When You Lose Your Place in the Posse

Bob Cornyn and Bill Cassidy woke up, tired and anxious, after having the same dream last night. They were both back in high school. MAGA High School. A place they used to love. They were never big men on campus but they were big men adjacent, and that was good enough for them.

In the dream, Trump was THE big man on campus. The bully whose greatest joy was the arbitrary infliction of pain and total control over The List Of People That Matter.

Campus King Trump wore a gold lamé letterman jacket with red piping, his letters earned for varsity cruelty and self enrichment. He’s dating the foreign exchange student while quietly banging the girls from detention, and somehow everyone knows and nobody says a word. He’s that guy. He always has been.

Cornyn and Cassidy were never the swaggering core of MAGA High. Just fringe players who went along to get along, because in was always better than out. Cornyn was a placeholder, an unremarkable foot soldier, the agreeable porch puppy. You could kick him and he’d get right back up smiling. Still ready to be your friend. It was his most notable attribute.

Cassidy was useful for his intellect. The teachers loved him, and so what if he let the loud boys cheat off his homework. It kept him safe on the walk to science club. Nobody messed with his science project. The Kiwanis loved him. He only had to compromise his integrity a little to tag alongside them, those guys always tossing used gum at the peasants ducking into their lockers as the gang jostled by.

But in this dream, that fitful, awful dream, something changed. As the gang approached the spot where Cornyn and Cassidy stood near their open lockers, there was no greeting, no nod to come along. Instead, there was Julia Letlow looking happy, having already that morning prayed for world peace and the detention girls. She skipped to a stop just behind Donnie, holding his books along with her pocket New Testament, leaving his hands free to distribute nuggies and wedgies. Robbie Kennedy Jr. was further back, separated from his friends, pulled aside by a teacher and chastised for having no shirt, wearing only jeans and a cowboy hat with a coon penis bone decorating its hatband. T-Jeff Landry was also there, trailing at the absolute rear, sporting a goose down jacket with pockets full of chocolate chip cookies he tossed at the younger students, not even noticing when they ducked and flipped him off. Ken Paxton stayed close to Trump, looking vaguely neanderthal as he leaned menacingly into a well dressed nobody, lifting their Montblanc pen from their pocket and holding it up for admiration.

Trump stopped right in front of Cornyn and Cassidy. The whole crowd lurched to a halt. Landry dropped a cookie. Kennedy dropped to the floor for pushups. Trump reached back and Paxton handed him the pen. He extended his hand to Letlow and she handed him a clipboard with The List. Lindsey Graham, perpetually bent over near Trump, served as a desktop as Trump crossed Cornyn and Cassidy off The List, then handed the pen back to Paxton who smiled and placed it in his own pocket.

Then the group moved on. Just like that. The noise receding down the hallway. Cornyn and Cassidy stood there. Evicted. Deported. Scratched off, but still smiling because they hadn’t figured out what else to do with their faces. They looked down. Both were wearing Power Ranger pajamas and neither of them could find their homework.

Then they woke up. Their pillows hot and damp. The hallway was gone. The crowd was gone. The List was gone. Outside it was cold, and the door to MAGA High was locked, and somewhere down the street the loud boys were already rambling toward the next thing, and nobody was looking back.

Nightmares are awful when they’ve already come true.