude (yet oddly elegant) solutions. The truth seems to work pretty well. Bash ’em in the head with facts, and then keep bashing. Take one at a time. Find a clip on YouTube of our Deceiver in Chief saying what he just denied ever having said, and press ‘send.’ Send it to everyone you know. Don’t stop. Infect others with your zeal; ferret out every lie and turn it against the liars and when you feel yourself growing tired, consider the alternative and where it leads us, and press on.

You know how this movie ends. Don’t you?