ArcaMax

I don't live in the kind of city that gets Lady Gaga live for one night, or Taylor Swift.

I live in the kind of city that gets a Journey tribute band that sounds just like Journey if you're drunk. Sometimes, at some limping, underfunded civic event, we get a band that still has one of the original band members from the days of their greatest hit. If we're really unlucky, that original member is the drummer.

But what the hell! The concert is free, and if you close your eyes, you can feel young again.

More and more, with every appearance, Donald Trump is looking like that band.

The lead singer's voice is shot, and he doesn't dance like he used to dance. He's gotten fat, and he's wearing a "hip" fedora to hide his baldness, and he's croaking out the lyrics that defined one summer of your life when you were high all the time.

"Let's get high and doooo it," he's screeching. "You know you want to doooo it!"

And the singer pumps a wrinkly, small-knuckled fist in the air, and you remember how you kicked Bobby Poniatowski's butt outside the pizza place on Redfern Avenue the summer you were 17.

You take a chug of your Vitamin Water and try to remember what it felt like to smoke three joints a day for two weeks.

And Trump's out there on the circuit, the last band member. Spicer's gone. Maddog Mattis has retired. Alex Jones put down his bass and started hawking male enhancement pills on late-night TV.

But Trump is still out there, backed by a band called The Conspirators, doing that one years-old hit over and over again, forever releasing new music that only the old fans buy, never busting onto the charts again, the leather pants just a little tighter in the back.

...continued