“They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us — they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.” — Hunter S. Thompson, “Kingdom Of Fear” (2003)

Hunter S. Thompson killed himself with a .45 caliber Smith and Wesson Model 645 semiautomatic pistol while sitting in front of his kitchen typewriter on this day twenty years ago in snowy Woody Creek, Colorado. He was 67.

While that obviously was a tremendous tragedy for his loved ones and fans, it also robbed the world of what he would have said — violently, colorfully, insightfully — about the current age of madness in which we all live.

There’s a delusional rabble of half-bright dingbats online that believe Thompson would today be a full-throated supporter of Donald Trump, which is utter stupidity. But we live in one of the most unimaginably stupid eras of human history, so of course there are grasping imbeciles that think one of history’s most famous anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian writers would somehow be wearing the foolish little red MAGA hat that signifies slavish devotion to vicious autocrats and cruel oligarchs.

Thompson would have been 87 years old today and may not have survived this long naturally. His body was a painful mess by the time of his suicide, and a life spent as a functional alcoholic and professional drug enjoyer had already taken an enormous toll on his prodigious talent. There’s not a lot of longevity in the fast lane. It’s probably merciful that he didn’t live long enough to see the final perversion and death of the American Dream, a concept that animated almost his entire canon.

He did leave behind a substantial body of work that provides ample evidence that Thompson would have had found new levels of literary fury and hatred for Donald Trump and his pathetic, vindictive rabble of neo-Confederate dipshit followers.

Just look at what Trump did on Wednesday alone: Shamelessly refer to himself as king and have the White House communications apparatus double down on it with a fake Time magazine cover of him wearing a crown; completely sell out Ukraine to the gangster war criminals in Moscow; declare that only he had to authority to determine what is law; and push out a cruelty porn video of immigrants in shackles.

To imagine Thompson would approve of such things is sheer insanity. It’s akin to calling the sky plaid and denying gravity. The writer who spent almost 40 years blasting away at Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes would not drop his core ideals and principles to suddenly enlist with a brigade of low-rent Klansmen, bottom-shelf Nazis, science-denialists, and other cranks and reactionary trash. Thompson was not a boot-licking supplicant of the ruling class, and he loathed mindless peasant fear and ignorance that power requires and preys upon.

I consider myself a very minor amateur authority on Thompson. I’ve interviewed his editors (and his son), talked at length with his biographers and his literary executor, read everything he published and all the biographies and academic works about him, written about him, and drank deeply from the two books of letters that give incredible insight into the man himself. I also consider myself fortunate that I didn’t come to Thompson first via the “Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas” cult that did so much to cement his image as a bit of a Gonzo clown because most readers missed the message of the book and instead focused on the booze and drugs and antics. That’s the shallow frat boy grasp of Thompson.

Instead, I discovered Thompson in 1994 when I saw a copy of E. Jean Carroll’s oral biography “Hunter” sitting on a desk at my college newspaper. The cover photo was this guy in a multi-colored patch coat, fedora, camouflage pants, with a shotgun on his hip. Who the fuck is this guy, twenty-year-old me wondered. I picked it up, started reading. Kept reading. Then went to a used bookstore and picked up “The Great Shark Hunt” “Songs of the Doomed” “Generation of Swine” “Hell’s Angels” and most importantly, “Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.” I devoured all of them in a few weeks (rather than attending classes).

I read the Vegas book last, and I am glad for that.

Reading his journalism blew the doors off my mind. I had no idea it was possible to write like he did, to say such things in print … and get paid for it. And yes, I briefly fell into the embarrassing trap of trying to look and act like his signature style. Fortunately, I didn’t smoke and trying a Dunhill with a TarGard filter didn’t lead to that unfortunate habit. I also wasn’t a drinker (I didn’t get drunk for the first time until my early thirties) and certainly wasn’t a drug user then.

Worse, I tried to write like him but was wise enough in my callow years to quickly abandon that affectation. Still, his unique and forceful and bold style continues to influence my own writing and politics today and always will. There’s a reason he’s still in print and has had five movies and several documentaries made about his life and work.

His early freelance writing and more obscure pieces reinforce the fact that Thompson was a lower-case libertarian, a thoughtful patriot, and as angry as one could be at the people he deemed responsible for wrecking and perverting the idea of the American Dream. All of his polemics, satires, rebukes, screeds, and elegies share, at their core or at least in their undertones, what he called the Death of the American Dream. He was the flawed and doomed harbinger-scribe of what is now coming to pass with terrifying speed.

The man who wrote a long endorsement of Jimmy Carter was never going to be a MAGA white nationalist stormtrooper. Racism, bigotry, fascism, and unfettered crony capitalism are the traits of small minds and atrophied souls. They’re the hallmarks of the morally and ethically illiterate, and the spiritually and intellectually bankrupt. Thompson was none of those things.

The writer Timothy Denevi published a 2018 book called “Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism” that’s the most clear-eyed explanation of why it’s safe to assume even an elderly and enfeebled Thompson would be enraged at the Trump era of American history. That Thompson was anti-fascist is stone-cold fact.

Trump is a very American type of fascist, and he’s surrounded himself with henchmen bent on dismantling a century of progress in favor of an austere autocratic regime. This simply isn’t a point of debate anymore.

The so-called “outlaw journalist” Thompson told SPIN magazine in 1986 that the three most important men of his time were Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro, and Bob Dylan.

Not exactly the pantheon of right-wing heroes.

My theory of why some people think HST would have been MAGA is that Thompson was an iconoclast and anti-establishment figure. The Trumpist Right believes their man is the ultimate anti-establishment figure. Trump is an iconoclast in that he wrecks cherished traditions like liberal democracy. But it takes an absolutely incredible level of credulous mental gymnastics to believe dishonest billionaire Donald Trump – a man that shits in gold-plated toilets – is anything but the ultimate establishment figure. He’s an unrepentant nepo-baby crony capitalist, a mob-loving crook, a duly adjudicated rapist and multiple felon, a white nationalist, and a seething sweaty totalitarian-bent mad king with all the loyalty of Judas Iscariot. He’s a bizzaro Col. Kurtz with 40 fewer IQ points and zero profound insight into anything.

Thompson would have shit on Trump from a great height. Unlike the serial draft-dodging Trump, Thompson was a veteran who loathed militarism and once called the Air Force in which he’d served “the most efficient gang of murderers in the history of man.”

That doesn’t sound very MAGA, which indulges in flag-humping worship of the military and cops.

“I think he has remained a writer of significance because, essentially a satirist, he has displayed an utter contempt for power – political power, financial power, even showbiz juice,” wrote the travel essayist and novelist Paul Theroux about Thompson in 2003.

Contempt for power isn’t a MAGA hallmark. Just the opposite: It seeks total political, military, economic, and cultural power. All things Trump openly worships. Any dissent is dismissed as the disloyal and treasonous ramblings of Marxists.

Trump made his fortune and name as a New York real estate mogul that understood how to manipulate media. Here’s what Thompson had to say about developers when he ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., in 1970:

Change the name “Aspen,” by public referendum, to “Fat City.” This would prevent greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name “Aspen.” Thus, Snowmass-at-Aspen — recently sold to Kaiser/Aetna of Oakland — would become “Snowmass-at-Fat City.” And the main advantage here is that changing the name of the town would have no major effect on the town itself, or on those people who came here because it’s a good place to live. What effect the name change might have on those who came here to buy low, sell high and move on is fairly obvious… and eminently desirable. These swine should be fucked, broken and driven across the land.

Doesn’t sound like a Trump supporter to me. Especially now that Trump has promised to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn the land into a private oasis for the wealthy. That’s a textbook “greedhead land-raper” and worse.

Trumpers point to Thompson’s criticisms of major Democratic Party figures, including George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and others, as evidence he was somehow a reactionary fellow traveler. But that’s exactly what a keen observer of politics does when the party and politicians of their choice fail to live up to expectations. Our nastiest fights are always within our own families.

MAGA cannot abide any criticism of Trump and their movement and is congenitally unable to understand how anyone could be critical of their own side. Constructive criticism, rather than ad hominem attack, is also beyond the grasp of Trumpists. It’s the sort of ideological cult that Orwell warned us about, only the pigs walking on two legs are somehow dumber and uglier and meaner than all of the other animals on the farm.

It’s almost surreal to think about, but the now-politically-castrated ESPN had Hunter S. Thompson writing about sports in the early 2000s when the network had the old irreverent Page 2 site that dealt with the culture around sports. Naturally, most of Thompson’s columns delved into politics, especially after 9/11. He understood everything is political.

Here’s what he wrote for ESPN about George W. Bush being on television so often after those attacks: “Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-Failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants.” That almost seems quaint today as we watch TV networks, major media outlets, and corporate America hand Trump everything he wants while preemptively bending the knee.

Thompson’s ESPN columns were published in 2004 as a book called “Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.” That title alone should be evidence enough that Thompson would find zero common ground with Donald Trump and modern Republicanism. The dumbness has spiraled further downward at an alarming pace since Trump arrived on the political scene. We now reject fucking vaccines and purge civil servants and talk of annexing Canada and invading Greenland and seizing the Panama Canal. This is an obscene age.

Here’s what Thompson wrote in Rolling Stone about Richard Nixon after that disgraced president’s death in 1994: “He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

It would be hard to top such an obituary for sheer savagery (and to top what Mencken wrote after William Jennings Bryan died), but if anyone could have risen to the occasion for elderly Donald Trump’s coming death, it was Hunter S. Thompson.

But he’s now been gone 20 years and it’s up to the rest of us to carry on the good fight against these fascist shitheads and their imperialist oligarch financiers.

My hope is to live long enough, and to stay out of MAGA concentration camps, to write Trump’s obituary. I cannot match Thompson’s acidic rhetorical brilliance, but I can meet his vehemence and venom.

And I hope to get the chance to write it soon.

Fuck Trump. Fuck MAGA. Vive le roi du Gonzo.

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