This absolutely poetically brutal takedown of Donald Trump’s character by a fellow New Yorker is truly one for the ages

Michael White. Updated April 11th, 2026

Over the years there have been no shortage of memorable descriptions of Donald Trump.

Who could forget this screed about why British people so dislike the US president?

Or this classic, referring to Trump as “the festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit”?

Well, we can now add this to the collection. Writer Lyle Fass went on Threads recently to share his views on Trump, based on his impressions of him as a New Yorker but also having encountered him in real life before.

And boy, is his description worth every word.

(Scroll down if you want to read it all in one go)

View on Threads

It reads, in full:

“Donald Trump is one of the most degraded things New York ever produced, and this country looked at him once, then somehow said yes, again, put him back in the Oval. I am not over the first election. My nervous system never reset. Now we are deep in the sequel, watching a man who should be screaming at a maître d’ in midtown hold the nuclear codes, like the nation ordered a second round of food poisoning on purpose.

“Trump has been background radiation in my New York since childhood, a permanent orange smog over the Hudson. There were years when it felt like he had finally slid into the Page Six sewer with the other 80s fossils. Then came The Apprentice, the national laundering of a vulgar, bankrupt, racist clown into some kind of fake business patriarch. One of the great propaganda jobs of modern American life.

“I watched him once up close, my 31st birthday at Jean-Georges, in that cursed hotel with his name glued to the façade like nicotine stain. He sat a few tables away with Melania, hugely pregnant, and two extras from central casting. He sipped 7Up like a child on a plane. Melania stared into the middle distance. No one laughed. The whole table had the energy of a hostage video financed by tacky carpeting.

“Even then he was repulsive on a cellular level, the opposite of charisma. No Cary Grant money aura, no old Manhattan menace, just a low, sticky presence. Spiritually low. The kind of man who makes the room sag around him. A man built entirely out of appetite and grievance, ketchup packets in human form, the energy of a guy who screams at busboys and still thinks he’s been wronged.

“He is a collage of every bad man I have ever met, stapled together into one swollen Queens Frankenstein. Misogyny, racism, sadism, cowardice, loud stupidity, petty score-settling, class hatred, chronic insecurity, the whole damp catalog. He is what happens when every ugly reflex in American life finds one host body, hands it a gold toilet, and lets it loose on the republic.

“His engine runs on hate, and the fuel line is endless. Women, immigrants, the poor, reporters, Democrats, anyone with a second language or a second thought, he cannot stand them. He even despises the people in red hats who would sleep in their trucks for him. They are props, clapping seals who let him cosplay strength while he waddles through history smelling like airport food court and fear.

“He has never governed for a country, only for himself and a tiny club of money-sick men who look at America and see a carcass to strip. He is president for his court cases, his grudges, his debt, his sugar-high ego, for the billionaires who giggle when he talks about shooting migrants. He is a long tie filled with spite, a walking non-disclosure agreement with hair, signing away our future.

“So forget the polite vocabulary. No more museum labels. Sometimes precision means saying the plainest thing. Donald Trump is the worst American of my lifetime, a stupid, rancid, vengeful mediocrity who has dragged this country through his personal sewer for a decade. The fact that he clawed his way back into the presidency is a five-alarm moral failure. No fucking kings. Not today. Not ever.”

Brutal, huh?

Others think so too.

View on Threads

Source: Threads/@grapeylyle