Return of the Swashbucklers

An Old Mule Keeps Its Fleas

“Either the Deep State destroys America, or we destroy the Deep State. That’s the way it’s got to be. We are at a very pivotal in our country.”

With that enigmatic call to action, Donald J. Trump began his roundup of cadres with those gathered in Waco, Texas, for the first of his 2024 presidential campaign rallies. Being alerted to the dire “pivotal” to which the country had sunk was important because they hadn’t noticed. No one had. Trump had a lot of campaigning ahead of him to do to alert everyone else.

Naturally, Trump’s vengeance had redoubled. After spending four years on the outside collecting indictments, he was so much more aware of how much Deep State there was to eliminate.

Learning that fatal first week of November that Trump would indeed be returning to the White House to destroy the Deep State cut deep for those who don’t want him to. Yet the wound, so fresh, virtually gaped as memory kicked in: He would not be returning alone. There would be others. His gallery of rogues and several carpetbaggers picked up along the way would be returning with him, like a pack of fleas. The mere recitation of the names of that parade of stooges stung like so many lashes. Their faces, conjured as from the depths of a cesspool, depicted knaves of such impudence and arrogance as to be scarcely borne over the course of a lifetime. And they were saddling up to head back in a single posse.

Of course they were coming back. Trump wasn’t going to be doing any destroying himself. His minions would do the work and the jail time if someone got caught. They were racing back for the honor of being so used. To huddle once again under Trump’s wing was highly reassuring. Returning from prisons, fleeing disbarments, panting for pardons, dodging threats of pending charges, trials, and possible sentencing, these rogues were already squeaky. But only Trump could make them clean. 

What’s to distinguish Donald Trump from an octopus? For starters, the octopus was born with its apparatus. Trump had to construct his from the ground up.

Imagine the wily octopus with its eight arms, interior surfaces covered with suckers, their single purpose to grasp and guide forage and foe toward the beaked mouth at the center. This soft-bodied beast can radically alter its shape to squeeze through small gaps. To defend and protect itself, it uses camouflage and threat displays, jets through the water, hides, and is even known to use deceit. Indeed, the gelatinous creature is among the most intelligent and behaviorally diverse of all invertebrates. Yet the humble octopus strives merely to survive in order to feed itself another day. 

So what’s to distinguish Donald Trump from an octopus? For one thing, the octopus was born with its apparatus. Trump had to construct his from the ground up. Imagine the ingenuity required to duplicate such an anatomy. Venturing out into the wilds of society — high and low, underneath and beyond, in the cracks and around the edges — to scrape together the members required to assemble his own cephalopod self, and he did it! Not to be outdone, he managed to attach far more arms than any octopus could boast or even handle.1 Trump’s appendages, however, are not referred to as tentacula but, in proper Trump-speak, as swashbucklers. 

To refresh the minds of readers who left the genre eons ago, a swashbuckler is a gallant, chivalrous fellow — swashbucklers are exclusively men — who is skilled in swordsmanship, acrobatics, and guile; is heroic, daring, and idealistic; rescues damsels in distress, protects the downtrodden, duels to defend his honor or that of some deserving lady, and leaps sword in hand into mobs to avenge a comrade,2 in this case Donald Trump. 

A boa constrictor can consume a whole cow at once, but is lamed for days by its bonanza. We must be wiser and digest what’s being dished out to us in manageable lumps.

With his team of swashbucklers about to reenter the arena and dominate the stage for the next four years, a brief, though certainly inadequate, review of the salient members, is in order. Worthwhile to keep in mind as we conduct that review are the words of former Trump White House spokesperson Hogan Ridley: “They don’t have to share his worldview exactly, but they have to implement it.”3 In other words, these swashbucklers are just goons, but they’re Trump goons, unleashed to do his bidding. No doubt Tump will welcome lusty latecomers, but let’s not think on that now. A boa constrictor can consume a whole cow at once, but is lamed for days by its bonanza. We must be wiser and digest what’s being dished out to us in manageable lumps. Meanwhile, let us be merry while we may. Come inauguration day, any occasion for merrymaking will be gone. And so to the rascals.

Stephen Miller.
Tag: Snake. 
Asset: Maniacal aversion to others. Blind loyalty to Trump.
Specs: Both intent on and charged with ridding the country of illegal immigrants and their U.S. citizen children. Could be up to 20 million. Will cost hundreds of billions. Trump promised, Miller will deliver, with pleasure.

Elon Musk.
Tag: Chucklehead.
Asset: Money. Richest man in the world with fortune of $200 million.4
Specs: Demonstrated his expertise in efficiency by giving $118+ million to Trump’s campaign. Much appreciated, Trump assigned him the task of making the government more efficient by extracting $2 trillion worth of waste from it. Milestones and objectives unclear except for one: eliminate meddling of Federal Aviation Administration and Interior Department in Musk’s SpaceX bid for launch licenses for its newest rocket “Starship.” 

Vivek Ramaswamy.
Tag: Acolyte.
Asset: Glib.5 Money, but not as much as Chucklehead, Acolyte boasts a modest fortune of slightly over $960 million.
Specs: Not one to serve as anyone’s lickspittle but Trump’s, Acolyte suffered humiliation and secret rage to find Trump had been so unkind as to buddy him up with Chucklehead to co-commission DOGE.6 After rubbing out the Department of Education, which is Acolyte’s no-compromise aspiration, he may have to negotiate with Chucklehead on other targets, which could be fun. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Tag: Vaccine Man.
Asset: Name of such repute, it should have cautioned him from joining this sideshow.
Specs: Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) by providing raw milk, stem cells, chelation, and hydroxychloroquine to all such who desire these concoctions. 

Steve Bannon. 
Tag: Desert Rat. 
Asset: Gab. 
Specs: Keen on destroying the Deep State government, but hopefully not before Chucklehead and Acolyte have gotten that $2 trillion out of it. Whenever sighted, appears to have just wandered out of the wilderness where he spent many days without razor or change of clothes.

Donald Trump Jr.
Tag: Starched Man.
Asset: Son of Trump. 
Specs: Never fully acclimated to life on Earth, his shirt, some speculate, got starched while he was still in it. Notwithstanding, will be asked for an opinion every day; worse, he shall impart it. 

Elise Stefanik.
Tag: The mouth. (In Greek tragedies designated “Chorus.”)
Asset: Talks faster than anyone can listen.
Specs: Browbeats presidents of famous universities into states of despair and resignation. With her masterminded equivocation and slug-loaded rhetoric, she KOs opponents before they climb into the ring. Now headed to the United Nations as U.S.’s ambassador, flares and fireworks will fizzle before her.

Matt Gaetz.7
Tag: Lord of Smug and Sleaze. 
Asset: Glib. Blind loyalty to Trump. 
Specs: Keen desire to smash whatever Trump tells him to. 


  1. Those less acquainted with Donald Trump may not realize that they must also be wary of that necktie of his. Although its powers remain mysterious, we do know it’s very long and flaps in the wind. ↩︎
  2. “Swashbuckler,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Swashbuckler&oldid=1255094585 ↩︎
  3. McKay Coppins, “Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies,” The Atlantic, January/February 2024 Issue. ↩︎
  4. Musk’s $13 billion gain as a result of Trump’s electoral win amounted to a mere 7% increase of his total wealth. ↩︎
  5. Not to be confused with the noun form, which denotes “a mass of hair worn thickly matted so as to overhang the forehead and eyes and constituting a manner of hair arrangement at one time customary among the men of Ireland.” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/unabridged/glib. Accessed 13 Nov. 2024. ↩︎
  6. The nonexistent Department of Government Efficiency. ↩︎
  7. The admission of this rogue into the gallery of fools just lately announced, the author was forced to relinquish full consideration of Trump’s pick for attorney general due to a sudden bout of indigestion. ↩︎

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *