The Populist

She storms through rallies like a queen of the lost,
and something in the crowd completes the circuit –
not stupidity, not theatre, but a cost
long owed, long felt, finally given a verdict.
She reads the room the way the desperate read
a face that seems, for once, to know their name.
Whether she believes it is a different creed.
The hunger was already there. She came.

Her origin story plays well in the lights:
the battler, the outsider, the plain-spoken one.
Each telling files the edges, smooths the slights,
until the myth eclipses what was done.
She learned to wear the wound like decoration,
to make the past perform on cue, on stage.
The grievance real once; now an invocation,
a script that keeps the faithful in their rage.

The cameras love a face that holds a crowd,
and so they came – not to interrogate, to air.
The panel format keeps the content loud
and shallow as a saucer. She knows where
the lights are warmest, where the questions stop,
how long a pause before the catchphrase lands.
The fourth estate became another prop
she borrowed too. She bites the hand that hands.

What drew them in deserves a longer look
than gullibility, that comfortable word.
The plant that closed. The town the market took.
The minister who smiled and wasn’t heard.
She didn’t make that wound. She found it open,
knelt down beside it, called it by its name –
not to heal, but to ensure it stayed unclosen,
a permanent constituency of pain.

The ideology, such as it is, runs thin:
a border here, a traitor there, the pure
nation betrayed from outside and within.
You cannot build a house on that, but sure
enough they try, because the blueprint flatters
those who feel themselves erased, passed over, small.
She offers them the one thing that still matters
when everything has gone: a villain for it all.

The question that the critics always miss
is whether she herself has crossed the line
from instrument to true believer. This
is where the portrait blurs, by her design
or by attrition – years of saying things
you half-believed until the half dissolved.
The puppet sometimes forgets there are strings.
The con, long run, leaves nothing quite resolved.

She waves the flag she’s never bled beneath
with the confidence of someone who has never
been asked to prove the faith beneath the wreath.
The veterans she invokes – she’d struggle whether
to name the conflicts, rank the sacrifice.
But sacrifice was always beside the point.
The flag is costuming. The flag suffices –
the performance its own sacrament, its joint.

She’ll soften once in power, runs the line
the moderates recite to help them sleep.
But power is not school; it does not refine
the curriculum of instinct, running deep.
What she has shown across these many years –
the signal in the noise, beneath the show –
is that the cruelty isn’t posed for cheers.
It’s genuine. That’s the thing they need to know.

The journalists who built her and then wept
that things had gone too far have questions owed.
The segment that they aired, the access kept,
the interview that flattered and was stowed –
these are not innocent. The architecture
of the platform was not built by her.
She walked through doors held open. Every feature
polished by a hand that should have demurred.

She’ll leave – they always leave – but not the same
country she found. That’s the part they elide,
the advocates who say it’s just a game
of politics, the pendulum’s wide ride.
The trust corroded doesn’t self-repair.
The institutions mocked do not bounce back.
The cruelty, modelled nightly, fills the air
like smoke, long after someone killed the stack.

What do you do with someone who has turned
a real wound into a career, a brand,
whose followers have legitimate concerns
she’ll never address, and never planned?
You name the grift without dismissing grief.
You hold two things at once: the conned, the con.
The ones who followed her deserve relief
from a politics she profits keeping on.

So here she stands, or stood, or stands again –
the populist is structural, not personal.
She’ll be replaced in time by other men
and women fluent in the same reversal
of means and ends, of symptom treated as cause.
She was a chapter, not the book. The book
is us: the hunger, and the long applause
we give to anyone who seems to look.

by Bakchos