IT DOESN’T pay to step away from the political scene for too long in Washington, DC. Aboard the Trump administration’s runaway train, the madness, criminality and downright cruelty piles up like trash in a landfill.

In the past month, we’ve had Trump depicting himself as Jesus, prompting thousands of hilarious memes; viral Iranian Lego videos mocking Trump and his cabinet; plans to put Trump’s face inside select US passports — “while supplies last;” and Trump’s signature on US currency.

And then, of course, another Trump assassination attempt — during the April 25 White House Correspondents’ Dinner — that almost no-one believes was real because these days what used to be an obviously ludicrous conspiracy theory, could under the Trump regime be exactly what happened.

After all, soon after the assassination attempt, and still in their tuxedos, the Trump cabinet, all smiles, assembled for a press conference in which they talked about….the Trump ballroom! All of a sudden, a mad gunman was reason enough to insist that Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project, which a judge had declared must be approved by Congress before it can rise from the rubble of the East Wing Trump has destroyed, should now be given a most urgent green light.

Sure enough, just 10 days later, Senate Republicans duly obliged by inserting a hefty $1 billion for the ballroom into an immigration enforcement funding Bill. The money, which would come from US taxpayers, is needed, they claim, to cover the ballroom’s “security enhancements.” So now, instead of being an expensive, unnecessary and vulgar vanity project, the ballroom is a US security imperative.

And yet, we must pity those idle rich who one day may be waltzing in the Trump ballroom. According to Steven Roth, the billionaire CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, the phrase “tax the rich” being used by his New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani and others, hurts his feelings. Its use, says Roth, is equivalent to “disgusting racial slurs.”

No, Mr Roth, it really isn’t.

Meanwhile, one of Roth’s New York “tenants,” Jeff Bezos (Roth rents space to Amazon in Manhattan) and Bezos’s possibly AI-generated wife, were busy across town presiding over the appalling annual over-indulgence that is the Met Gala. There, celebrities preened and posed for the cameras in outlandish get-ups while Gazans, Sudanese, Congolese and now even millions of Americans struggle to put food on the table. The smiling smugness of the unaware elite was sickening.

Speaking of Mamdani, a minor Republican member of Congress, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, whose name sounds more like a snack food, actually introduced a Bill that he calls the MAMDANI Act. It stands for Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists (such a clever boy!) If passed, the US would be allowed to “deport, denaturalise, deny US citizenship, or entry to any alien who is a member of a socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”

From time to time we even hear politicians warning against “the Leninists,” causing one to wonder if we are living in some kind of time warp. Where are all these Leninists? And you can be fairly certain that Roy, and most if not all of the other fools orbiting around Trump, have never read a word of Marx or Lenin.

But amidst all the nuttiness, the very real horrors of the fascist Trump administration advance apace. At its apex were his comments on April 7 directed at Iran that “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” That prompted another American, Pope Leo XIV, to retort that such threats were “truly unacceptable.”

Participating in pro-Palestinian protests can get you deported. So can being a loyal Afghani who supported America’s meddlesome war there to get rid of the Taliban which, after 20 years, brought them, drumroll, the Taliban.

Afghans who helped US troops and officials were promised safe haven in the US. Many came. Now Trump wants them deported to the Democratic Republic of Congo. If they refuse to go to a country and a continent with which they are entirely unfamiliar, they face being sent back to Afghanistan and into the hands of the Taliban.

The New York Times article that described this threat, lamented that Afghans sent to the DRC would find themselves in a country “already burdened by more than 600,000 refugees.” Yet there was no mention of that other inconvenience — the ongoing genocide there that has seen the slaughter of likely at least eight million people and where violence against women and girls is rampant.

On the home front, the Trump-loaded US Supreme Court continued to advance his racist agenda, striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that will dramatically weaken the prospects for more black candidates to get elected to public office while disenfranchising black voters.

Derrick Johnson, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, called the Supreme Court decision “a devastating blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act, and a license for corrupt politicians who want to rig the system by silencing entire communities. The Supreme Court betrayed black voters, they betrayed America, and they betrayed our democracy. This ruling is a major setback for our nation and threatens to erode the hard-won victories we’ve fought, bled, and died for.”

The specific decision by the US Supreme Court in the case, Louisiana v Callais, struck down the Louisiana congressional map, calling it unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. “In doing so,” wrote constitutional law professor, Edward Foley, the court “obliterated the commitment of the Voting Rights Act to racial equality in elections.”

In her scathing dissent, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan called the ruling a “demolition” of the Voting Rights Act, adding that “minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

Which is precisely the goal. The American Civil Liberties Union began tracking evidence during the first Trump presidency that he was on a path that hews to a white supremacy agenda. Nothing has changed this time around. Indeed, things are arguably far worse.

There is now an immigration ban against 75 countries in majority Muslim regions, and mostly from Africa and Latin America. Birthright citizenship has been attacked.

The venerable Southern Poverty Law Centre that, among other things, tracks hate groups of all colours and ideologies, was targeted last month with an almost certainly groundless indictment on fraud. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives have been slashed and even banned in both the government and private sectors.

We have much to fear. As one critic described him, Trump is “a tyrant wannabe who wouldn’t hesitate to set an entire country ablaze for the sake of his own narcissistic ego.” That was author Stephen King, the master of horror. He should know.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is the author of No to Nuclear: How Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, published by Pluto Press.