Goines On: Down with the king?

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Someone in a college email discussion group Goines sometimes participated in suggested that the latest whistle blown about Trump – that his Deutsche Bank loans were backed by a Russian state-owned bank – could be the end of Trump. Another participant said he was hoping that this might lead to Trump’s resigning, in exchange for a comprehensive pardon. Sure, Goines thought, if Trump could put in a fix for one. “But a pardon might mean we wouldn’t get to see Trump wearing a prison jumper,” Goines said.

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    A fourth participant reassured Goines that a pardon would apply only to Trump’s federal crimes. New York could still go after him.
    The classmate hoping for a resignation admitted that Trump seemed to have an endless supply of accessories to take the fall for him, which elicited from the one who brought up the whistleblower to start with that MAGA really stands for My Associates Get Arrested.
    A fifth participant said that he personally would demand that the “golden showers” video that the FBI was probably hiding be released, but he was afraid that even that would not sink Trump.
    The image of Trump’s “sinking,” in that context, provoked Goines to imagine him drowning in a vat of urine, and he suggested that that might be an appropriate punishment for Trump. But a sixth participant complained that drowning in piss wouldn’t be unpleasant enough for Trump (“too quick”), since Trump seemed to think he was a king. Or a queen? Trump’s evangelical Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, had expressed confidence last March that the Lord was at work in raising Trump, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.
    To address the “too quick” problem, Goines compounded the scenario by suggesting that Trump be confined in traditional stocks and pillory (ankles and wrists confined) for some lengthy time of months or years, with no one looking at or talking to him. “And inability to tweet with his hands locked in the pillory would compound his misery.”
    Goines subsequently realized that many people would want to approach the stocks and pillory (or at least be able to see it on television, which would necessitate the presence of a camera), but could the knowledge of garnering attention be unpleasant to Trump? Ordinarily not, as gathering attention seemed to be one of his main things. But surely gathering it under the circumstance envisioned would be excruciating to the man. Otherwise adjustments would have to be made to make Trump blind and deaf to it, either literally by surgery or by fitting on his head unremovable eye patches and white-noise earplugs.
    With a start, Goines questioned whether he was into inflicting pain for its own sake, or for his own pleasure. He fervently hoped that he did not want that. He didn’t think that he took any pleasure in inflicting pain. Certainly not on innocent creatures.
    The punishments he and others had begun to imagine in Trump’s case reminded him of the brutal executions of English history: drawings and quarterings, disembowelments, castrations – all with the victim still alive and sentient. Goines realized with a shudder that he had always assumed the English took pleasure in those practices. but that assumed that their society was psycho- or sociopathic. The English crowds that gathered for executions seemed to find them entertaining, so far as Goines could tell from films and from what he could remember from reading novels or history.
    But what if the English, like Goines and his friends, were only seeking appropriate, deserved punishments for the wicked kings and criminals they were administered to?

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