By James Moore

Little Johnny was off to school with his backpack and baseball glove. Teachers said classmates could play catch during recess. They noticed something about him, however, that he was not as aggressive as other boys and was overly thoughtful and concerned about his fellow students, and there was just something about the way he crossed his legs that bothered his educators.

The surgeons grabbed him out of the hall on his way to the library, probably to check out copies of “Little House on the Prairie” or some other book written by a woman. Doctors understood his character and physiology better than even Johnny. On a cold, metal table in shop class, with the curtains pulled, the doctors grabbed scalpels, sliced off his boyhood, and went to work fashioning a vagina so Johnny could become full female. Estrogen was pumped into his veins and they gave him a cute little dress and patent leather shoes to wear back to class.

“They’ll call you Johnette now,” one of the doctors said. “But you’ll be so much happier.”

It was all that simple. Johnette struggled a bit with the pain and his stitches hurt for a while, but he slowly adjusted. When he got home that day, his parents were upset because they had not authorized a sex change operation for their son. They adjusted, too, though, believing the teachers and the school were probably only doing what they thought best for his future. The future quarterback was now a prospective cheerleader. Johnette put away her baseball glove and went shopping with her mother for girls’ clothing. Her mom was happy to have a daughter after four boys.

Absurd? Sure. Comical? Hell, yes. But it’s what a man who wants to be president thinks is happening to many school age children in America: They go to school of one gender in the morning and come home the opposite in the afternoon or a day or two later. Secret operating rooms are apparently being set up in study halls and cafeterias and between library shelves. Who the hell knows other than Donald Trump? He believes it so it must be true.

Out of all the senile rantings the Republican presidential candidate spouts off, this one most clearly establishes his disconnect from reality and the psychotic break he has undergone. Watching him make the claim on video, it is obvious he is not fashioning a horror story on the fly for political effect. The man is truly convinced that children are undergoing sex changes at their schools and going home a different gender. Were he making such assertions on national television as the President of the United States, Trump would likely be confronted with the 25th Amendment and there would be an effort to remove him from office, quickly. His party, however, stands mute, privately hoping he will lose and go away and they can begin the generational challenge of rebuilding the GOP.

“The transgender thing is incredible,” Trump said at one of his rallies. “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

If you doubt his psychosis, consider that the campaign, almost certainly without Trump’s knowledge, admitted to the media it had not even the slighted indication such a thing had happened anywhere in America. Surely, Trump did not know his staff were telling the truth behind his back because just a few days later he repeated the scenario at another rally.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school and your son comes back with a brutal operation.”

No, actually, no parent can imagine that because it has not happened. What they are forced to envision on an almost daily basis, however, is a crazed gunman, slinging an automatic weapon and sweeping a classroom with a rain of bullets, destroying children. Trump increased the odds of that occurring with a resolution issued during his first month in office that rolled back an Obama-era rule that made it harder for people with certain mental health conditions to purchase firearms. The measure had required the Social Security Administration to provide the names of people who receive disability benefits for mental illnesses to the FBI’s background check system. Crazy and want a gun to do some fun killin’? Don’t worry about the feds finding out. Trump fixed that.

The lunacy of his vision regarding school surgery for sex changes seems to have astonished the American public less than his assertion Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats and other pets belonging to the residents of Springfield, Ohio. Because Trump’s mind is balanced precariously on the edge of the cracker, the oddities that spring from it spontaneously are losing their shock value. Little Johnny losing his willie during school lunch hour, however, must have set a new standard for absurdity, and, yet, the party of cowards that follows and votes for Trump is non-plussed; they move on waiting for rallies to hear more laughable claims before they walk out bored and carrying their MAGA gear.

The real world is so frustrating and unwilling to adore Trump that his pathology requires him to create a place his mind can occupy where he is respected and honored. There is, for instance, no state of Michigan in this universe that has named him “Man of the Year,” a claim he has repeated numerous times. The award doesn’t even exist, and yet since 2016, Trump has said it was given to him, and during a campaign event in the state recently insisted he had been vindicated regarding the honor.

“The press said, ‘Oh, it never happened.’” he told a crowd. “Well, then it did happen. They found out where it was. But it was like 15 years ago, a beautiful area, but nobody remembered it; nobody remembered it all. All of a sudden, like through a miracle, they found out it did exist.”

No, they did not find out it existed because it does not and never has, except in the gray goo that comprises Trump’s mind. The story has the same lack of validity as the one about the Congo emptying “rough prisoners” into America through illegal immigration. He manufactured images with his short-circuited synapses that showed him visions of prisons in Africa opening their doors and helping convicts get transit to the U.S. – Mexico border. Thematically, though, he is consistent; his tales of fright are all related to people of color. They are black Africans and Haitians, brown Mexicans and Central Americans, yellow hordes of Chinese coming to infiltrate our economy and steal our technology, and, of course, the dark-skinned Mid easterners determined to destroy our Christian way of life. That leaves out his warnings that undocumented immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country” and are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Aggregate polls indicate that 67 percent of Trump supporters believe those falsehoods.

Weariness sets in when trying to keep up with or catalogue the lying, and the addition of J.D. Vance to the ticket has added a new dimension of prevarication to the campaign. The Ohioan has admitted that he is willing to “make up stories” if that’s what’s needed to get the attention of voters, which makes him more Trump than even Trump. His confession ought to frighten the electorate even further away from Trump’s restoration. The former president is old, angry, and demented, and given his manifest mental state, there is a likelihood he will not serve out four years even if he were elected, which means a vote for Trump is, in effect, a vote for Vance. The inevitable conclusion from that probable scenario is that, yes, there is a worse than Trump scenario.

And that ought to scare hordes of sane Americans to the polls.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.