We're getting the band back together

I don't live in the kind of city that gets Lady Gaga live for one night, or Taylor Swift.

I live in the kind of city that gets a Journey tribute band that sounds just like Journey if you're drunk. Sometimes, at some limping, underfunded civic event, we get a band that still has one of the original band members from the days of their greatest hit. If we're really unlucky, that original member is the drummer.

But what the heck. The concert is free, and if you close your eyes, you can feel young again.

More and more, with every appearance, Donald Trump is looking like that band.

The lead singer's voice is shot, and he doesn't dance like he used to dance. He's gotten fat, and he's wearing a “hip” fedora to hide his baldness, and he's croaking out the lyrics that defined one summer of your life when you were high all the time.

“Let's get high and doooo it,” he's screeching. “You know you want to doooo it!”

And the singer pumps a wrinkly, small-knuckled fist in the air, and you remember how you kicked Bobby Poniatowski's butt outside the pizza place on Redfern Avenue the summer you were 17.

You take a chug of your vitamin water and try to remember what it felt like to smoke three joints a day for two weeks.

And Trump's out there on the circuit, the last band member. Spicer's gone. Maddog Mattis has retired. Alex Jones put down his bass and started hawking male enhancement pills on late-night TV.

But Trump is still out there, backed by a band called The Conspirators, doing that one, years-old hit over and over again, forever releasing new music that only the old fans buy, never busting onto the charts again, the leather pants just a little tighter in the back.

But what a summer he had just a few years ago, barely bumping Hillary Clinton out of the No. 1 spot, but getting there, playing the big arenas, selling the merch, rocking the house down.

But you slip out of the top spot, and all you're left with is the road and the old fans who want to feel young again, who want to close their eyes and lean into yesterday.

Trump's winning primaries, no trouble at all, out there in the square states, and he's thinking that if he can do one album of new material, he'll be back on top.

But there's no new material. Some guys only have one song to write, and they start by playing bars and bowling alleys, then clubs, and then, when that hit song drops, they play arenas.

But there are no new songs, and they play the clubs again, and the oldies weekends, heading back to the bars and the bowling alleys. Their shows still sell out, but only old fans show up, and hardly anyone wears the T-shirts anymore.

Donald Trump can't win another national election. He barely won the first one, and he better write a hit song fast.

As the years went by, Joe Biden became Tony Bennett. Donald Trump became Ted Nugent.

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