Song of the Day 1/6: Lynyrd Skynyrd, “That Smell”

Given the media’s eight-year obsession with Donald Trump, you would think the fact that he’s odiferous would have emerged before now. A person of my close acquaintance who interviewed him several times back in the ’90s, when he was having an affair with Marla Maples and doing his best to pretend he wasn’t, said at the time that he had an odd smell about him. She described it as a sour odor, like clothes that had been worn too much without washing.

That’s not the sort of smell Ronnie Van Zant was describing. He was speaking metaphorically because he didn’t want to come right out and call guitarist Gary Rossington a dick. Rossington got drunk and crashed his new car into a tree, forcing the band to postpone its 1977 tour to support “Street Survivors,” the one that ended when three band members, including Van Zant, died when their plane crashed. Rossington, meanwhile, survived years of drug and alcohol abuse and heart problems before dying at age 71 last March.

Trump’s got a metaphorical smell about him, too. It’s hard to tell with his worshipful cultists and the media’s obsession with doom-talking about him, but he’s sinking into dementia faster than Biden is. Yesterday in Iowa he told a rally audience, “Now, all I know about magnets is this: give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets. That’s the end of the magnets.” I’m no doctor, but when Uncle Sam started talking that way Aunt Millie started locking the doors at night so he wouldn’t go wandering.