Bombing Iran is Trump’s latest grassfire. Like a poisonous snake a foot away, grassfires make it hard to think about nuclear war, buying groceries or the spreading of a document describing being raped by Donald Trump when you were 13.

Of course, while practicing French I had to read the “histoire” of a cute gamin reported to have killed a viper that bit her lip. It beggars belief, but the histoire said she fatally chomped on its head. 

Will Donald Trump, will we, be so lucky?

Maybe Donald Trump will win a Nobel Peace prize. If not, the Capital Hill GOP will surely summon Joe Biden to testify about Epstein as Trump’s black holes expand.

One black hole was the SOTU. I watched it. I watched it all because I’ve become immune to a vocabulary better suited to a teething child.

SOTU? That’s the State of the Union address used by our previous presidents to unite the nation.

No such luck in 2026.

In his first 30 minutes, before the TV audience lost interest, Trump introduced guests hurt by brown people and added two more Medals of Honor to my grandfather’s lofty fraternity.

The rest of his record 110 minutes speech he leaned lazily on his podium and pointed his finger at the depleted ranks of Democrats. Many were absent, attending their alternative “Kid Rock” SOTU. (It was probably something like doing calisthenics with six-pack Bob Kennedy)

When they wouldn’t stand on command Trump called Dems unpatriotic. When he accused them of harboring murderers, Minnesota’s congresswoman Omar shouted back that HE was killing Americans.

Republicans dutifully stood to applaud every three minutes. The Dems mostly sat on their hands. A few walked out. A black congressman holding a sign saying “Black People aren’t Apes!” was “escorted” out.

Pardon this prologue. This was intended to be about my short break from “Pulitzer-worthy history” to read Pulitzer-winning fiction. 1946’s All the King’s Men is about our first wannabe Donald Trump.

The book by Robert Penn Warren was written in a kinder and gentler (for white folks) America. Its muse was Louisianna’s Governor, Huey Long. It started with enough N***** words to inspire a Trump not to sell homes to black people.

I got through two of its 10 tiny print chapters laden with southern drawls, imagery, metaphors and color before I gave up the ghost.

To finish it I watched the book’s first movie adaptation filmed three years later. Penn’s ne’re-do-well was “Willie Stark.” Willie started out sincere, as Huey Long reportedly did, but swiftly became an amoral opportunist building highways, schools and lining pockets.

The movie could have passed for Louisiana had it not been for some distant California mountains in one scene.

Both fiction and reality led inexorably to Stark’s and Long’s assassinations on the state capitol steps. The movie that gave Broderick Crawford an Oscar for best actor, raced past all the book’s blackstrap molasses.

Even so, it lasted an hour and 50 minutes.  That was only two minutes longer than Trump’s record-setting SOTU.

Trump, Stark and Long all shared impeachments.

The real Huey Long bribed his way out of the state legislature’s grip in 1929 by controlling the press, among other indelicacies.

Watching Trump smugly sneering at Democrats who escaped his zip ties in 2020, I could better understand why Franklin Roosevelt dreaded facing the ambitious Long far more than the quartet of successive Republicans he knocked aside.

Huey talked big. He was going to make every man a king. It was easy to imagine him as our current president, cocky as Old Scratch, telling democrats they weren’t patriots.

You have to admit, the kid with a foot deferral out of Vietnam has moxie

The day after the SOTU I finished the first chapter of David McCullough’s 900-page Pulitzer Truman.

I told Claudia, that it was great to be reading history again. McCullough spent 10 years researching and writing this book.

Did you know that by age 12 Harry Truman had read the Old Testament twice. That’s more book than Trump has read over his entire life. Some folks don’t think he bothered to read his ghosted bestseller The Art of the Deal.

When I was a kid my grandfather told me never to vote for a Democrat. And yet, he also told my mother that he liked plain-spoken President Truman, even though he gave Republicans Hell.

Harry Truman and George Robb, who was three years his senior and who fought in French trenches few miles apart during the Great War.

How might Old Scratch, I mean Donald Trump, dodge losing control of Congress this November? 

His lackey Pete Stauber is trying to require every American get a passport to vote in November’s election. That’s an unconstitutional poll tax of $165.

He wants every woman who has taken her husband’s name, gotten a divorce, been remarried or anybody missing a birth certificate, or adoption papers to unearth them in order to vote.

How’s that for the State of the Nation?

Someone needs to give Pete Stauber hell.

Google Harry Welty. He’s been busy.