Donald Trump is to blame for everything

Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I realise bad luck and trouble can be laid at the feet of one tiny-handed speaker of post-truth to power. Blame Trump! 

After a 2016 of moderate to extreme suckage on both a personal and global level, 2017 dawned with a rosy optimism and a feeling that things could only get better. It was time to put to rest a year where heroes dropped like flies, zeros rose like champagne bubbles and my health and wealth barometer plunged sharply southward, and go forth into the new year and prosper.

But suddenly, in short order, everything has gone to the dogs. A blissful visit from my overseas-dwelling girlfriend was cut brutally short when her mother collapsed and was rushed to hospital for heart surgery. I was confronted with having to deal with the reality of divorce for the second time around. And then to top it all off, from a reasonably busy street outside a major shopping location in broad daylight, some bastard with a boltcutter stole my bike, the one gadget in my life that had brought some happiness and a sense of freedom (after a shaky start with a bad crash), allowing me to begin to get fit again after a bout of pneumonia.

My bike had carried me to Bondi and Botany Bay, over the Parramatta River and along the Cooks River, through mangroves at Homebush, around the Iron Cove and, thrillingly, over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Kirribilli, Mosman and Manly, from Gladesville to Ryde, and Rydalmere and Clyde.

I’d felt my legs grow stronger, along with my lungs, as hills that had thwarted me and seemed like endless mountains gradually become molehills. I rode it to work and back, on errands, and on my days off, I’d head off into the unknown with a vague new destination and Google Maps as my guide. Having laughed at first at the warriors, it wasn’t long before I invested in a couple of pairs of padded Lycra bike shorts, for added comfort after hours in the saddle.

There were even some sleepless nights where at some ungodly hour I wheeled my bike down the stairs as quietly as I could, flicked on my flashing lights, and coasted out into the night, gasping like a madman up the steepest hills I could conquer and shrieking like a werewolf down the other sides.

Basically, I just wanted to ride my bicycle. It had almost become an extension of my body. So when I turned a corner, returning from shopping, to see a void where my steed should have stood, the air went out of me like a punctured tyre and I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. All that was left was the snipped lock coiled on the ground, testament to the brazen crime, taunting me.

I was subsumed by a towering rage.

A primal scream curdled in my throat as I snatched up the broken bike lock, and then a great shadow passed across the sun and I was struck by as vivid an epiphany as any of the hallucinatory visions in the Revelation of St John.

To err is human, to forgive divine. But truly blessed is he who shifts the blame onto his fellow man. Suddenly it all became clear. There was no point blaming myself, or railing at the gods. I didn’t need to blame Canada or the Kiwis, or blame it on the boogie, or the bogeyman.

I realised my problems, along with most of the troubles plaguing our planet, could be laid at the feet of one man: Donald Trump.

Things were just fine until a few weeks ago, then that doofus as POTUS took office and everything went pear-shaped. So I blame that tiny-handed speaker of post-truth to power. I blame that chump Trump. He’s been blamed for everything else. The seers have moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. A Penn State professor, Michael Mann, visiting Sydney last week, warned Trump might well cause the end of the world. So he might as well take the blame for my missing bike.

In the future, the last surviving remnants of humanity will send a killer cyborg back through time to take out the antichrist superstar, the devil’s apprentice who is to blame for all human misery and who ushered in the end times.

Until that day, when anything goes wrong, I simply unfurl my bony finger of blame in the general direction of Donald J. Trump.

Amazing grace. Sweet catharsis. The yoke has been lifted. A great weight removed. Try it. You may like it. Just blame Trump.