I think the Former Guy is well enough known that I don’t have to repeat that he didn’t receive a majority of the popular vote and it was the stupid electoral college—that outdated holdover from the founding of our nation—that put him into office. I really hate it when I hear people say that he “won” the election. I recently even saw a video made by a Brit who should have known better, who in an off-handed comment claimed that a majority of the American people had voted for him. No, they did not.
Anyway, in a panel discussion a few years before he died, Stephen Sondheim, along with John Weidman, mentioned that the song “Another National Anthem” from their musical Assassins was appropriate for the January 6th rioters.
In the show the group of assassins gang up on the Balladeer who has been providing the optimistic counterpoint to their angry rhetoric all evening and finally banish him.
Here is the song from the revival Broadway Cast recording in 2004. Alas, that production was not recorded for telecast, although there is a very poor quality bootleg available on YouTube.
And I’ve cued up the Westchester Sandbox video so you can see a staged version of the number. I’m not very happy with the way it’s staged here, but it’s better than nothing, I suppose.
I don’t know that there’s any way to prove it, but the Former Guy may very well have been the stupidest person to inhabit the Oval Office, he was certainly the least qualified.
But he wasn’t the worst president, at least not in the harm he did, not in my opinion anyway. He was so incompetent and there were enough people around him who were trying to rein in his worst impulses, that he was pretty ineffective. Overall I think Junior Bush and James Buchanan beat him as the worst, with Ronald Reagan close behind. Still, he was pretty bad.