On January 20, 2017, president-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated the nation’s 45th President. Almost a year to the date, on January 24, 2016, Republican candidate Trump boasted at a Sioux Center, IA, campaign rally, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Sadly, he was probably right then — and his prediction will likely be worse after January 20th. But how long will Trump’s electoral halo keep him covered in a superhero costume of invincibility?
Following his inauguration, Trump and his ever-increasing entourage of family and business cronies will take over the White House and transform the Kennedy-era Camelot into a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Mirroring the gaudy, ostentatious bad taste of his “luxury” hotels, it will come to resemble Dante’s eighth level of Hell, Malebolge, an amphitheatre-shaped pit in which panderers, pimps, seducers and others are whipped, ducked in boiling pitch and their feet licked by flames. In Trump’s Malebolge, old-style sinners will be replaced by 21st century crooks and con-men be they Goldman Sachs scam artists, ex-military hustlers or political hacks as well as their legions of enforcers, the vast bureaucracy that distributes the spoils.