A guy ought to be able to leave town, even the country, with the expectation that sanity will prevail, that the inmates will not be given the keys to the place, and that he’ll return a couple of weeks later to find things essentially the same as when he departed.

Well, as we have learned to discard so many assumptions. I guess that one must also go by the wayside.

While overseas and doing my darnedest to disconnect a bit from the madness, there seems to have been a metastasis of precisely that. Let us take stock.

Close to home, Denver’s mayor, regarded as someone of high intelligence and even higher ambition, announced pay raises for his top cabinet members of up to 44% before predictably being forced to back off in light of a projected two-year budget shortfall of $250 million requiring layoffs and furloughs for run-of-the-mill city employees.

At the same time, nine – count ‘em – senior executives at Denver International Airport flew first-class or business-class to a conference in Madrid with tickets costing as much as $19,000 apiece. Asked to justify this expense, airport CEO Phil Washington said, “Our policy allows us to do that.”

The booster group for downtown Denver spent $100,000 on a London consulting firm to rebrand the troubled 16th Street Mall as, wait for it, 16th Street. If only such a marketing genius could be found on our own shores.

Over at Denver Public Schools, a complaint, “May I feather your pillow?” board short-circuited any performance evaluation or voter revolt come November and extended Superintendent Alex Marrero’s tumultuous reign by an additional two years. Clearly, the concept of “merit pay” does not apply in this case.

Committed to tumult and apparently not content with his newfound job security, Marrero asked for the formal censure of one of the two board members who voted against his contract.

These local events were child’s play in the national context. The political class waited breathlessly for the release of a much-hyped book documenting Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive decline, and the increasingly desperate denial of his Democratic enablers.

A question: Does it constitute a “cover-up” if most Americans were in on the painfully obvious secret?

Of course, Donald Trump, never one to take a backseat when it comes to embarrassment or outrage, was heard from over and over again.

Who knew that the restoration of American greatness included the reopening of Alcatraz, which had been shuttered for 62 years? Or the posthumous rehabilitation of Pete Rose, banned from baseball for gambling and from civil society for tax evasion?

Trump’s grand tour of Arabian capitals could have been produced by Monty Hall of “Let’s Make a Deal” fame. The Saudi royal carpet included a mobile McDonald’s. Shawarma was probably not part of the Happy Meal promotion.

Not to be outdone, Qatar gifted our president a $400 million airborne palace, henceforth to be known as Emoluments One. History will record it as the most expensive freebie ever to come our way.

Trump’s unforgiving crackdown on immigrants and refugees had one giant-sized asterisk. The plight of Venezuelans escaping violence and misery is so much white noise. Ditto for those fleeing persecution in Myanmar, Bhutan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other modern-day hellholes.

Trump’s America has no tears to spare for such individuals. But a notable exception is made for a few dozen white South Africans or Afrikaners. Rest assured that their skin color is purely coincidental.

A massive military parade a few weeks hence, on the President’s birthday, no less, will attest to the permanence of our greatness. Just ask all those elderly stick figures who sat atop the Soviet Union’s Red Square year after year as an army of tanks passed by.

Asked in a Senate hearing about the meaning of habeas corpus, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defined it as “a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their rights.”

Excuse me, you might be able to execute the family pet on a personal whim, but a cabinet chieftain, this one, ought to have some passing familiarity with the guarantee of due process.

The family of Jan. 6 heroine Ashli Babbitt walked away with $5 million in tax dollars courtesy of Trump’s generosity. Our election-denier-in-chief found time to shout out Mesa County’s own Tina Peters as “an innocent political prisoner” and direct his Justice Department to secure her release.

All the while, ultimate futility wore purple pinstripes and masqueraded as a major league baseball team called the Rockies. For the record, manager Bud Black was hardly the problem. That ignominy occupies the owner’s box.

It was good to be gone.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann.