The story so far: I introduced the characters Leo and Max to stand in for the sharp political division in this country. Leo is the liberal: woke, environmentally conscious, and fully vaccinated. Max, on the other hand, is full-on MAGA and even has his very own presidential pardon for taking part in the January 6 Trumpster insurrection at the Capitol.
In February, I decided that Leo got himself swept up in an ICE raid while volunteering at a food bank. At the time, it seemed likely that he would end up stranded on a tarmac in some random Latin American country among a plane load of braceros, roofers, hotel maids, short order cooks, guitarrónistas, and Operation Enduring Freedom veterans.
The Trump regime’s depths of depravity, however, are more abysmal than anything I imagined in February. Venezuelan immigrants and refugees have been sentenced with no due process to die in a sweltering concentration camp in El Salvador.
Afghani women and men who assisted our soldiers in their country before Trump pulled the rug out from under our allies there are being sent back for certain persecution and probable stoning to death by the Taliban.
Misappropriated FEMA funds have been purloined for the hasty construction of Florida’s flood-prone-and-that's-hardly-the-worst-of-it Alligator Gulag.
The Trump team is now shanghaiing people to South Sudan, a country perpetually in the midst of civil war.
All this ethnic cleansing is the wet dream come true of white supremacist ghoul Stephen Miller, aided and abetted by Trump's cabinet of martinets, lickspittles, and wackadoodles, a Congress dominated by knuckle-dragging yahoos, and a right-wing Supreme Court that has ruled that under any Republican President, civil rights aren't worth the paper the Constitution is written on.
When last we saw Leo in Trumplinka Prison, a faceless ICE gestapo trooper was grilling him about a tattoo of Max's initials, which they misread as the Salvadorian street gang "MS13." So WTF am I to do with Leo now?
Maybe he'll be freed by an AI Marco Rubio imposter. Unless that comes too close making light of our descent into lawless dictatorship.
But how else can I get back to having Leo and Max argue about Big Bonkerful Abomnibus Bills, Zohran Mamdani, and Eau de Trump No. 5™?
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