Pray God it comes hard.

Since I left the newspaper business, I’ve called myself “semi-retired.” I say “semi” because I can’t really stop working. I wasn’t bred to stop working. I was bred to compulsively pull in every dollar I can until I die or become too sick to work.

Boo-hoo, right? America is full of people like me, hustling our way up to the lip of the coffin. I’m not special.

One of the things I’m doing in semi-retirement is a talk radio show. It’s local, but I talked about President Donald Trump today because I was on the air as Michael Cohen was testifying. Why talk about anything else? Why not just sit back and let the callers narrate the national reality TV show?

Thirty minutes before I went on the air, I was standing in a convenience store, buying 16 ounces of black coffee for 99 cents. I had to stand in line behind a couple of lottery ticket buyers, and the clerk was chatting into his smartphone in Arabic.

I considered buying some of those CBD oil gummy bears that are supposed to calm you down, but they were $6.99 a package, and I’ve been in the news business long enough to know that calm isn’t worth $7. Jittery nerves will make you money. Calm makes you happy with being poor.

Every morning, I give the clerk a $1 bill, and every morning, I wait for my penny change because I’m a fiscal conservative.

And in Washington, D.C., former attorney Cohen was lancing himself like a boil, spewing pus on the walls of the bought-and-paid-for Congress. Covered with the vivid green fluid of rot, the torpid white men in the chamber flossed the NRA money out of their false teeth and questioned Cohen’s motives. Belching the death stink of big pharma cash, they pressed on with the questions.

And why shouldn’t they have? Cohen isn’t running for anything, and no lobbyist paid him to speak. How would the Congress interpret any other motivation? Do any other motives exist?

This was while people speaking languages other than English sold coffee and swept floors and hung drywall all over America. I’m a 61-year-old native-born white man, and I am more frequently embarrassed by my own people than I am by any kind of foreigner.

I believe that Trump, more than any past president, is capable of asking for a national plebiscite to make himself president for life, a process ending with his being inserted into photographs showing men fighting in Vietnam. History, she is rewritten!

Before going full banana republic, we have this crack-toothed white minstrel show of justice among native-born white men, this cripple-footed dance of a democracy’s drunken, witless apes.

I’m not so sure that I believe in justice anymore or that it’s here in the country where I was born, where a beaten and bloodied Constitution means only that you can own as many guns as you want.

If there is justice, if there is a turning-away, if there is a time when we wearily plod away from a silly little dictator who promised us only that we could finally take a swing at black people and homosexuals, then I hope it comes hard.

Pray God it comes hard.

— Marc Dion is a columnist at the Fall River (Mass.) Herald News and author of The Land of Trumpin’, a collection of his columns about the man who heads what was once the mightiest nation on earth. Contact hin at news@noozhawk.com, and follow him on Twitter: @MARCMDION. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.