The hydrogen of hyperbole

by David Benjamin

“… Justice Merchan made clear that even if the sentencing were to go forward, he would not recommend any kind of prison sentence or home confinement.” —Maggie Haberman, NY Times, 5 Jan. ‘25

MADISON, Wis.—The inhabitants of “Earth One”—immune to the fantasy world of “X,” Fox News, Truth Social, OAN, InfoWars and The Epoch Times (among many)—can take a smidgen of consolation in the affirmation by New York judge Juan Merchan that Donald Trump is the first U.S. president who merits the honorific, “Convict-in-Chief.” But the dispiriting reality is that, with six lapdogs on the Supreme Court, with his team of shysters taking over the Justice Department and declaring that he’s “totally innocent” of all his ninety-odd high cries and misdemeanors, Cadet Bone Spurs is officially and uniquely above the law.

But how did he get there?

To understand how this happened, legal and political explanations are a dead end. The answer can only be found in a discipline cunningly disdained by the president-elect: science.

In an obscure but ground-breaking research paper published in the technical journal, The American Flatulary, Aeolus Mephitis, professor emeritus of aerostatics at the Pivnik Institute of Technology, revealed that Donald Trump has been measured with the most bloated ego of any human being in history. “As gasbags go,” wrote Prof. Mephitis, “the only precedents in the same ballpark were Nero, Catherine the Great, Louis XIV, Adolf Hitler and Orson Welles. But Trump blows them all away—literally.”

Prof. Mephitis explained that the volume of gaseous content in the once and future leader of the free world renders Trump lighter than air. “He’s a sort of human Hindenburg,” said the scientist, referring to the German dirigible, inflated with hydrogen, that exploded in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937, killing thirty-five people.

As with all politicians, the vast volume of buoyant air stored inside Donald Trump is composed of lies. “Each falsehood uttered by Trump, or anyone, exudes a few molecules of toxic gas,” said Prof. Mephitis, who has made the study of hot air his life’s work. “This accumulates dangerously. The mystery of this particular subject is that he seems unharmed. This endless gush of lies would kill most people. They would die of shame. But Trump seems to thrive and grow fat on mendacity.”

The scientist noted, however, that a danger to which Trump appears immune poses an increasing threat to anyone with his “range.” “If Trump goes, my God,” said Prof. Mephitis, “the Hindenburg, by comparison, would be like popping a little girl’s balloon with a cigarette.”

According to Prof. Mephitis’ team of aerostaticians at Pivnik Tech, most lies disperse harmlessly into the air, their toxicity mitigated by a thin, prevailing layer of healthy skepticism. However, the habitual prevaricator can’t help but retain a tiny residue of solid waste from each lie, which accumulates inexorably and turns its human vessel—unless purged by exposure and embarrassment—into what is known, in the vernacular, as a “lying sack of shit.”

Herein lies great peril for anyone within the vicinity. This film of deceit—popularly referred to as “hogwash,” “poppycock” and “bullshit”—constantly building up within the liar, couples with the subject’s mounting volumes of noxious gas. If released suddenly into the atmosphere, the vast volume of mendacity built up in Donald Trump “has the potential to explode with the violence of a nuclear blast.”

Prof. Mephitis said, “Considering the depth, breadth and longevity of Trump’s pathology, such an explosion of pent-up lies would devastate an area in excess of twenty thousand square yards covered chest-deep—in theory, of course—with a glutinous, suffocating sea of crapola. Anyone nearby would be powerless to escape.”

The scientist added that last July, in Butler, Pennsylvania, “We were within a whisker of a mass drowning more horrific than the sinking of the Titanic.” Prof. Mephitis was referring, of course, to the would-be assassin whose bullet clipped candidate Trump’s ear.

A number of facts about that near-catastrophe have been suppressed by the Secret Service. The crowd was spared the death and destruction that would have followed the puncturing of Trump’s compressed mendacity. But they almost lost their hero when he jumped out of his shoes, which were especially designed to keep Trump’s feet on the ground. For years, the soles of his loafers have been especially built with a thick layer of osmium and gold, the two heaviest metals in the periodic table.

The Secret Service grabbed the shoeless Donald not to protect him from rifle fire but to keep him from floating into the air beyond their reach, up, up and away, like a huge orange balloon with a long red tail. Buoyed upward by his gaseous reservoir of lies, insults and slanders, and aware of the danger of drifting into the ionosphere, Trump cried out in terror: “Flight, flight, flight!”

Few people beyond the Secret Service and a few researchers at Pivnik Tech have any idea that the incoming president is lighter than air. Some members of the media have uncovered Trump’s potential to suddenly fly off in whatever direction the wind is blowing, but they’ve been cajoled (or coerced) into not revealing what they know—much as the press agreed to conceal the disability of a wheelchair-bound President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A lying sack of shit in the White House, however, poses more problems to the nation than one who had polio. “I’m not a politician,” mused Prof. Mephitis, “but considering the presence of a president incapable of telling the truth, who might explode any minute into a scene of American carnage, I see only one practical choice.”

The solution, he said, would be to shove Trump into a black van and transport him—treating him gingerly, like a truckload of nitroglycerin—to a safe place, perhaps a deserted atoll in the Marshall Islands. There, he could be deflated by demolition experts with no threat to innocent life or human decency.

“Eventually, if Trump’s internal gasbag could be stabilized without killing him,” said Prof. Mephitis wistfully, “he might be brought back into society. After all, he’s an entertaining sort of guy. I picture him as one of the highlights of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, alongside Underdog and the Liberty Mutual emu. I can see him floating up there above the law as Secret Service agents in black suits and Foster Grants man his ropes. Smiling that stiff, phony smile, smelling vaguely of rotten eggs and armed with a toy pistol, he gazes down upon the New Yorkers who—he thinks—have always loved him, symbolically shooting people on Sixth Avenue without losing a single vote.”