Charles Rammelkamp

DONALD TRUMPSKY

“I have never rated Stalin
so highly as to be able to hate him,”
Leon Trotsky once observed,
the best-known leftwing critic
of Stalinism in the world,
dismissing his rival as tawdry, unworthy,
no doubt pissing off thin-skinned Uncle Joe,
who invoked Trotsky’s name
throughout the Moscow show trials,
the Great Purge of the late thirties:
Leon the sinister source of all disloyalty, sabotage,
the classic purveyor of fake news.

Founder and commander of the Red Army,
Trotsky lost the power struggle
after Lenin’s death in 1924,
ended up in exile in Mexico,
after a year in Alma-Ata in Central Asia,
then Turkey, France, Norway.

Stalin’s agents tracked him down.
But he survived a machine-gun attack
just as he’d survived prison and Siberia
as far back as 1900,
a proverbial cat with nine lives.
But on August 20, 1940, 
NKVD agent Mercador did him in
with an ice-ax blow to the skull
outside his compound in Coyoacan.
So Uncle Joe finally got his revenge
against the fake news.
Take THAT, Crooked Hillary! Take THAT, Sleepy Joe!


Charles's YouTube reading of "Donald Trumpsky"


Charles confesses: "Donald Trump seems to have the same brutal instincts and lack of self-humor as Joseph Stalin and given the opportunity will no doubt exercise the same ruthlessness; he already has. Talk about “show trials” – Trump’s (against Letitia James, Jim Comey, Mark Kelly, etc., etc.) have basically been joke trials."

CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His collection, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, was recently published by Kelsay Books.