Trump is the Rat King of Scandal

You Know What a Rat King Is, Doncha?

My wife hates rats. I don’t blame her. Rats are hard to love.

Personally, I had a bad experience with rats as a little kid. My dad was a research psychologist. He wanted to learn how we learn. But he started out experimenting on rats. Perhaps he thought he would figure out how Republicans learn first.

I’m sorry. I’m a little punchdrunk from this campaign. Forgive my outburst.

Anyway, my Dad would periodically invite me up to his research laboratory. This was when he was a young scientist. He spent most of his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories. But this was during a year he had a teaching position at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York.

I was maybe 3 at the time. So, he’d bring me up to the lab. And I would sit on a stool. And he would run the rats through a maze. And they were cute and I would pet them. And then he would pick them up and crack their necks over the edge of the garbage pail into which he threw them. Because once the rat learned the maze he was of no use from a research perspective and, presumably, because no one was, back in the day, or now for that matter, running buccolic rat sanctuaries for over-the-hill research rodents.

This upset me psychologically and to this day I almost never dispose of creatures I no longer have any use for that way.

My wife’s experience was, I think, also shaped by some bad experiences she had with rats during a time she was living in Mexico as a little girl. I am not sure of the details but I do know that by the time we moved to New York City nearly 10 years ago, if she saw a rat in the street, she would holler. I mean she would shriek. And she’s a trained opera singer. So it was an experience.

On garbage nights when all the apartment building supers would drag bag after bag of garbage from their basements and pile them up in the street, it was a rat jamboree. We would walk down the street and rats would be scurrying from some dark shadowy hideout in a building over the bags of delicious putrid garbage. And sometimes, they would be so full from the delights they discovered in those smelly mounds of the stuff New Yorkers no longer wanted, that they would kind of loll about. They wouldn’t run away. And this was even worse for my wife.

But the worst experience came when one night we were walking down the street and two particularly bold rats decided to make a run right at her. She was shocked and froze briefly before they ran up her feet and started climbing her legs. She did a desperate kind of survival dance and screamed and we moved out of that neighborhood within weeks.

Not that there were any neighborhoods in New York without rats. So we got a big dog. The dog was very intimidating to people. He chased squirrels. He once caught a pigeon in his mouth. But he just didn’t care about rats and they didn’t care about him. They could walk a couple of inches below his snout and he just would trot by la-di-da as if they were distant relatives of a semi-benign rat like Templeton from Charlotte’s Web. (I know. Templeton was a sneaky guy. But he helped save Wilbur and he mourned Charlotte just like everybody else so…you know, semi-benign. Oh. Did you not know what happened to Charlotte? Sorry. Belated spoiler alert.)

Anyway, when my wife got offered a job in the Biden Administration, we decamped for DC in part because we had lived through the great rat population explosion that occurred during COVID (lots of people eating outside in the street at little outdoor cafes did not help). Enough was enough. DC had rats but it was not the same.

Since then, New York’s mayor Eric Adams launched a war on rats and in his one contribution as mayor, he finally mandated that people keep their garbage in bins rather than leaving it in torn plastic bags. Now they are actually giving birth control to rats (until Clarence Thomas puts a stop to that). And so maybe the situation will improve.

It is worth noting at this juncture that it is obvious that the rats did not take to Eric Adams’ initiative very well. There are three million of them in the city—roughly twice the population of Manhattan—and once they targeted Adams, he was doomed. Now virtually everyone in his cabinet has resigned in a rapidly growing scandal. And if you ask Adams why so many of his cronies have fallen and why he is next he will surely tell you that it was the rats that did it. (Presumably he would mean that metaphorically, but don’t be too sure.)

Now there is a phenomenon among New York rats that you may not know about. It is something called a “rat king.” Rat kings are groups of rats whose tails become so intertwined that they cannot free themselves from one another and they are forced to move around together as one.

It’s a disgusting image and frankly, pictures of the real thing are just as repulsive. But more foul still is New York’s ultimate rat king. Like the rats, he is a creature of the New York demi-monde. Like the rats he is a survivor despite his known odiousness. Like the rats, he is concerned with nothing but feeding his own appetites. And like the rat king, he carries with him lots of baggage. He is intertwined both with other rats, many of whom have been indicted, some of whom are serving time, some of whom are just unindicted co-conspirators waiting their moment in the sun…and with his own ratlike behavior, the scandals that can never be separate from his person, that he drags around with him like an extension of his large, furry rat’s ass. Early frauds. Mob deals with building projects. Failed businesses. Charities that were shut down because they were scams. Mueller’s many obstruction charges. Uncharged collusion with Moscow. Two impeachments. Two dozen credible accusations of sex abuse. Rape. 34 felony counts. Pending cases for stealing national secrets and election interference at the state and federal level. And dozens of uncharged crimes that were crimes nonetheless—from betraying the country to violating campaign finance laws to possible violations of the Logan Act in his calls with Vladimir Putin. (Was it a crime to send Putin COVID testing equipment when Americans couldn’t get it? Maybe not. But then, maybe it should be. Was it a crime that a million people died on his watch? Definitely if the term justice means anything at all.)

Yup. You know who I mean. Trump. The ultimate rat king. And now, he has announced that he is going to hold a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, a rally just like the one the German American Bund held there before WWII, just like it because both will have been events driven by hate and racism and vileness. But you know, New Yorkers know Trump best of all. We’ve known he was a crook since he was helping his Daddy keep people of color out of their apartment buildings. In 2020, Trump got just 12 percent of the vote in Manhattan…the place where he lived. People hate him. (Just as they probably do in Detroit today after he visited the city and took the opportunity to slam it.)

So, you’ve got to ask yourself, with attendance at Trump events lagging already, how does he expect to fill the 20,000 seats at Madison Square Garden. Especially if no one in Manhattan wants to have anything to do with their homegrown rat king. But then, of course, you remember.

There are always those three million rats.