MOLOCH MUST BE APPEASED:

The brutal killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is arguably the most cinematic moment in our Trumpian death montage, but it's not the most lethal. At a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., Attorney General William Barr's Justice Department is racing to commit state-sanctioned murder against five more inmates before Trump leaves office -- the first time since 1889 that a lame-duck presidency has carried out any executions at all.

These actions come at the end of a year in which death has covered the United States like a shroud, as a result of our utter failure to contain the coronavirus. In El Paso, Texas -- one of the worst epicenters of COVID-19 -- officials recently brought in 10 refrigerated morgue trucks to deal with an overload of deaths, a scene that a skillful director like a Coppola or a Scorsese would surely edit with interspersed cuts of an uncaring president lining up putts on a golf course.

In the end -- and it is the end, no matter what a deranged team of White House lawyers is still babbling about on Newsmax or Facebook or wherever -- Trumpism and America's hopefully brief experience with neo-fascism has been exposed as a death cult.

The latest bizarre plot twist -- an 11th-hour push by Trump and Barr's Justice Department to allow executions by poison gas, firing squads, or the electric chair if that's what's needed to clear any obstacles to the current mode of lethal injection -- probably would have been rejected in most Hollywood writers' rooms for looking too much like 20th-century totalitarianism.

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