Louisiana Voice

Call it the gift that keeps on giving.

Just as we as a nation are beginning to emerge from the four-year train wreck that was the Donald Trump presidency, we’re greeted with the stark reminder of yet another failed Repugnantcan administration.

Even better, the two are now uniting under the double yoke of irrelevancy and incompetence.

It was in September 2015, when his own doomed presidential aspirations were still in the embryonic stage (from which they never emerged) that Bobby Jindal called Donald Trump “shallow” and an “unstable narcissist” while warning that a Trump nomination would torpedo the Repugnantcans’ chances of capturing the White House.

“Like all narcissists, Donald Trump is insecure and weak, and afraid of being exposed,” Jindal said back then. “And that’s why he is constantly telling us how big and how rich and how great he is, and how insignificant everyone else is. We’ve all met people like Trump, and we know that only a very weak and small person needs to constantly tell us how strong and powerful he is. Donald Trump believes that he is the answer to every question.”

While he could well have been holding a mirror up to his own reign of error, Jindal went on to say that Trump “has no understanding of policy. He’s full of bluster but has no substance. He lacks the intellectual curiosity to even learn.

“You may have recently seen that after Trump said the Bible is his favorite book, he couldn’t name a single Bible verse or passage that meant something to him,” Jindal continued, calling Trump’s claim “just a show.” Jindal said at the time, “And he hasn’t ever read the Bible. But you know why he hasn’t read the Bible? Because he’s not in it.”

Well, guess what? Jindal was correct (for a change).

Trump, for his part, DISMISSED JINDAL as one would flick a stray dust speck off his sleeve, quipping, “I only respond to people that register more than 1% in the polls.”

Jindal did what Trump could not accomplish: he got reelected to a second term but it was even more disastrous than the first. “After inheriting a $1 billion budget surplus, Jindal agreed to an INCOME TAX CUT that the state couldn’t afford,” said BLOOMBERG NEWS. “He cut spending where he could, particularly on health care and higher education, and reduced the state workforce. But balancing the books required relying on one-shot revenue windfalls and resorting to other fiscal sleights of hand that have left the state’s cupboard bare.”

He also engineered what Bloomberg called “a comically dishonest tax credit that even his fellow party members referred to as ‘money laundering.’ Washington has enough of this kind of budget gimmickry already.

“Jindal joined most other Republican governors in rejecting the expansion of Medicaid. And after Indiana found itself at the center of a national controversy over a religious freedom law that allowed discrimination against gay couples, Jindal pushed for a similar law in his state,” Bloomberg said. 

But fast forward to Aug. 24, 2021, and we have the announcement that Jindal will join the America First think tank to head up its healthcare arm, the Center for a Healthy America.

America First, of course is joined at the hip with Trump and he is using the so-called think tank as just another means of extracting contributions from the faithful who must be somewhat disappointed by now that he was not reinstated as president by that Aug. 13 deadline.

If there ever were two star-struck schmucks destined to join hands in a common march into oblivion, it would be Bobby Jindal and Donald Trump – poles apart in their spiritual beliefs, but oh-so-similar in their misplaced sense of self-importance.

Trump has this unquenchable appetite for attention. He must remain in the spotlight. Jindal was as spot-on in calling him an “unable narcissist” as Trump was infinitely off-target in his self-analysis that he was a “very stable genius.” (One wag ventured that when Trump was asked what his middle initial “J” stood for, he responded, “Jenius.”)

Jindal, on the other hand, has been casting about since he left office in January 2016 for some means to keep his political vital signs alive. Those efforts, which include the occasional writing op-eds for the Wall Street Journal and getting appointed to a couple of corporate boards, have done little to resuscitate what is essentially a moribund public career.

This union reminds me of a wonderful Tom T. Hall song, The Little Lady Preacher. The song is about a 19-year-old female preacher who was “developed to a fault” and who preached each Sunday morning on the local radio. She would punctuate the Bible with a movement of her hips and when she breathed into the microphone, she’d “send us all to hell.”

In the song, Hall said he played the “doghouse bass” and she had a guitar picker named Luther Short who drank and smoked but never drew a rebuke from her though “she said a prayer for me. I told her in a way, I’d been praying for her, too.”

The upshot of the song was that the little lady preacher and Luther Short had “a callin’,” and ran away together, leaving Hall to face the “heartbreak, unemployment and all.”

“I don’t know where they’ve gone and I ain’t seen them people since.

 Lord, if I judge ‘em, let me give ‘em lots of room

I know ol’ Luther Short and he’s a hard ol’ boy to change.

And I’ve often sat and wondered who it was converted whom.”

So, as Jindal and Trump embark on their common journey to political extinction, they can take some solace (or discomfort – the jury’s still out on this one) in the knowledge that the road doesn’t fork.