Month: February 2018

Vanka

Three a.m. is such a lonely time. I hate it. The sidewalks on Independence Avenue are empty except for the police cars. There’s nothing on the TV except guys with disgusting abs peddling gym memberships and combination apple-corer/wine-bottle-stopper/cummerbunds. No commentators to challenge. No recaps of those inspiring shots of me coming down the steps of Air Force One and waving to the crowds. My worshippers have all gone to bed. It’s just me and my demons. Three a.m. is a preview of death.

Once upon a time I would have waked you up and we could have talked. Now you are sleeping with that Jewboy. (Sorry, honey; habits are hard to break.) Melania, bless her, may have gotten a Number Ten body, but nobody has yet put her up for a Nobel Prize in political science. She yesses me to death, and she enjoys my physical attributes but she doesn’t get the same charge I do out of stirring the pot and honing the knives. And Pence says he’ll quit if I don’t stay off Twitter, so who the hell am I supposed to talk to? I don’t trust Kelley as far as I could throw him, and the boys of my posse are either the usual blinkered military mental midgets or so flabby-rich that they have no idea what it’s like to have to fight for your place at the table. Not to escape poverty, of course, Daddy insulated me from that, but for rejection by those mealy-mouthed bluebloods who have been living on their Princeton and Yale degrees and Yacht Club memberships while I have had to fight for recognition. Do you know how many golf courses I could have built by now if I had had the foresight to be a Whiffenpoof instead of a Fordham grind and a Wharton MBA?

So I pace this apartment at three am and try to think up ways to show them up. All their degrees and memberships and blue blood aren’t worth shit when it comes to stirring up a crowd. “Facts”, they say they want. There’s no such thing as a fact. There are slogans that work and there are slogans that don’t work. “Lock her up!” is sure-fire. “Show me your tax returns” is just plain boring. Who wants to read a tax return? His own or anyone else’s. “Build that wall!” is a killer — it makes no sense but it resonates with half-remembered echoes of Saint Ronnie and it creates a vision of “other” people being denied a free ride on my money. A winner.

I may have mentioned to you at some time or other that I am a winner. Everyone else is a loser. To what extent they are hopeless losers (like Christie or Jeb or Mitt or Hillary) is perhaps debatable, but I will be the judge, and if I have to create my own facts to do it that’s not a problem. If people wanted to be governed by facts there wouldn’t even be political parties. We would all agree on everything. I may or may not try to salvage what’s left of the Republican one. Haven’t decided yet.

But now, because of the stupidity of all these losers, I am in the hot seat. I am the President. I have to make the decisions. And even though I make fun of Pence, sometimes he’s right. Decisions have to be based to some extent, however distant, on reality, or they won’t work. And reality bores me stiff. He says if I turn the whole thing over to the generals, they will keep us safe. Generals! A bunch of frozen-sphinctered time servers. They sit so upright in their damned chairs you’d think they were made of cardboard. They haven’t dared to fart since they graduated from West Point. All they know is, “Give me bigger weapons to play with and I’ll kill anyone who won’t listen.” You want a fact? If you kill everyone who won’t listen who is going be left to dig your sand traps and plant your zoyzia grass and manicure your greens? After you kill off all your workers will you then start incinerating your customers, too? Who will then be left to pay for the memberships and the greens fees?

“All right,” Ryan says, “then leave it to us politicians.” Hah! Spineless amoebas with nothing on their minds but their peckers and their perks. Anemometers with legs. And social-climbing wives. Wave a few votes or a few dollars in front of them and they come crawling like ants to sugar. They don’t want to make decisions; they want to duck decisions so they can never be held responsible for anything. Even I am better qualified than they are.

I hate the whole idea.

So this morning I had an inspiration. It’s true. I am the President. This can be seen as an opportunity like no other. How did Rod Blagojevich put it? “This is golden.” I can outsource the job.

You know and I know that the President is so hemmed in by congressmen, civil servants, and lobbyists that he can’t accomplish anything, even in four years of trying. Look at poor Barack. And even what little he got done we are about to reverse. So how much real difference does it make who is President? But that’s not the popular perception. What people see is Air Force One. What they hear is “Hail to the Chief” until it becomes an earworm. What they admire is the title “The most powerful man on the planet”. They are awestruck with envy. And that’s not just the ordinary guy. Every little tinpot African dictator in his shitpot country dreams of qualifying for treatment like that. And not just African tinpot dictators. Tinpot dictators everywhere. Russia. North Korea. Turkey. The Philippines. And now, apparently, China.

So what if we were to divide the job up into one-day segments and auction them off? “Be President for a Day”. How much damage can one man do in 24 hours when everything he deals with today can be reversed tomorrow? Let him fly around in AF–One to his heart’s content. Put the Marine Band in a C5M and let them land first and be ready to play on every tarmac as he arrives. Give him the big bullet-proof limo with the flags on the fenders. Let him shake hands with Prime Ministers and government leaders wherever he goes. Let him grab at their wives’ tushes or pussies if that’s his pleasure. Bring girls to the back cabin through the “Kennedy bomb bay”. How much do you think Putin would be willing to pay for that? Or Duterte? Or Erdoğan? We could probably wipe out the national debt the first year. And I could go back to what I know. There are still over a hundred countries on this planet in which there is as yet neither a Trump golf course nor a Trump hotel. Even working around the clock with no political distractions it will be a hard race. I want to leave office with 200 golf courses. I may even learn to cure my slice!

Three am is such a damn lonely time. Maybe you should ditch that Kushner jerk and come back home where we could talk like we used to. Vanka?

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I’d Be Dead

You know what? If I had been born 50 years sooner I would probably be dead by now.

What do you mean, ‘probably’? You’re 93. You would be 143 years old. Nobody lives that long. You’d be dead, all right.

That’s not what I mean. I mean that my chances of reaching the age of 93 would have been slim to zero. Look at how many life-threatening things I have avoided just by being born in 1923 instead of 1873.

I don’t see what you’re driving at. Life-threatening?

Well, for one thing, my life expectancy in 1873 would have been 43 years instead of the 53 it was in 1923. That’s a 10-year gain right there.

Averages don’t apply to specific cases. There is no such thing as the law of averages. It’s only in hindsight that averages mean anything.

Well then, consider just my medical escapes. I had pneumonia when I was 21. In 1894 sulfonamide and penicillin were still three or four decades away. Statistics say one person out of three who got pneumonia in 1894 died of it. Fifty years later the cure was almost routine. A few shots and a little rest and you were okay. No need to spend months in the Alps. trying to understand Thomas Mann.

OK. I get your point.

And what about the influenza epidemic in 1918 that killed 25 million Americans who hadn’t yet heard of flu shots? True, I might not have caught it, but by being born after that I avoided it altogether. And what about surgery? In 1987 when I was 64 years old I developed a double inguinal hernia. The surgeon just tucked it back in behind some plastic mesh, a routine procedure then. That operation hadn’t yet been heard of in 1937, when the mortality rate from hernia operations was also about one out of three. And even if I had survived in the OR, there would have been no Medicare to pay for it — I would have been stuck with a bill that would probably have bankrupted me.

Now I see where you’re going.

My hearing went south in 2006. In 1956 I would have been carrying an ear trumpet, if I had had the courage to advertise my problem. As it actually happened the Geek world gave me a little peanut inside my ear, and by that time nobody would have considered that embarrassing, even if they had noticed. But my narrowest escape was four years ago when my small intestine somehow got twisted into a knot. My wife called 911 and an ambulance with EMTs and all kinds of testing equipment was at our apartment within ten minutes. Three hours later I was on an operating table and four and a half feet of my gut was in a bucket on the floor, beating fatal gangrene (the surgeon later told me) by no more than a few hours. In 1962 there would have been no 911 to call. The hospital would have been many more hours away and I wouldn’t have made it.

All right. I agree you’ve had some close shaves. But…

Wait. Last year I was hit by something called CRVO — a Central Retinal Vein Occlusion. It occurs inside your eyeball. No warning. Suddenly your retina swells up and your vision becomes just hazy light and shadow. There is no cure, but luckily for me two drugs had just come on the market that could stop the swelling and restore sight and stop further deterioration. My ability to read and write is now back again. (You don’t really want to hear about the procedure for the monthly injections in the eyeball unless you are a fan of Buñuel movies, but so far it’s working.)

All right. I hear you. If you had been born 50 years sooner none of these treatments would have been available.

Right. And I would be dead instead of sitting here asking you to consider whether the much-bemoaned economic stagnation in their standard of living that the American middle classes have supposedly suffered over the past half-century is really as ruinous of the quality of life as the critics say. Maybe GNP is not the full measure of our well-being. Other things need to be counted. I am surely lucky to have been born when I was instead of fifty years earlier. I’d be dead by now. Economic inequality is still a major problem to be sure, but at the same time maybe it’s true that in some respects a rising tide does really lift all boats. My doctors and my insurance broker and my pharmacist and the president of my local hospital may all have gotten rich while I haven’t, but I’m still here. My boat hasn’t sunk. Yet.

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Another Wall

Date: 8 February 2018

From: Donald J. Trump

To: Kierstjen Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security

Subject: The New York City Wall

Well, Kierstjen, we finally have incontrovertible evidence of where the radical Islamic terrorists who threaten our Great American heartland are coming from. Even the lying, disgusting, fake news, failing New York Times has printed the story. I quote :

“Two New York City men have pleaded guilty to federal charges they plotted a pressure cooker bomb attack in the city on behalf of the Islamic State, prosecutors said on Friday.”

Doesn’t say what color they were, but this only corroborates what I told you earlier : New York is full of people who hate me. They hate my Tower, my wealth, my success, and my daughter, and if they knew my wife and my sons better, they would hate them, too. So it is time for Plan C — the New York City Wall. If these schemers and haters are confined inside a thirty-foot high wall they won’t be able to carry out pressure-cooker plots to kill and maim the good people out in our Great White America.

I have consulted Wikipedia, which despite everyone saying it is a source of fake facts occasionally does get some right. New York City contains 303 square miles in its five boroughs. Simple mathematics (Square Roots, which any four-year old child can handle with the help of a calculator) says that if all this were in a single contiguous space a wall 174 miles long could enclose it all. With allowances for the ins and outs of bays, harbors, gerrymandered election districts, and possible Mafia family treaties, and for the probable problems of securing rights of way in New Jersey and on western Long Island, where those treasonous non-clappers Cuomo and di Blasio still have considerable influence, let us add 20% to that to be on the safe side, meaning we would need only 191 miles of wall. Call it 200 to make the math easier.

Using the latest officially projected cost figure for the Mexican wall (33 billion including graft and kickbacks; there are about 1,200 miles to go), we get a figure of 27 and a half million per mile, meaning that a New York City wall would cost only around 5 and a half billion dollars to build. A real bargain considering that those prospective pressure-cooker bombers will be physically confined and prevented from getting out to threaten the heartland where the real Americans live. I’m sure we can find that much to delete from the education budget or Medicare or somewhere.

If I keep my apartment in Trump Tower you can monitor my helicopter flights in and out to Florida and Washington to make sure no Muslims or Mexicans or Democrats are hiding in the wheel wells.

So I am instructing you to draft an Executive Order ASAP and bring it to me in the Oval Office and arrange for the press (those lying, cheating, probably adulterous, diseased and mentally handicapped wretches who hate me and my whole family) to be there to take pictures. I have already ordered the special felt pen we discussed, with the two-inch wide nib and small wheels to take the weight off my wrist. Please remember to leave me plenty of space for my new signature.

Regards to your family. You do have a family, don’t you?

Donald J. Trump

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