TRUMPOLYTE! Did I just coin a word? It combines the surname of the current President of the United States with the word acolyte. Originally, an acolyte was “one who assists a member of the clergy in a liturgical service by performing minor duties.” And it sure does look to us non-believers that there sure is a lot of that ol’ time religion mixed up with the beliefs of today’s so-called “conservatives.”
It has passed into a more generic use to mean “one who attends or assists a leader; a follower.” And here follower means “one that follows the opinions or teachings of another” and “one that imitates another.”
As I said, today’s Rep*blican voters appear to have a religious-like devotion to their political and cultural leaders and heroes. So while engaged in an email conversation with Maryann Heimel, I spontaneously typed the word Trumpolyte.
Maryann Heimel is responsible for keeping me abreast of the best Trump political cartoons of the day, like this one by Robert Matson for Roll Call.
Since I didn’t know if someone had already beat me to the punch and coined the term, I assembled this article and readied it for publication thinking, “If I look up Trumpolyte on Google and it’s not there, I can launch this immediately and be The First!” Then I thought, “Who cares? Just post this and if I’m first or twenty-first, what the hey, heyna?”
FEATURED IMAGE: I went looking for some dismal grey photo of the Berlin Wall from the ’50s to make some kind of metaphorical statement about building such a wall and what it brings to my mind. Then I found all these colorful photos of the wall after its East Berlin vs West Berlin heyday.
So now it’s got me thinking that maybe we should let the Trumpolytes have their way and fund a wall! Think of what an enormous canvas both sides of a 2,000-mile long, enormously expensive, impossible-to-protect, counter-productive wall between “us” and “them” would give ambitious graffiti artists from both countries!
Plus, sometime in the future, thousands of liberals would get to tear the silly thing down and reduce it to rubble amid worldwide applause. And maybe then we Americans could look somewhat sane again to the rest of the world.
POSTSCRIPT: So I published this and then went to Google and typed in “trumpolyte” and not only am I not first, there’s already a hashtag for the term! All I can say is that someone behind that hashtag who beat me to the punch sure am smart . . .
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)
