If you do a web search for “is Trump toast” you will find that the phrase has been used frequently this week what with, well, everything going so badly for the president. It’s not merely Covid-19, unleashing his thugs on peaceful protesters, his widely mocked Bible photo op, the Russian bounty story, the polls, the dismal turnout at his Tulsa rally, but also news about GOP lawmakers “throwing him under the bus” and major donors abandoning him.
Republican columnist Mark Gerson called Trump’s situation the smoking ruin of his reelection in yesterday's OpEd, but many others just say that Trump is toast.
In fact scroll down the search page and you’ll find a Daily Kos community story with that title from May 3rd by middleoftheroadDem with this illustration.
More recently Frank Bruni’s OpEd in The NY Times had the same title.
I come here not to excerpt articles from others with this title with a few opinions thrown in.
I come for several reasons.
One is to do grievous injury to one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines by paraphrasing Marc Anthony:
Friends, Kossacks, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Trump, not to excoriate him.
The evil that Trump did will live after him;
There is no good to be interred with his ashes?
So let it be with Trump.
To be completely honest, and I try to be nothing else when I post something here, I also came in part to show off my pictorial version of the oft maligned toast that Trump is about to become.
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After I made this image I got to thinking about the derivation of the expression he’s toast.
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Toast, after all, is a versatile version of bread that is downright yummy whether used for a classic BLT or simply spread with butter or jam.
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Burnt toast, not so good. Toast done the way you like it, good, toast burned black, bad.
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I decided to look this up the derivation of the expression and right off came up with the perfect explanation about where the saying “he’s toast” came from. William Safire wrote an entire article about it in 1997 in The NY Times in “Is History Toast?” He was not only an author, columnist, journalist, and speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew, but he
wrote the "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine. Please, fellow amateur etymologists, forgive him his politics and read what he wrote. Wikipedia
But history, in its sense of ''hopelessly old-fashioned; last year's craze'' is back in the mists with twenty-three skidoo. In our breathless run-up to the millennium, the hot term for outcastedness -- expressed in a combination of scorn and revulsion -- is toast.
''Hey, dude. You're toast, man'' was a passage in The St. Petersburg Times of Oct. 1, 1987, the earliest citation the Oxford English Dictionary research staff has of this usage. ''Actually, the trendiest way of saying someone is finished is to say 'He's toast,' '' wrote the columnist George Will the following year. ''The women in Bush's entourage also are turn-you-to-toast toughies.''
Nearly a decade later, Tom Friedman, a foreign-affairs columnist for The New York Times, envisioned Secretary of State Madeleine Albright urging Jiang Zemin, the Chinese leader, toward the next stage of economic development because ''if you can't deliver that next stage you're toast.'' The columnist concluded his imaginary dialogue by having Jiang ask, ''What does it mean to be toast?''
It means ''burned, scorched, wiped out, demolished'' (without even the consolation of being remembered, as history offered). Makers of a movie about a volcano in California wrote the tag line ''The Coast Is Toast.'' When Ted Turner, the magnate who enjoys sailing, almost fell overboard, he told an interviewer in 1992, ''I thought I was toast -- I would have died''; five years later, firing his own son after a merger, the tough-loving father said, ''He's toast.''
My opinion about what level of flame broiled bread Trump has become in the past few days is depicted in my illustration.