The media sorts gave their sober reports
That today’s situation is dire;
The POTUS-elect, we must surely expect
Is a con man whose pants are on fire
Whose history shows (and now everyone knows)
He’s a rampant and dangerous liar!

When Trump was a lad, he would work for his dad
As they rented apartments to white folks
But plain as could be, applications marked “C”
Meant that “coloreds” were never the right folks

He set off on his own with a million-dollar loan
He remembers as practically zero
(While his dad guaranteed any more loans he’d need)
A Horatio Alger-type hero!

Small businesses knew, and they told me and you
Of the many times Trump simply cheated
By refusing to pay in the usual way
Once the contracted work was completed

His repeated retort was “I’ll see you in court,
If you’ll put up the money to sue me!”
“But my lawyers” he’d boast “Are much better than most,
So there’s little or no danger to me!”

The banks were no fools; the had special “Trump rules”
Cos they knew that the man was dishonest
His dad knew the con, and had taught it to Don
So he never delivered as promised

And there’s one time he crashed at a charity bash
Though he never donated a penny
He stole someone’s chair who was s’posed to be there
And he grinned for the cameras, so many!
So that everyone thought he had given a lot
When the truth is, he didn’t give any!

He jealously gripes about old-money types
Cos his money is new and not olden
They never will find him as one of their kind
So he paints all his properties golden

It’s brash and it’s bold, but it’s only fool’s gold
Every surface you see, thinly plated
To make up for the fact that his wealth is an act–
By the wealthy, he’s pretty much hated
He pretends to be grand, but the rich understand–
Like his courses, it’s all over-rated.

While at first we could joke at the words the man spoke
Cos we knew he was constantly losing
“We can no longer laugh” is our sad epitaph
As we’re meeting a doom of our choosing

The primary states, and the early debates
Found the voters were splitting asunder
So support ran quite this, such that Donald could win
With not fifty percent, but far under!

He says, then repeats in his three AM tweets
His impetuous notions, unfiltered
And we try not to laugh, while his unprepared staff
Tries to cope with a world thrown off-kilter!

*****

So, the thing about ballads… some of the classic, traditional ballads are very probably not written by one bard. They have been passed down and around, with verses tweaked, added, and removed, with melody substitutions, with far looser attention to meter and rhyme (because songs can do that). I’m starting out with classic ABCB, tetrameter-trimeter, with internal rhymes on A and C (classic ballad form may occasionally throw in ABCBDB as well). I will absolutely accept near-rhymes and stunt rhymes, and anyone with musical talent has my permission to do anything at all with it. I invite–no, I urge–you to contribute your own verses. Ballad form dictates a narrative, but you can include earlier, later, and in-betweener verses as you wish; I know, with such a larger than life (well, aside from hands) person, there are a great many verses I have missed, detailing his move into Manhattan, his marriages, his mob ties, his Russian mob ties, his failed businesses, his failed University scam, his… well, the good thing is, there are no length limits to ballads, and some can go on seemingly forever.

If you wonder whether or not your own verse fits the scheme, try singing it to the tune of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“.