GULLIBLE’S TRAVELS

A Comical History of the Trump Era

Marvin Kitman*

SEVEN STORIES PRESS

New York • Oakland • Liverpool

*Author of The Making of the Preƒident 1789 and co-author of George Washington’s Expense Account

Copyright © 2020 by Marvin Kitman

A SEVEN STORIES PRESS FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Seven Stories Press

140 Watts Street

New York, NY 10013

http://www.sevenstories.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kitman, Marvin, 1929- author.

Title: Gullible’s travels : a comical history of the Trump era / Marvin

Kitman.

Other titles: Comical history of the Trump era

Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020006755 (print) | LCCN 2020006756 (ebook) | ISBN

9781609809881 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781609809898 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946---Humor. | Presidents--United

States--Humor. | United States--Politics and government--2017---Humor. |

Political satire, American.

Classification: LCC E913.3 .K58 2020 (print) | LCC E913.3 (ebook) | DDC

973.933092--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006755

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006756

For Donald J. Trump, without whom this book would not have been possible.

These things serve to shew how far the People were really overcome with Delusions; and as they had a notion of the Approach of a Visitation, all their Predictions run upon a most dreadful Plague.

—DANIEL DEFOE, A Journal of the Plague Year

One other such victory and we shall be utterly ruined.

—PYRRHUS, in Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus

To me the utterances of the unenlightened are as noises emanating from the belly. What difference does it make to me whether their rumblings come from their upper or nether regions?

—DEMETRIUS, to his friend Seneca

“It’s every man for hisself,” cried the Elephant as he danced among the Chickens.

—ANON

CONTENTS

Preface

I. THE TRUMPONICLES 2015–2016

1. The Mouth That Roared (Time Man of the Year)

2. A Star Is Born

3. The Great Panic of 2016

II. THE TRUMPONICLES 2016–2017

year one (11/16–11/17)

1. Election Mourning

2. So How Did It Happen?

3. The Enemies of Which People?

4. Fool’s Gold

5. The Battle of the Mall

6. George Orwell Lives

7. The First Twenty-nine Days

8. The Chicken Dancers

III. THE TRUMPONICLES 2017

more year one (11/17–11/18)

1. The First-Year Report Card

2. To Russia, with Love

3. Russiagate

4. Day 61 Amerika Held Hostage

5. The Dopey Awards

6. A Summer Vacation

7. The Gang That Couldn’t Loot Straight

8. Collusion Defined

9. So-Called Presidents’ Day

10. Obesity Crisis

IV. THE TRUMPONICLES 2018

year two (11/18–11/19)

1. The Sophomore Jinx Strikes

2. The Most Famous Swede of All

3. Patriot or Traitor?

4. The Afghan War

5. Dotard Controversy

6. Playing the Trump Card

7. Nobel Prize

8. Hurricane Donald

9. James Comey

10. Second-Year Report Card

V. THE TRUMPONICLES 2018–2019

more year two

1. The Evil Twin Theory

2. The Hondurans Are Coming

3. Here Comes the Judge

4. The Great Debate

5. Wharton v. Wharton

6. Mussolini v. Hitler

7. Helsinki Summit

8. Kavanaughgate, Part I

9. Kavanaughgate, Part II

10. Kavanaughgate, Part III

11. Kavanaughgate, Part IV

12. Armistice Cemetery Non-Visit

13. Parade Deprivation

14. Xmas Greetings

VI. THE TRUMPONICLES 2019

year three

1. The State of the Union

2. National Coulter Emergency

3. Is He a Communist—or Just a Dupe Taking Orders from the Kremlin?

4. A Patriot Talks to His President

5. Third-Year Report Card

6. Artificial Stupidity

VII. THE ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT

Article I: Why Are We Impeaching the President?

Article II: Yet Another Case of Presidential Harassment

Article III: Nyet Quo Pro Quid

Article IV: Charge of the Right Brigade

Article V: The New, Improved, Fairer-to-Me Constitution

Article VI. Mr. President, Take the 25th

Article VII: How to Watch Four More Years of SOTUS—And Live to Fight Another Day

VIII. THE TRUMPONICLES 2020

1. There Is an 80 Percent Chance There Will Be an Election in 2020

2. Go Fourth!

3. How Will It All End?

EPILOGUE

1. And Furthermore

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

A question I am often asked is how do I become a pundit like you?

First of all, I explain, there are no openings in the field. Already there are far too many pundits. It is my humble considered opinion pundits should be licensed. You need a driver’s license to drive. So why not?

If the petitioner persists, I explain it is very hard to become a pundit. You have to study your Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Kant. Read all the books and speeches of Henry Kissinger, who we call “Hank.” Eat lots of fresh vegetables, and go to bed early at night.

I guess I wasn’t too encouraging.

I myself reached the pinnacle of journalistic achievement by watching the TV news. My hero growing up was Eric Sevareid, the pundit in residence at CBS News, circa 1970.

He was the apostle of dealing evenhandedly with any controversial subject. He was so balanced, we called him Eric Severalsides. He would give both sides of an issue, even when there were three or more, and end with a “You decide.”

Someday I hope to be as respected as Eric Severalsides.

The ideal basic training for my current role as one of the nation’s leading pundits (in the top 2,687,905 at last count) was serving as a TV critic. For thirty-five years at Newsday, I stuck my neck out five times a week making judgments on the nation’s most important issues. What did I think of Laverne & Shirley or fake news shows like The Jerry Springer Show? And who do I think shot J.R. in Dallas?

I still remember getting a letter from a fan of my work.

“Dear Mister Know It All:

How dare you say Laverne & Shirley is the worst thing to happen on TV since the invention of commercials? That’s only your opinion, you Rat Fink Jew Commie Kike Red Bastard.

Anon.”

“Dear Sir or Madam,” I would patiently explain, “If I didn’t have an opinion as a critic I would be fired.

Yours, Rat Fink Jew Commie Kike Red Bastard”

Still it hurt. I have a low threshold for criticism; anything less than unstinting praise is painful. You need to develop the skin of a rhinoceros to survive in this line of work.

As a rat fink Jew commie kike red bastard critic, there was more to it than calling them as I saw them. I needed to come up with original concepts that said something more meaningful than just thumbs up or down.

My most important contribution was Kitman’s Law:

On the TV screen, pure drivel tends to drive off ordinary drivel.

I also was the first to predict that cable prices will always rise.

So it was only natural after stepping down from the seat of power as an arbiter of taste—as I explained to my readers in 2005, “Newsday gave me an audition in 1969, and after 35 years we mutually decided it wasn’t working out”—that I should turn to a life of crime as a pundit! No longer could I hide behind a medium like television, which, as pundit Fred Allen once said years ahead of his time (1953), “is called a medium because nothing is well done.”

I chose as the medium for my work as a serious pundit, not newspapers, which all the other pundits were predicting were on their last legs, but the medium of the future, The Internet.

The Internet is the perfect venue for punditing.

What’s great about the Internet: there are no fact-checkers. It’s like the FBI files, filled with information, some of which is true. Everything carries equal weight: real facts, true facts, plain old fact facts, or no facts, championed by our current commander in chief of the most powerful nation on the planet. Not to mention, the ever-popular “alternative facts.”

Should you be challenged as a pundit, your defense can be: The facts are accurate. I made them up myself.

The Internet is the one place where you can practice Trump-style journalism. No need to waste time on research. You just make up whatever facts, data or information is needed. Who knows, if lucky you might be invited to play golf at Mar-a-Lago.

A pundit has to be ahead of the curve. I myself am often ahead of my times, by as much as five minutes.

On the downside of the profession, you have no idea who actually hears you as you cast your pearls of wisdom at the swine, I mean Internet news junkies.

Still it’s a lot better than going up to the roof of your high-rise and yelling at the wind. Or becoming one of those bores at dinner or cocktail parties who keeps talking about Trump or Bernie or Crooked Hillary or the real Americans who want the wall. Lock them all up!

The most important thing you need to do is come up with a motto that distinguishes you from others in the field. Mine is: “Often wrong, but never in doubt” (Pat. Pending).

Enough of giving away trade secrets. Should anyone want to know even more about how to become a rich, famous, and powerful pundit, I strongly recommend that you eat right, get lots of sleep, and read this book.

Remember, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the pundit.

The author is on the short list for this year’s Emily Litella Prize in journalism.

Before we go on, with all due transparency, I want to make something perfectly clear, I am a Republican, a proud registered Republican, a New Jersey Republican, one of the three left in my little town in Northern New Jersey (pop. 9,937). There may be others, but it’s not such a good thing to be called one openly the way things have been going in the Oval Office lately.

When the Kitmans emigrated here from Pittsburgh, with a stop in Brooklyn, in 1961, this used to be a solidly rock-ribbed Republican town. Everybody, it seemed to us, was a Republican.

Now Republicans In New Jersey should be on the Federal endangered species list, with the gray wolf, moose, and lounge lizards. Our local Republican Party organization, if it still exists, doesn’t even bother to put candidates on the local ballot anymore. We are a one-party town, like in Russia.

Some of my best friends still can’t believe I am a Republican. How could such an intelligent, handsome, tall person, who actually reads books, be a Republican?

Actually, I am a Lincoln Republican. The GOP used to be the party of Lincoln, a party that was strong on civil rights, the right to vote, a single nation under the Constitution, and a belief in veracity, whose leader was known as “Honest Abe.” I even ran for president as a Lincoln Republican in 1964. I lost. It was an experience that prepared me for writing about the 2016 election, even more than having watched all seven seasons (161 episodes) of The West Wing.

I am also a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. Under TR, the GOP broke up the trusts, fought Wall Street, the big banks, and corporations, who were real enemies of the people and free enterprise. Teddy Roosevelt created the national parks, which the current version of the party is now subdividing into housing tracts and mining claims.

Furthermore. I am an Eisenhower Republican, in the sense that I liked Ike’s crusade in Europe more than the current POTUS crusade to throw our Western allies under the bus and suck up to the Russians.

As one of the last four Eisenhower Republicans (one of whom was David Eisenhower), I still appreciate Ike being first in warning us about the military-industrial complex!

And let’s not forget, I am one of those Republicans who is still an avowed anti-communist.

The Republican Party of today is the party of squishiness on communism. We Republicans made Red witch hunts the nation’s second-favorite spectator sport after watching TV. Now our Republican president whispers secrets like a schoolgirl to Vladimir Putin and accepts Russian help in elections.

Our Republicans currently sitting in Congress are led by those progressives Moscow Mitch McConnell, with a face that looks like a turtle, and Trump’s Hoosier Boy Friday, what’s his name Pence, who should go back home to Indiana, where he was losing his race for reelection as governor. They are gutless cowards, afraid to bring up our hallowed past to a president who is an ignoramus about history. They have nothing to fear but the president’s tweets and his snarky nicknames, which apparently are too much to bear.

The Republican Party of today is the party of Lincoln the car and the tunnel, and it is a party that would have made the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations under the Smith Act.

I blamed my loss in 1964, if I may digress, on being too closely aligned with Lincoln. His picture was on my campaign buttons and featured in all my campaign literature.

The Republican Party, I declared in my 1964 concession speech, was not ready for Abraham Lincoln. And still isn’t today. All of which explains the president we’ve got.

As a lark, I began keeping a journal of “this campaign thing,” as a future president might call it, that could be studied by future historians, like Artie Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson, or a memento for my grandchildren, demonstrating how Zayde wasted his time when he could have been writing the great American novel.

In the hands of an objective and unbiased crack reporter like myself, it might have turned out to be a history of the most strange and bizarre administration in our 226-year history, as seen through the eyes of a registered Republican.

Furthermore, it might have been a guide to the 2020 election, giving a glimpse of what the future might hold should we be unlucky enough to elect that political joke Donald Trump in 2016. Not that it could possibly happen.

My plan had been to cover the 2016 political debut of my favorite real estate developer before his presidential aspirations evaporated like the morning dew.

Unfortunately, in the course of my research, I came down with a severe case of Trumpitis, a disease caused by media overexposure, which afflicted many news junkies like myself. Some people found looking at Trump and his head of hair sickening; others were nauseated by the sound of his voice. It turned out I was in a third group. Both the sight and sound of him were making me sick. The hand gestures alone were driving me up the wall.

Fortunately, I had a plan B. I could always do the book Trump-style: Don’t waste time on research. Make up whatever facts you need.

—Marvin Kitman

Somewhere in Northern New Jersey

January 2020

I. THE TRUMPONICLES 2015–2016

1. The Mouth That Roared (Time Man of the Year)

Time magazine named Angela Merkel Person of the Year 2015.

Talk about your media bias!

Angela Merkel? Are they serious? Where has this left loony journal of opinion been in 2015, anyway?

My nominee for person of the year—perhaps the century, whatever metric they use at Time—is the world’s leading owner of golf courses, tacky buildings on the West Side ruining the view of New Jersey, and failing businesses with his leased name turned presidential candidate, the man who has even nicer hair than Frau Merkel.

I am speaking, of course, about Donald J. Trump.

If the far-left progressive lying rag Time was being objective they would have been saying, “We have seen the future of presidential politics, and its name is Donald Trump.”

All he has been doing since June is changing the nature of political discourse in the greatest democracy ever created by God or the Founding Fathers.

No longer will future presidential candidates spend the four years between elections memorizing position papers on fixing the problems that will make the country great again. They will be assembling arsenals of insults, put-downs, nasty names, and wild and crazy proposals, following the Big Mouth of the Republican Party’s leadership model.

His modest proposals are not like those of 2012 innovator-of-the-election-year Newt Gingrich’s plan to colonize the moon. I mean, building a wall across the southern border? It took muy grande cojones to call for that. Banning 1.4 billion Muslims from entering the country, even temporarily? What transcendental chutzpah! The most misogynist, xenophobic, racist presidential candidate, my Man of the Year’s words seem to be lasers guided to the hearts of darkness in the breast of America.

My nominee has become the titular leader of the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, and not only by the use of waving his hands and making faces. He is blessed with an acute case of an oratorical dysfunction called premature articulation. It’s a condition that makes a person talk too soon, before what he’s going to say runs through the brain, or in Trump’s case, what passes for his brain hidden in his hair.

Trump’s hair reportedly bit a reporter who asked an unfair question, but I have not been able to verify the fact.

“Premature articulation” is another name for what scientists call talking to oneself. Trump’s Disease, as it is also known medically, is contagious. There is no pill for treating the condition.

Here is how the process works:

Hypothetically, say, the presidential candidate looking out at the faces of all his angry white men in a southern primary state suddenly decides to say the KKK is not that bad. “Honestly, I don’t approve of what they did. But they had a lot of nice people. Some doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, police chiefs, responsible folks. They had a bad press. And with all those sheets they were good for white sales.”

The second part of the success formula is that his pro-KKK revival rant would then be transmitted instantaneously by cable network news into homes and minds across the nation.

Whatever egregious words, whatever the absolute lunacy, comes out of Trump’s mouth, people will say it must be true. It’s on the TV, isn’t it?

The antidote, of course, is for TV news managers to boldly go where no VP of news has gone before. They need to step up and say they are mad as hell and are not going to contribute to this insanity.

Thanks to the media, Trump has become the Ebola of American politics.

What we have today in the way of mass communication is what Samuel F. B. Morse must have had in mind when his first message sent across his telegraph wires in 1847 said: “What hath God wrought?” It was even scarier in Morse code.

While I am handing out laurels to my man of the year, a Trump victory in 2016 will either mark the end of the road for democracy as we know it or the start of an even higher form of non-intelligence.

If Time weren’t so biased, they would have done the legwork and awarded the true person of the year the recognition he deserved.

The rest of this book is about the greatest political story ever told that the descendants of Henry Luce missed or suppressed for the good of society.

2. A Star Is Born

By January 2015, twenty-five candidates had answered the Republican Party establishment’s call for new faces to run for president in 2016.

So many were lining up for the run for the roses—and the chance to face Ms. Clinton in 2016—it reminded me of the start of the New York Marathon at the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge every November.

As the thundering herd began delivering State of the Union messages and other instruments indicating they are ready to make sacrifices for the public good by seeking higher office, it occurred to me it might be a good idea if the candidates wore numbers around their necks so we could keep track as the media race heats up. Who knew what a Kasich of Ohio or Pence of Indiana or Walker of Wisconsin or Jindal of Louisiana look like?

The stampede began this time with new face Jeb Bush, who, after the usual period of soul-searching, exploring options, and consulting with families and potential donors, emphatically pledged on Facebook he will be staying true to his beliefs, no matter how they seemed to evolve over the years. What wasn’t mentioned was that, according to my sources, Jeb wasn’t a favorite-son candidate. They had to promise Barbara Bush a new pearl necklace to get her on board.

Among the other new faces who had answered the call, a call so high-pitched in some cases only a dog can hear it, was Rick Perry, who cut short his seemingly lifetime governorship of the great state of Texas to enter the election derby. Technically, he is only a semi-new face, having dropped out of the last run for the gold in 2012; he was hard to recognize this time around, with his “new look” glasses, which made Rick the Unready look like an intellectual or nerd. In other preparations for the grind, he reportedly has been taking Ginkgo Biloba every morning, in case the question of which departments he would close came up in the debates.

The Republican livestock was improved further a few days later by the startling announcement that Mitt Romney had bitten the bullet. He chose a new way to break the news of his availability at a donor meeting attended by a cross section of average billionaires, who leaked it.

Holy Mormon! I found myself thinking. Romney! Wowee! This is going to be even more exciting than I thought.

Hadn’t he told the New York Times reporter who had the audacity to ask last year if he was planning to run again—in a response that will live in the annals of political candor as being even more emphatic than General Sherman’s “I do not choose to run for president”—“Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. No, no, no.”

One new face in the crowd that I recognized with or without a number turned out to be Donald J. Trump.

He was the tall one with the orange skin, a color not often seen in nature. Trump has that certain kind of presence. And he’s orange. The color of orange marmalade. He also towered above the other candidates because of his hair, which looks like a bird’s nest when the wind blows. The candidate does not wear a hairpiece, as his enemies have suggested. He has a fringe of very long hair like Ben Franklin. It is lovingly cajoled and sprayed to stay in place every day. The most famous hair in America, it’s a “do” Samson would have died for.

A few nights earlier, I had caught Donald Trump on the TV news descending an escalator in the glitzy Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to the applause and wild cheers of a crowd of organized spontaneous demonstrators. The mob scene in the lobby was filled with paid volunteers handing out leaflets proclaiming their boss as the next Republican president.

Apparently, I had stumbled on the official launch of the “Trump for President in 2016” campaign. Little did I know that this event would profoundly affect the fate of the nation.

Donald Trump, I should explain, had been my favorite real estate mogul, whose career for years I followed on “Page Six” of the New York Post. He was a parvenue, a playboy, a publicity-seeking arriviste, a Queens real estate developer trying to push his way into the big time in the Big Golden Apple (Manhattan), using the power of the press. His greatest development deals in the seventies and eighties were always being trumpeted in the papers, but never seemed to happen. That didn’t stop Page Six from following his exploits, especially in the field of dating.

Young readers went into puberty reading about the latest Serbian or Latvian supermodel The Donald, as he called himself, was shlonging.

Often, he modestly pretended to be his own press agent, a fictitious character named “John Barron,” phoning in scoops about what billionaire real estate mogul with the initials “Donald Trump” was caught secretly dining out with what hot celebrity nobody at what new Trump Hotel boîte, disguising his voice with the old handkerchief trick. As the New Yorker writer S. J. Perelman once said, “Greater love hath Onan.”

Widely praised as the leading fake news journal in town, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post (founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801) was the place to keep up with the exciting career of America’s greatest real estate developer. The Marla Maples/Ivana divorce thriller, with many of the inside exclusives supplied by You Know Who, was featured on Page One of the Post for weeks in eighty-point World War III headline type.

Donald Trump was a legitimate tabloid star, a Gotham institution. He was famous in an age when your major achievement is being famous for being famous. In this sense, Donald Trump was an overachiever.

But running for president? “You cannot be serious!” as John McEnroe would scream on the courts of Wimbledon.

Maybe he would be better to start at the bottom in politics, his enemies were saying, and run for Mayor of New York?

As a Republican? To call himself a Republican was like Ronnie Reagan saying he was a New Dealer. A man of no known fixed principles moral or immoral, he would be proud to be a member of the Socialist Workers Party if there were press ink or money in it. Everybody I knew thought he was a Democrat.

The first hint of Donald having possible presidential aspirations came to me when he suddenly joined the birther movement of 2008. His scrupulous research led him to the conclusion that President Obama was born in Kenya, Africa.

His digest version of the atlas must have omitted some of the newer states, like Hawaii. Or was he just accepting as gospel the word of God-fearing Bible thumpers who were peddling the theory that the election of the well-known Muslim immigrant was null and void because he wasn’t native born?

Maybe Don was misled by Fox News (The Most Trusted Name in Fake News), which had first reported the birther crisis. The Mahatma of the Taj Mahal, one of his four failing Atlantic City casinos, made it an even bigger lie by endorsing the far-right fruitcakes birther nonsense. My favorite real estate hondler, who, it turned out, apparently never met a lie he didn’t like, fanned the lying embers, demanding that the sitting president show us his birth certificate! “What is he hiding?”

When the White House produced the birth certificate, Trump denounced it as a fraud.

In the field of lying, that was yooooge. It took real gutsy championship-level balls, as we said in the ’hood, to impugn the veracity of the Oval Office over an official document. Trump was a man to be reckoned with, as his subsequent rise in prestige to liar in chief attested.

His presidential campaign was a revelation. As my last editor at Newsday, Tony Insolia, exclaimed, “Never knew Trump was a closet asshole. Running for president has been a coming-out.”

I remember thinking at dinner one night, “Could he really be serious about running for president?” I should point out that I believe, as Winston Churchill said, “The only way to be sure of having an intelligent conversation is to talk to oneself.” Still I share these selfies publicly because, frankly, conversations with myself sometimes bore even me.

Why would he want to run for president? He was already rich, famous and powerful, a leading sex symbol, owner of the most important hair since Samson.

He already had achieved his highest goal in life, being a star on Page Six. That’s what life was all about for him. What else could possibly be in it for him?

Nada. Borscht. But my progressive friends were already alarmed about a Trump presidency and were planning their exit strategies. The most popular places to seek asylum? Mexico, Canada, and the Turks & Caicos Islands, all forty of them. I assured them that what he called “this campaign thing“ was a publicity stunt, a way to get more ink on Page Six.

3. The Great Panic of 2016

Every time a new Nate Silver column came out about the Rust Belt states or Michael Moore sent a letter to Ivanka asking her to do something about her father before Election Day 2016, my friends hit the panic button.

I asked them, “What is the worst thing that can happen if Trump actually won? Will the Republic fall?”

Okay, let’s say the people really want an irresponsible, incompetent, unfit for the job candidate, even though he claims he has “a great temperament.”

Say they want the first so-called Republican ever to praise a former KGB boss who was a sworn enemy of his country trying to subvert our electoral process. Forget the Manchurian Candidate; this may be the Muscovite Candidate.

Say the voters want a man who has learned everything about foreign policy from his beauty contest business, a man who is a credit to the history faculty at Trump U.

And while we’re listing all his qualifications, say the folks are happy with His Hairiness being the greatest liar in the annals of American politics.

It’s a head-scratcher why this man hasn’t been taken off the streets and put away for his own safety, instead of running for the most important job in the world.

In a worst-case scenario—and this was a hypothetical, I warned my anxiety-prone friends—let’s say by some fluke, he increased his approval rating among blacks from 1 percent.

It turned out to be true that Mexicans love him. Muslims love him. Women love him. The physically disadvantaged love him. Believe me, as he said, everybody loves him.

Given all of that, I’m still not buying that time-share in Winnipeg.

And here’s why:

First of all, he will lose tomorrow.

The Trump Raw Deal, or whatever his program may be called should he emerge victorious, as they say in politics, will have to pass through the legislative branch. Congress, as we know, is dedicated to making sure nothing gets done.

Executive Orders he bragged will enable him alone to fix whatever is broken—all Obama’s great programs, like guaranteeing clean drinking water and clean air you don’t see—will be thrown out by the judicial branch, he hopes.

That’s why the greatest democratic system ever invented has three branches of government. The Founding Fathers put in that tripartite business to guarantee we would never have to worry about a freak character like a Donald Trump running the country. It’s worked for 226 years!

In the unlikely chance that a new president ignores the two other branches in the checks-and-balances system, he will face the threat of impeachment. The charges: fraternizing with the enemy, whatever. But that won’t be necessary.

The forty-fifth president, if I’m wrong, will wake up in the bedroom next to the Lincoln Bedroom, occupied by his foreign policy adviser, the Henry Kissinger of his administration, Vladimir Putin. Combing his hair in the mirror, he will ask himself what does he really need all this agita for?

“I’ve got all the material I need for that movie I’m making about the experience of running for president, a horror movie.”

The script idea was to test the bedrock American concept that anybody can grow up to be president. And Trump is anybody. The last fifteen months has all been a form of political conceptual art.

True, his election may be a calamity. But all calamities are bad.

Should the worst happen, let’s give the guy a break. I am willing to predict he will be the best president we have.

II. THE TRUMPONICLES 2016–2017

YEAR ONE (11/16–11/17)

1. Election Mourning

If you don’t know how the election turned out, look it up on Google.

I have one further thought.

It wasn’t entirely my fault.

I predicted eleven times we had nothing to fear but fear itself, which turned out to be quite a lot. Without malice and charity for all, I told the worrywarts he would drop out of the race before Election Day. He had been more than successful in getting the publicity, the press coverage, the TV face time, the oxygen he needed to survive. Not even he thought the people were so stupid as to elect a totally inexperienced, unqualified, failed businessman as the commander in chief and president of the most powerful nation in the known universe.

In the unlikely chance that I might be wrong, I was so sure his administration would be short-lived, I had taken the liberty of starting work on my president’s farewell address, suitable for delivery at the end of his first twenty-nine days, or after the reading of the last line of the Inaugural Address, or when he could no longer take the heat in the kitchen and was getting out, whichever came first.

For the good of the nation, my first draft explained, for the good of his party, for his family, especially his latest favorite wife, Melania, who has enrolled in night school and is considering becoming a professional presidential speechwriter, and following doctor’s orders—his doctor had warned that a combination of his bone spurs and high cholesterol numbers due to addiction to fast food makes him a threat to national security—he has decided to step down, effective (date blank) . . .

His fans will never forget him, I assured the ex-president. “Remember the Mane!” could be a popular bumper sticker for his 2020 campaign, when he can run as an experienced, qualified candidate, based on his previous public service record.

Well, I was wrong.

I predicted he would drop out after the playing of the 2005 Access Hollywood video several thousand times on cable network news, in which the candidate gave his theory about how a then-fifty-nine-year-old fat rich man sweeps damsels off their feet. Being such a charming, hot celebrity, it gave him the freedom to do anything he wanted with women. In his own words, anyone he found attractive he could “kiss and grab their pussy.” Consent was not an issue.

Well, I was wrong.

Some pundits actually thought having such a nominee might affect the Republican Party’s strength as the party of family values, ignoring the possibility it could appeal to voters who also used the technique or fantasized about doing so.

As the number of gropees grew by the hour on cable network news, telling of their experiences with the Rudolph Valentino of his day, the potential groper in chief accused all of lying, and said he would see them in court.

Reminding voters of the Republican film classic Knute Rockne, All American, starring Ronald Reagan as George Gipp, a.k.a. the star too sick to play, the coach exhorted his boys to win one for the Gipper, I suggested Trump’s remaining supporters might be told now “To win one for the Groper.”

Then came another October Surprise. A contestant from Arizona in the Miss Teen USA TV beauty show, which Trump owned, accused the candidate of being a Peeping Donald. He came into the dressing room to inspect the merchandise in their underwear, she charged.

Little did I know then that candidate Trump was shameless.

With his character being sullied, I predicted he could never win the primaries in the Bible Belt, where Evangelical Christians were a core constituency.

I especially couldn’t believe that good Christians in the Iowa Caucus, which usually knocks out unlikely fringe candidates, would consider a man who is a bigot, a pathologically narcissistic, politically schizophrenic, misogynistic, ethically and morally bankrupt, hypocritical, excessively vain, draft-dodging, p***y-grabbing charlatan.

Who ever dreamed God-fearing Evangelical conservatives would not, ipso facto, turn a deaf ear on the preachments of a thrice-married sinner, a prevaricator, fornicator, facilitator, a flimflam artist, a playboy with New York values—and we all know what that means—a man who can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, if you haven’t already bought it on your last trip to New York with your high school senior class, a man who can’t even quote passages from the Bible correctly—as their candidate for president of your Christian United States!

He’s promising to fix the economy. Everybody will have jobs. Forget a chicken in every pot, as Hoover promised in 1928. Trump will build a golf course in every community, and all your sons will get jobs as caddies.

What does he really think of ethanol? Didn’t he once date her? Or was that Ethyl?

Or farm subsidies, those onerous government entitlements that weaken moral fiber by giving you money to not plant peach trees so you can go to Florida or play vingt-et-un (twenty-one) at one of his fancy Atlantic City casinos?

Surely, the party would not nominate a man like that at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in August.

Ted Cruz, a real conservative, was still the leading alternative candidate. The only Canadian American in the race, Cruz also was the only senator who had gotten down on his knees in the Senate and asked all members to join him in asking God to repeal Roe v. Wade.

True, Lyin’ Ted, as Mister Veracity called him in the debates, came across as nasty, like Pat Buchanan. “Elect me,” he seems to say, “and I’ll give you free root canal treatment. No Novocain. Just a root canal.”

“Cruz or Trump,” explained Sen. Lindsey Graham, a perennial Republican presidential candidate. “It’s a choice between being poisoned or hanged.”

The highlight of the opening day ceremonies in Cleveland was the creative writing award going to Trump wife number two or three, the immigrant from Slovenia. Melania stole the show with a speech that will be remembered in the annals with William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech of 1896. Apparently, there were oddities in Melania’s moving paean to her husband. Googlers found word-for-word similarities to Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention remarks.

Scholars and respected authors call it “research” or “homage.” Others call it plagiarism. I was the pundit who came to her defense. Look, shit happens. In my opinion, it was still a remarkable piece of work for a recent émigré who had studied writing by reading the Style section of the New York Times and other political journals like Vogue.

There was a rumor that Melania, who some people still think is the name of a nation somewhere in the South Seas or Asia, would be delivering a revised version of her Opening Day remarks, correcting the record as members of Congress amend their speeches in The Congressional Record.

Melania’s new short speech, in her own words this time, my usually reliably informed source explained, began “Four score and seven years ago . . .”

There were so many good reasons why a man who had the knack for putting both feet in his mouth wouldn’t win. I was especially impressed with his skills as a campaigner when, while still basking in the accolades from his amazing victory in Cleveland, he began his victory tour by attacking a Gold Star Mother.

Psycho-politico scholars might question making political capital of the mother of the fallen hero, Capt. Humayun Khan, who happened to be of the Muslim faith.

Letting her husband explain the grief the family is enduring at the Democratic convention, our candidate argued, is a clear sign why it’s okay to ban all Muslims. Don’t ask me to follow the logic of any of his remarks; I’m not that smart.

This is a political tactic known as kicking the Gold Star Mother when she is down. Nobody had ever tried it before on national TV, so we don’t know its effectiveness.

He had warmed up for this attempt to boldly go where no candidate has gone before in running for office by taking a shot at John McCain’s war record. A hero, the Republican nominee explained, is not captured.

A greater hero might be a presidential candidate who wasn’t a draft dodger, if I can use that term loosely. No reliable document—including the podiatrist’s letter to the draft board, requested by his landlord, Fred C. Trump, attesting to the most famous bone spurs in military history—is available.

Excuse me for not repeating his equating a family’s sacrifice on the Stephanopoulos interview on ABC (This Week With George Stephanopoulos, July 31, 2016)—trumpeting his sacrifice during the Vietnam War in creating all the jobs that made him rich while stiffing the working people who built his palaces. Not to mention his patriotic contribution by not catching a social disease in the Battle of Manhattan Nightlife. It was either a case of terminal insensitivity or the man has gone bonkers. Either way, it is disconcerting.

In his defense, it could be argued, he’s been a nutjob all the way through the primaries. That is what may have appealed to the 34.9 percent of his base.

I am not questioning our candidate’s patriotism or popularity here, only his sanity.

Enough of this bragging about my record of perspicacity.

Where did I go wrong?

2. So How Did It Happen?

First of all, the election was rigged, as the novice political candidate charged even before the election. He had been propounding the rigging theory, a priori, as early as the Pennsylvania primary, according to my records. Every time he was behind in a poll, for example, it was because it was rigged; how else could he be losing? Often it was not clear who benefited from the rigging, as in the case of the 2016 election results.

Second, the election was too confusing. Sometimes it seemed the candidates in the election were Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton.

The reason Hillary lost is she didn’t get the most votes.

Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right either, as it does in my usual pundit’s profound postelection analysis.

Actually, Hillary got 2,864,974 more votes than did The Donald, the official government tally will tell you. But they were all illegals, as our new president swears, Mexican rapists and drug dealers, let in by Obama, so they could vote illegally in our elections. These were the same illegals, BTW, who were the constituency behind all previous Democratic victories, including that socialist FDR’s four terms. They never would have tainted our elections if we had a wall at the border, a big beautiful wall that Mexico paid for, or will by the time our president finishes repeating that alternative fact. But I digress.

Hillary lost because she is a dirtbag.

True, her opponent also was a dirtbag. By definition, all politicians are dirtbags. They make promises they never intend to keep. They lie, cheat, are corrupt and untrustworthy, will do anything morally reprehensible to get elected. Crooked Hillary may be the worst of the dirtbags.

Yes, but, as my wife the Democrat explains, she is our dirtbag.

How did we a minority elect a President of Some of the People All the Time?

As the unlikely candidate who became president said about the KKK and white supremacists after Charlottesville, there were some very fine people on both sides voting for him. In his words, during a campaign rally in Indiana for 2020, only a few days after he won in 2016:

Hispanics love me . . .

Black Americans love me . . .

Muslims love me . . .

Physically challenged love me . . .

Idiots love me . . .

Who loved him the most in the lovefest that was the 2016 election was the Electoral College.

It was that Broadway musical star Hamilton’s fault that the forty-fifth president was elected. A cofounder of the Electoral College (est. 1787), Alexander Hamilton saw it as a defense against the people electing one of their common folk. True, the college had only one other graduate (Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876). But one is one too many, as some people say about 2016.

Sasha, as we pundits call Hamilton, wasn’t the only one of the founding fathers guilty in the writing of that magnificent document that strict constructionists swear covers everything we need to know about our democracy.

Of the qualifications for president, the Signers at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 listed only two: attaining thirty-five years of age and being native-born.

They expected all our chief executives to be like George Washington, a model of rectitude and a pillar of dignity, a paragon, a man who made you believe in integrity and honesty, in trust of elected officials who acted in best interest of the country rather than self-interest. In short, a moral leader!

Failing that, it could be a John Adams, a Thomas Jefferson, a James Madison.

As smart as they were, I am willing to bet the Fathers never dreamed it possible we would elect a man who was, in the words of presidential scholar and email pen pal N. Baat-Canaan, “a juvenile delinquent trust fund baby who is a misogynist, a bigot, a racist, a fat slob and the man who is going to destroy a democracy . . . a man for whom half the country is willing to give up their freedom, a free press and the rule of law.”

The Founders, for example, never anticipated we would elect a man who would launch his campaign for a second term as president in 2020 after the reading of the last line of the Inaugural Address of January 2017.

A man who would be out of the office and at his properties in Florida and New Jersey vacationing and playing golf for 265 of the first 400 days of his term.

A man who would treat the emolument clause (Article I, Section 9, Clause 8), the so-called Santa Clause, as the guide to making sure his kids will not be on food stamps, thanks to his service for his country.

Well, they didn’t call them the Floundering Fathers for nothing.

Assuming the vote was not rigged or hacked either by the Russians or some four-hundred-pound kid in bed in Terre Haute, and despite his success at becoming president-elect by being the second choice of almost three million of his fellow Americans, our president is the same man today he was in 2015.

As a man who was considered trustworthy enough to become a possible Secretary of State so eloquently put it:

Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing Americans for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.

Mitt Romney was too kind.

The real heroes of 2016, the persons deserving honors, are the minority who elected a con man to the highest office in the land, I’m talking about the base, the 11 million idiots who voted for him in the primaries and bought his snake oil that he alone could make America great again, the unsung idiots for whom the president can do no wrong. Not all of them are idiots, of course. Some are morons.

He also won the vote of those who suffer a psychological impairment, medically known as Hillaryophobia, or the fear of Crooked Hillary in the Oval Office, instead of being locked up in Gitmo.

Not to mention those who voted for him because of his hairdo, or because they were mesmerized by those little hands.

Let’s not forget those who admired his literary skills. It has been said that the pen is mightier than the sword. Mightier still is the Twitter account. It will be an outrage if the president-elect doesn’t get this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Literature of 280 characters or less.

With his gift of gab, the president’s greatest achievement may have been making some of us believe that he was a friend not only of the rich but of the middle class.

How proud those constituents must have been when he filled his cabinet with rich people even richer than himself. It showed he would be the president of not only billionaires but the ordinary millionaires.

He said he would be draining the swamp of Wall Street insiders, only to stock his incoming administration with the few Goldman Sachs fat cats who had not served Crooked Hillary.

His cabinet, composed of the best talent he knew, “the greatest cabinet” in history, they loved him and the job he was doing. Remember the first week each stood up and delivered an unprecedented speech of praise for his first week in office. Some thirty of the worthies at cabinet level or senior department rank within the first year left office under a cloud of malfeasance, misfeasance, or no feasance.

I feel especially bad for my fellow Americans who actually believed his promises. He won’t be building a wall. He won’t be repealing Obamacare. He won’t be keeping us out of stupid wars.

Somehow, after fifteen months of running for office, some people still did not seem to understand the president’s rhetoric. He was the unique individual who was not committed to what he had said in the past. Instead, he spoke in a code.

The key to breaking the president’s secret language:

Whatever he says, expect the opposite to be true.

For example, his new tax bill designed to benefit working people and middle class will make the rich richer. That’s what rich people do.

For those who want a fat, sweaty, seventy-something, vain, egomaniacal, inexperienced, unqualified man who thinks it’s okay to have the First Family serving as co-presidents (except for Baron and Tiffany). . . . Well, we’ve got our man of the next eight years. Wear your MAGA hats proudly.

At this critical time in the history of the Republic, I am reminded of the words of an earlier calamity watcher:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.”[1]

It finally came true.

H. L. Mencken in the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920, in an appreciation of Republican businessman Warren Gamaliel Harding as the twenty-ninth president.

3. The Enemies of Which People?

Mister President, sir,

Can we talk?

First of all, I want to congratulate you belatedly on your victory in 2016.

I realize it’s only the first week, but you’re doing a great job. You told us that yourself. Better than the first hundred days of FDR.

Whatever others say, I still think you are the best president we have.

But I have one difference of opinion I want to share with you as my president.

Not since Spiro Agnew was reviewing the press for the Nixon administration in the 1970s, and finding fault with “the nattering nabobs of negativism,” have we members of the working press been so lucky to have in the Oval Office such a distinguished critic of our work.

So far, you have called the media fake, dishonest, hypocritical, disgusting, lying, sleazy, traitors, the scum of the earth, enemies of the people. And those are the good things you have said about us.[2]

Still, I keep wondering who you have in mind? It certainly couldn’t be me. As a pundit, not only have I gone out on the limb and said you are the best president we have, I correctly wrote that your election in 2016 was a miracle.

Who would have ever dreamed that a totally inexperienced, unqualified real estate developer who came down with delusions of grandeur could convince a minority of we the people he could make America great again, especially when it already was pretty good?

True, I had been guilty of occasionally checking my facts, distinguishing what some people called “true facts” from “alternative facts,” which some said are the president’s favorite kind. I had been known to source, or even double source, my flattering essays about the groper in chief, identifying my usually reliably informed sources. Sometimes they were unreliably informed sources or even unreliably uninformed sources, but all highly placed. You can’t be too careful.

I was the one who rejected the charge the president was “a moron,” as Rex Tillerson may or may not have called our chief executive, his most noteworthy achievement as secretary of state. I suggested that the peripatetic ex-CEO of ExxonMobil, who had been flying around the world since Election Day, might have called you a “Mormon,” blaming jet lag.

And I went to bat for you when your closest adviser at the time, Gen. John Kelly, used the I-word, defaming the nation’s idiots. You may be a moron, sir, an imbecile, or simply intellectually challenged, as my defense ran. If you were an idiot, you were America’s Idiot, a sizable constituency, judging by the election. There was one in every village, sometimes two or more.

Some may have thought there was something corrupt or un-American in the way the president and the First Family seemed to be profiting from the First Family business (building Russian skyscrapers), theoretically banned by the Emoluments Clause. But that was the Floundering Fathers’ fault. As the only surviving coauthor of George Washington (See George Washington’s Expense Account, by Gen. George Washington & Marvin Kitman PFC [Ret.]), I had written extensively about emoluments. You are simply following in the hallowed footsteps of the father of the country.

It must have been the other guys you had in mind, sir.

Now if you had said the bad guys were the cable news people, I would have agreed with you. The cable news networks were the real enemies of the people. They made it seem like you were the only Republican in the race.

Yes, Mister President, some of us are guilty as sin. The Rupert Murdoch Fake News Brigade, for one, should apologize for hurting a president’s feelings. There were mornings when your favorite source of news, Fox & Friends, did not spend its ninety minutes discussing a 3 a.m. tweet of yours followed by a correction at 3:01, followed by another at 3:02. Unconscionable!

Yes, we are sleazy, disgusting, untrustworthy, disloyal traitors. If this be treason, so be it. And if this rallying around the flag doesn’t get a true patriot like me on the president’s Official Enemies List, the nation’s highest honor (established in the Nixon administration), I will tell you what I really think of the forty-fifth president the next time you invite me down to Mar-a-Largo.

Signed/

A Real American

Come to think of it, “enemies of the people” is not such a very good choice of words. Historians tell us it was a phrase used by Hitler and given mass circulation by Joseph Goebbels, National Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, well known for his ability to tell lies, the bigger the better. It must have been something the future president picked up while reading the speeches of Adolf Hitler, a collection of which was by his bedside, First Wife Ivana said in a Vanity Fair profile. Trump’s next book, Dick Cavett told me, will be titled My Kampf.

4. Fool’s Gold

I had the good fortune to hear the next president-elect’s victory speech in South Carolina one night during the campaign. That was the one in which he repeated how great he was and how he would make America great again.

The speech was immense, the highlight of the Super Duper Stupor Tuesday primary events from which some of us still haven’t awoken.

While he was at it, the Next President thanked seemingly everybody in the ballroom, except Ivanka’s obstetrician, the family plastic surgeon, and the Botox lip guy with the syringe.

The one group omitted was the media, without whom none of this would have been possible.

Without us attacking him, spreading what Trump called “fake news,” he would have been just another one of the seven or seventeen dwarfs, led by Snow White (Carly) slouching their way to the highest office in the land.

Even higher praise than Pulitzers or duPont Awards should go to the cable news networks that had been covering Trump like Madonna when she was hot.

Like the alchemists of yore, one presidential candidate in 2016 discovered the secret of how to turn dross (cable news networks) into gold.

By gold, I mean the gift of $2.4 billion free airtime, according to the Washington Post (“The Most Trusted Name in Fake News”) or $2.7 billion estimated by the failing New York Times (“All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print”), which has been failing since 1857.

Here’s how that lucky candidate’s magic formula worked:

1. Say something outrageous . . . an exaggeration . . . misleading . . . totally stupid . . . utter falsehood . . . doesn’t matter. Something wild and crazy like promising to build a big beautiful wall and having Mexico pay for it.

2. Give only a first declarative sentence. Never do a second sentence with a fact that might bolster a first sentence argument’s assertion. Better yet, skip the second sentence. It tends to introduce too much detail, making a sound bite drag.

3. The third sentence then repeats the first sentence, clinching the non-argument.

The gross absurdity du jour is next discussed by the news panels of two or three assumed experts that had become the substitute for real news on cable.

Usually consisting of expert millennials, often covering their first campaign, the panel will discuss in depth the meaning of the Trumpian throwaway, chewing it over like cud for several days until the next campaign rally provides further food for thought.

A master showman and carnival barker, the candidate knows how it works. As last night’s cud starts to bore even the panelists, he drops another oratorical bombshell, and the trifecta cycle begins again.

And that candidate was, let me check my notes, the next president! Tip of our MAGA caps to him!

The fool’s gold of the alchemist king was further enriched by the cable news networks covering whole rallies. They never knew when a candidate might say something newsworthy, the thinking went. Why not perform the public service of forcing the whole meal down the audience’s throat, like the golden geese of Périgord? That courageous, innovative network would be first with the sound bite du jour, no matter how insane.

I first began noticing the enhancement on my favorite biased cable network newscast, Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC. As a student of TV news journalism, I had always been impressed by Matthews’s ability to ask the longest questions in TV journalism history. He would take about five minutes phrasing a question, say, about building a wall on the Canadian border. Then add, “Your thoughts?”

The poor panelists would be looking around nervously, wondering if they would get ten or fifteen seconds to add their thoughts.

I was stunned to see one night a Trump rally in Peoria, seemingly unintentionally introduced by Matthews at the top of his seven o’clock hour, with the anchor then remaining silent for the next forty-five minutes of pure Trump (except for commercials for the latest new miracle drug with scary side effects, including death).

It gave me a chance to see the candidate do his impression of a Nuremberg speech, interrupted by chants of “Lock her up . . . Lock her up.”

The irony in all of this is that the next president would be continually using his free airtime to attack the media, “the news geniuses,” who were not being nice to him, or unfair, by not showing the folks at home just how HUGE his campaign was getting. They loved him in Alabama—20,000! They loved him in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania—17,000, whatever. They were lying to you folks at home.

And all the while he was condemning news censorship—chorus of boos whenever the hated word “media” is heard—the lying network cameras were panning the room from wall to wall.

Not all the sixteen other candidates’ rallies, it turned out, were so thoroughly covered as a public service by cable news networks.

Not only did it give one candidate all that free airtime, it sucked the oxygen out of the news environment for the other sixteen candidates. No wonder the best and brightest of Republicans with names like “Pataki,” “Perry,” “Santorum,” “Fiorina,” “Huntsman,” even “Scott Walker” were DOA.

News producers are some of the most intelligent in broadcasting, well-versed in ancient basic principles of good journalism: fairness, equal time, nonpartisan objectivity. Why didn’t they say “no way, José” to the pro-Trumpian media blitz?

What, not cover Trump 24/7? And get fired by their bosses for not being relevant? Not giving the public what it wants? All Trump/All the time! Even if they created the demand?

Is there a news director willing to be the first to say, “All this is campaign rhetoric, not news?”[3]

As the Kitman Law of news judgment goes, “The clown act gets the highest ratings.”

Mass nonstop distribution of candidate Trump’s wild and crazy campaign sound bites was enough for the media to be named unindicted coconspirator in the election of 2016. For the media to continue the same harmful practice of trumpeting the new president’s post-election Twitter remarks, some might say, was shameful stupidity.

What a tweet had to say could be sufficiently summarized in print on the screen without becoming the day or week’s story. Cowardly over-coverage of government by Twitter is deadly to democracy. Sad.

We of the media have been the patsies, the saps, in the Trumpification campaign.

And before I say, It’s morning in America all over again, in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Republican slogan, there are some of us enemies of the people who say isn’t it time we woke up and smelled the horseshit?

There probably was one, but he or she or they have been fired, the name expurgated from the records to protect the identity of the others committing the news management crime of the century.

5. The Battle of the Mall

Crowds at The National Mall view the inaugurations of presidents

Barack Obama, 2009 (left) and Donald J. Trump, 2017 (right).

I have been watching with growing fascination the game our chief executive is playing with the press, which, as he implies, is the most dishonest, corrupt media since the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439.

There is nothing new about the game. Blaming the media always seems to be the bedrock of Republican Party policy about serving the public.

In the insane asylum that is the new and improved America the Beautiful and the mentally and ethically challenged, watching the game is the second-favorite indoor sport for fans of good government, next to reading the commander in chief’s daily Twitter postings.

What is astonishing about this season is that the players seem to be on steroids.

The rules for the game change from election to election, like mah-jongg rules.

Here are the rules by which the game is now being played in this championship season:

Player #1 (known as “Individual 1” in the Mueller Report) says something like “I won the election by a landslide,” what HE means is losing by almost three million votes is a landslide.

Player #2, the dishonest crooked media, says, “Not so.” The corrupt media clings to the notion that “a landslide” was more like FDR’s victory over Alf Landon in 1936, with an electoral vote of 532–8.

Player #1 says the crowd attending his inaugural was the largest inaugural crowd in history. “Massive,” he says “A million or a million and a half.”

That was easy for him to say. But Player #2 disagrees. The crooked corrupt media displays pictures of crowds from previous inaugurals. It looks to the naked eye, or even a partly dressed one, that the crowd estimate by Player #1 is not exactly true.

Now the game gets even more exciting. According to the latest revised rules, the first player to lay down a lie is free to embellish.

Player #1 can then say his vote numbers may seems less than his crooked opponent’s by a few million, but millions of illegal immigrants (three to five million, to be exact) voted for Crooked Hillary, who should still be locked up, if there were any justice.

The dishonest crooked media (Player #2) says no evidence of claimed voter fraud has been found. Player #1 partisans say, you need new glasses!

Not quitting while they are ahead in their own minds, Player #1’s corner goes to work, changing the rules again. What they meant to say is Player #1 had the largest TV viewing audience in history.

The medal for massiveness is seconded by Player #1’s press secretary. And while he’s at it, his secretary of truth again sticks it to the dishonest media for being dishonest.

The controversial claim in the Battle of the Mall was then thirded by the leader of Player #1’s ministry of truth, who proclaimed the latest rule book change in this year’s most amazing contest in virtual veracity.

As Kellyanne Conway, administration senior counselor, explained to Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press, “Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts.”

Veteran Todd, who thinks he has heard it all, demurred. “Alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”

Shaking his head, as Kellyanne continued extolling the “alternative facts” concept, Todd speculated about the New Math: “Two plus two equals five is an alternative fact? Alaska does not have snow? Deserts are not dry?”

“Don’t get so dramatic,” said Counselor Conway, a leading candidate for this year’s Joseph Goebbels prize in alternative journalism.[4]

The latest lie in the game will have long legs, judging by Player #1’s previous record in liesmanship. His alternative fact about Obama being born in Lapland or Agrabah, wherever, ran for eight years. Even after admitting he may have been wrong, the president was a legitimate citizen, he assured fellow birthers his people were still digging through records out there somewhere. As a bonus, he threw in the alternative fact that it was all Crooked Hillary’s fault in the first place.

I tell you, by the time the game is over, the current occupant or resident of the Oval Office will be able to look in the mirror as he combs out his hair and ask, “Who is the greatest liar of them all?” My bet is that he will be self-acclaimed as our all-time liar in chief.

Charged in June 2019 with numerous violations of the Hatch Act. At last count, 237 transgressions. A government ethics watchdog agency recommended firing the adviser for breaking the law prohibiting federal employees from practicing politics on the job.

6. George Orwell Lives

Aside from being first in groping, first in being out to get the notorious three Ms (Mexicans-Muslims-Media), first in paranoia about election fraud, first in being a “useful idiot,” as Lenin is said to have called a sleeper in capitalist society, first in being the only president ever elected to the WWE Hall of Fame,[5] in only twenty-nine days in office Donald Trump continues to add to his laurels as liar in chief.

We the minority of the people have chosen a discombobulated potentate who can change his mind as quickly as the traffic lights on Fifth Avenue. But when it comes to lying, he is always straight ahead on red.

In his first hundred hours, he told more lies than some presidents have in their four years in office.

There is nothing in the Constitution banning the practice of not telling the truth. The new president has the God-given right to lie his head off. Not that he needs much encouragement.

It comes as easily to him as opening his mouth, or getting out of bed at 3 a.m. and inscribing his latest policy insight on the Official Twitter Pages, or walking it back at 3:01 and again at 3:02.

The tendency to say, “Hold on a minute,” throw up your hands or just throw up, is blown away by the sheer number of untruths. It could be one of Trump’s bald-faced lies, or one with hair on it, like the classic birther nonsense. His M.O. is saying whatever comes out from his hair, going through his mouth, without passing through his so-called brain, making the lies difficult to count, correct, or stop. His fans would be disappointed if he stopped lying. And why should he?

He lied about the election being rigged, although he got the aggrieved party wrong.

He lied about building a wall the Mexicans will pay for.

He lied during the primary.

He lied during the campaign.

So why should he stop now?

The current tenant in the Oval Office, it can be argued, is a born liar. It’s in his DNA. He lies like a rug—not referring to what some scholars mistakenly believe is that mop on top of his brain.

What made me think about his achievements in the field of truth was the breaking news on CNN: General Michael Flynn had been fired because he was caught lying.

I thought it must have been fake news.

General Flynn jumping or being pushed from the seat of power in the National Security Council for the crime of being “less than forthcoming,” militaryspeak for lying? This is an administration that rose to the top on the ability to be less than forthcoming. So ironic. So sad.

One would think they would have promoted him to a higher pay grade for demonstrating his loyalty to the president’s code of veracity.

The Washington Post reported he was caught talking to the Russians on the phone.

I wasn’t surprised the Russkies had gotten a man inside the White House, given the president’s bromance with Vlad the Poisoner. There are more friends of Russia in the Trump inner circle these days, I am gathering from the fake news reports, than in the Kremlin.

The purges in the Trump White House, like Flynn falling on his sword and missing, may soon remind us of the politburo. In the old days, our intelligence agencies needed to study the politburo photo op on the Kremlin balcony during the May Day parade to find out the latest about who was in or out.

How many days will the current commissar in charge of getting rid of un-American leakers in the White House, Comrade Steve Bannon, last?

What is the employment prognosis, for example, for the man from the People’s Republic of ExxonMobil, temporarily serving as secretary of state? Comrade Rex Tillerson, deserving winner of Russia’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Friendship medal with four oil derricks, for making Russia’s oil and gas industry great again?

What concerns me is not our liar in chief’s ability to fire off lies faster than a Kalashnikov in his fifteen-second sound bites, but making the people believe that it’s okay to lie.

Even more awesome is the new president’s convincing so many of us that presentation of evidence that something is not true by crooked media fact-checkers itself is proof that it is true!

What has gotten into so many of us?

Maybe it’s the water.

Could it be that the fluorides the John Birch Society warned us about in the 1950s finally kicked in? Instead of turning us into godless socialistic communists, the fluorides have had an unwanted side effect even more dangerous to society?

What we as a nation may be experiencing is the impact of a new clinical something called the Trumpification Effect, or TE.

Has habitual listening to the man who is the only president we have at this time taken its toll? Has it triggered some kind of brain trauma or cellular loss akin to early Alzheimer’s disease? Is the damage emotional and psychological, like PTSD?

TE could have set in the first time the afflicted watched the former real estate gonif promising to make America great again—even though it was already pretty great.

And the next thing they knew—they were Trumpified! Caught like insects in cooling amber in the Late Cretaceous Period.

For those with TE, it doesn’t matter how much evidence the crooked, corrupt, horrible media presents to prove the falsity of “alternative facts.”

As a matter of fact, the converse is true.

For the scientific among us, here is the formula that can be used to measure the TE in any situation:

E = MC^2

No, that may be the wrong one. It seems to have been mixed up in my notes as I left for vacation.

The way to tell if you, or anyone you know, has come down with TE, take the Trumpification Effect Test (Pat. Pending)

Q. 2+2 = ?

If the answer is 5 or any number other than 4, the person should either a) seek help or b) apply for a job in the Trump administration.

In my opinion, the impact of Trumpification needs further study at the National Institute of Mental Health. Hopefully, before it is closed by Trump on the grounds that it is a prime example of governmental overreach and a waste of taxpayer dollars needed to pay for the Great Mexico Wall.

World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (WWE) Hall of Fame Class of 2013 Inductee Donald Trump.

7. The First Twenty-nine Days

The stature of the presidency has not risen, as it usually does in the first days of a new administration when the winner gets to exercise his “first 100 days” mandate. If anything, our new president’s standing is declining day by day as he takes his mandate out for a walk around the park and a drink at the nearest Trump hotel bar. Around day twenty-nine, he seems to be running out of gas.

Some people thought it hit the bottom of the barrel with those “air quotes” (March 20, 2017) he used to expand and document his “wiretapping” charges that Her Majesty’s Government had indulged in ye olde-fashioned British skullduggery in response to the Obama administration request to spy on him during the campaign. Without evidence? Now I’m only a pundit, but that seemed strange.

Of course, with a president like Trump, you don’t need real evidence or any evidence. If anything, the absence of evidence, such as the facts, assures us that the president knows whereof he tweets. Real Americans who support the president know the facts prove the fact-checkers are lying.

We have a new president today who psychologically still doesn’t believe he is president. He is still campaigning, going to rallies where he says things like “On Day One, I will repeal and replace Obamacare.”

Now he doesn’t seem to understand why everybody isn’t cheering his every dumb statement. Why aren’t they chanting “lock ’em up” at Congress?

Why did those duly elected dummies give him such a health care bill as his first act?

Why hadn’t anybody told him health care was so complicated?

Why were they expecting him to actually read the bill before endorsing it? Don’t they know the only thing he reads is Breitbart and other journals of record that praise him?

Why were they having him push a health care bill that guarantees the blue-collar working-class folks in West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan—the people who voted for him—will die, or go bankrupt, whichever is worse, the first time a major illness strikes?

Why didn’t anybody tell him the real enemies of the people were the insurance companies that were raising premiums in the Affordable Care Act, and staying out of markets so there wouldn’t be the competition that would make the free market work?

It was politically stupid not to start off his victory parade with taxes. Any fool knows the Republican Party stands for cutting taxes for the rich. That is, if you need to pay taxes, it’s smarter not to pay them, as he explained during the debates.

So it wasn’t his fault that his administration is 0–1. It was the Democrats’ fault. Speaker Ryan’s fault. He’s dumb as a rock, the president was saying in a response to Speaker Ryan’s new book, which questioned the president’s qualifications, “A baby who didn’t know what the hell he was doing” (July 12, 2019). The Republican Party was disloyal. Nothing will be his fault as the years go by, and what the folks will have to realize is that he will only be taking credit for everything good that happens.

It might seem to some people the president had no mandate, other than cutting taxes so rich people like him would benefit. That’s not true. The other thing he wanted to do as president was fire people.

Since he never dreamed he would be nominated, no less elected when he entered the race coming down the golden escalator in Trump Tower, it would have been the height of presumption for him to have formulated a program for actually making America great, except for cutting taxes and firing people, at which he has been more than successful. That’s why he has seemed to be vamping now until the joke is over in 2020.

Unlike many of his predecessors in the Oval Office, he didn’t come to the seat of power with a head filled with ideas about how to actually fix what was broken. No Square Deal. No Real Deal to make America great again besides wearing the red hat.

So what if he scraps the Iran deal?

So what if he questions the right of newspapers to do their job by reporting the news?

So what if he is considering taking away the TV license from a network, even though TV networks aren’t licensed?

So what if he really doesn’t believe in the First Amendment, and thinks the Second could be improved by guaranteeing the right of citizens to bear submachine guns in public?

So what if he continues to treat American citizens of our Puerto Rico as residents of a third-world country?

So what if he is blowing holes in any international agreement he can find on trade or protection of clean air and water?

So what if he goads that silly little fat boy from North Korea into dropping a nuke on Los Angeles, as if they didn’t have enough trouble with the Weinstein affair?

So what if he calls his tax reform for the rich “a middle-class bill?”

So what if he is acting like a spoiled brat having a tantrum because he didn’t get to replace and repeal Obamacare, or get money from either Mexico or Congress to build the wall to nowhere on the border.

So what if he accidentally destroys the planet? He has insurance on his golf courses and hotels.

So what? may be the mantra for what remains of the Last Days of the Trump administration.

8. The Chicken Dancers

Those folks at Time Inc. really know how to hurt a guy.

Can you imagine the man of the year—or woman or person, whatever you want to call the award Time magazine has been handing out for ninety years—and that lucky person once again is not President Obvious Choice?

Adding salt to the wound, Time gave journalism’s highest honor in the December 6, 2017, issue to what it called “The Silence Breakers,” a group of women who have shared their stories about sexual assault and harassment. None of that would have been possible without the smoking Access Hollywood tape that established Trump as the groper in chief.

The best president we have said he actually turned down the coveted Time magazine cover bauble. The problem, as he explained in all humility, was that they wanted to interview him. They might ask him about . . . what? . . . “that Russian thing”?

Among his other achievements Time magazine’s headhunters ignored:

• First Republican president ever to have warm relations with our traditional hostile enemy, and not be accused of being a crypto-communist by the Republican Party.

• First Republican president ever to balance the budget by adding two or three trillion to the deficit with a tax cut for the rich. How will he do that? By having two sets of books, as Ronald Reagan did.

• First president to make the people shrug off the fact that he is lying all the time.

And leave us not ignore the fact that nukes did not hit Los Angeles or Bedminster, New Jersey, in 2017, despite the president’s bungling negotiations with a little fat rocket man.

The lack of progress in making America great again has not been a problem. The economy up, unemployment down, whatever caused by his predecessor he takes credit for. The Monroe Doctrine could well be one of his accomplishments soon.

As I was saying, Time magazine really blew it by showing disrespect for the possible maniac who will be commanding us in the coming war with (fill in nuclear power of choice).

Those traitors at Time continue treating the first Trump administration as if it were a Punch and Judy show.

But that hasn’t bothered the 34.9 percent in the base for whom he can still do no wrong.

So let us all do the Chicken Dance in honor of the president who in 2017 most made the nation seem like a chicken with its head cut off:

Make a chicken beak with your hand . . . clap three times . . .

III. THE TRUMPONICLES 2017

more year one (11/17–11/18)

1. The First-Year Report Card

At the risk of sounding like an apologist, I have a few good words to say about the first year in office of a president who is first in golf courses and hotels, first in emoluments, first in lack of involvement with Russian money, as he self-proclaims, and last in involvement with the truth.

First of all, I want to thank him for his service.

He’s the best president we have.

His first trip abroad was very successful. He didn’t grope Angela Merkel or any of the Arab potentates’ many wives or girlfriends.

Were you not proud of the way he knocked those sheiks off their camels in Riyadh? Shown the flag, the face, and the hairdo, the fifty-five desert autocrats accepted our novice autocrat’s sincerity. Despite all those anti-Muslim tirades back home, they swallowed that Ich bin ein Saudi speech, calling for more sandals on the ground against the terrorists.

And wasn’t it smart the way he managed to sell those ragheads 110 billion dollars of fresh ammo to replace what the Saudi flyboys were wasting bombing the hell out of the hospitals, wedding parties, and funerals in Yemen. None of which bothered our Sheik of Fifth Avenue.

And how about all those new super advanced military toys he is stuffing down the towelheads’ throats? (Ignore, as he has, that most of the arms deals were made by the previous administration. Besides, nothing much has gone beyond the good intention stage. Those Arab traders are some dealmakers.)

Let’s not forget the sword dancing. He went where no president ever went before in cutting a rug with the sheiks of Araby, although he probably could have used a little more time at Arthur Murray.

And why are everybody’s knickers twisted about “that Russian thing,” the hoax the fake media is over-covering like it was another global warming charade. It’s another example of red-baiting, as the Nation magazine calls it.

These guys the administration is accused of being in bed with are not the old-fashioned Communists. They are capitalists, crooked capitalists, the best kind. Putin and his fellow oligarchs are dedicated to the new improved Marxist-Leninist dialectic: “Each according to his need, each according to his greed.”

And I’m not the only one saying good things about the president.

Didn’t you see the way his cabinet stuck their necks out the first week by standing up and reciting what a great job the president is doing in only one week. It was like an audition for a high school production of A Chorus Line.

Admittedly, things have not gone as well as expected by the Trumpies doing the swamp-draining thing.

In control of the Executive branch, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, a cabinet filled with favorite billionaires and generals, and with a party platform that favors letting 23 million Americans lose their health insurance as the first order of business, nothing seemed to be getting done, except firing people and getting angry on Twitter.

Some of his cabinet of “all the best people,” as he called them, didn’t work out that well. Tom Price, the Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, resigned under pressure in September over a little thing like his addiction to grossly over-priced chartered air travel. Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, who used to ride his horse into the office—that can’t be right, I’ll have to check my notes—had to turn in his keys because of shady business dealings and other conflicts of interest. Scott Pruitt, the Environment Protection Agency administrator who was doing his darnedest to make sure we wouldn’t have clean water to drink and to guarantee air that we could see, had to go because the fake news people found out about the $43,000 soundproof phone booth in his office. Come to think of it, the president and his best cabinet were starting to sound like Warren Harding and his Ohio Gang behind the Teapot Dome scandal of 1921–23.

I forgot to mention the commerce secretary, Sleepy Wilbur Ross, who they say is never awake after 11 a.m.

By the end of year one, so many of the best heads and senior-level staff had left office, either outed by the fake news or disappearing, as if a trapdoor had been sprung under their executive desk chairs. It’s a good thing one of the president’s assets, as he’s told us, is his ability to pick the greatest managers to run his failing brands.

The lack of progress in making America great again has not been a problem. The economy up, unemployment down, whatever being caused by his predecessor didn’t matter because his strategy was to take credit for everything good that happens. The acquisition of Alaska from Russia could be one of his greatest accomplishments soon.

Despite all the achievements, a lot of my progressive leftist un-American friends still think his shelf life is expiring. They don’t seem to understand being president is not an easy job. There’s more to it than just waving at the crowd of reporters on the South Lawn on your way to another vacation or round of golf via Air Force One. There’s a learning curve involved. Of course, it’s an American media tradition to kick a guy on his way down, but shouldn’t we be giving a totally inexperienced unqualified president a break?

This is not to say some bad things also haven’t been going on in the Oval Office. They began with the reading of the last line of the Inaugural Address in January.

2. To Russia, with Love

By the second week of the new administration, I was alarmed at the growing number of Trump people who seem to be involved in “this Russian thing”—even though it is a hoax—as the commander in chief still calls it.

We haven’t had an administration with so much contact with Russians since they were our allies in the war against Nazi Germany.

The most bizarre aspect of the revelations is how the Trump people can’t remember their contacts and secret meetings with ambassadors, oligarchs, lawyers, professors, business commissars, and even Putin’s son-in-law, all of whom have ties to the Kremlin.

How could they all forget?

In all my years as a respected scholar of presidencies I have never witnessed an administration in which so many cabinet members and advisers had come down with, to use the clinical term, the forgotskis.

The forgotskis is a contagious disease, a malady that some said was brought in to the Trump campaign by his top military adviser, General Flimflam Flynn (from Rhode Island, America’s most corrupt state), who not only forgot to mention his rendezvous and phone calls with the Russian ambassador, but also was an employee of the Russian TV network RT and on the payroll of the Turkish government as a lobbyist, while neglecting to register as a foreign agent.

The first sign that the forgotskis had struck the upper ranks of the new administration was the president himself.

First, he forgot he knew the man who claimed to be the president of Russia. It turned out he wasn’t just a citizen named V. Putin auditioning for a job as doorman at the Trump Arms Hotel & Golf Club, which the First Realtor is planning to build or lease and refurbish on the site of the Lubyanka, the former KGB headquarters and prison, where, on a clear day, it is said, you can see Siberia from its basement.

Then the man who is the greatest master of bait and switch ever to sit in the Oval Office forgot that his former campaign manager (Paul Manafort) was a friend of the Russian ambassador who might have helped him get the job running the election campaign of the corrupt pro-Russian Ukrainian president.

The saddest case of the forgotskis in recent memory hit Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had so many forgotten involvements with Russkies that he has had to revise his story three times. So far. He reminds me of those characters in Roger Corman horror movies who wake up not remembering a few hours or three days in their lives.

Before his next grilling by Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, the AG should have taken the new miracle drug Prevagen, as they say on TV, clinically shown to help with mild to severe memory problems using jellyfish brains, as I gather, with possible side effects of creating the spine of a jellyfish.

Further evidence that there is cause for alarm about the disease of collective amnesia is the strange performance being put on by the commerce secretary.

In the process of hastily ramming through anointed billionaires for the Trumpian cabinet, the Commerce Committee forgot to ask Sleepy Wilbur Ross about his part-time job as vice chairman of the Cyprus national bank, which specializes in laundering rubles and dollars for Russian oligarchs including President Putin.

While hailing himself for divesting eighty investments that made him the “king of bankruptcy,” a pretender to the crown already held by King Donald the Insolvent, Ross remembered just this week that, da, he still owns a sizable chunk of a transoceanic shipping company (Navigator Holdings), which transports Russian natural gas in partnership with Putin’s daughter’s husband.

He should also be on Prevagen.

And let’s not forget the commander in chief’s right-hand son-in-law, who may have set a record for the administration in forgetfulness. Jared neglected to list from 30 to 101 contacts with Russians when applying for top-secret security clearance.

The last time the Russians were so involved in the inner workings of our government, during the FDR and Truman (Democratic) administrations, according to the Venona project, USSR intelligence agencies had 349 Americans embedded as spies. CIA alone had fifteen to twenty. Alger Hiss was on track to become secretary of state until he ran into Whittaker Chambers and the pumpkin papers.

“No collusion, no nothing. Investigate Hillary,” Honest Don assured us for the nineteenth time as he left for Northeast Asia one weekend.

The forgotski affliction, to be fair, was rampant beyond those who dealt with formulating the new To Russia with Love foreign policy. The new treasury secretary (Steve Mnuchin) in the “Greatest Cabinet Ever,” as POTUS dubbed it, forgot to mention the $100 million he had stashed away in the Bahamas. The secretary of health and human services (Tom Price) forgot he had a portfolio of health care industry investments, and also forgot he had expended more than $1,000,000 in department funds for personal travel on charter flights and military planes in only his first (and last) 231 days in office. The energy secretary (Perry) was heading the department whose name he forgot during a national TV debate. The HUD secretary (Ben Carson) forgot the people he referred to as “immigrants” were also known as slaves.

What worries me most, though, is the press ignoring the Russian ambassador’s dilemma.

He’s been sending in voluminous reports about all the good work he is doing in subverting the American electoral process, a goal of Communist policy since the 1920s.

After just finishing a three-hour lunch with caviar and vodka, an informal state dinner with the samovar and balalaikas, he needs to write a full report of a good meeting of minds, what was said verbatim, etc.

And then what happens? He has been sending in all these voluminous reports every week to the Kremlin, noting that he spent such-and-such amount of rubles on this and that incoming officials of the Trump administration.

But then they all deny ever meeting him!

Wait a second, his bosses at the Kremlin are probably shaking their heads, is this guy making it all up?

With every “No, I never met the guy,” the ambassador is seeing his promotion fly out the embassy window. His chances are ruined!

This is terrible. If he can’t show photos shaking hands with the different incoming Trump cabinet people, his next assignment might be counting trees in Siberia.

3. Russiagate

As entertaining as the Alphonse & Gaston routine (“After you, Alphonse. . . . No, you first, my dear Gaston!”), the leaders of the two most powerful nations in the world are performing in the exchange of spies, election hacking, and expanding the totally insane nuke race issues, questions are raised which have been keeping me awake at night. I should explain I am one of those pathetic false alarmists who turn on the TV first thing in the morning to see if there still is a world out there; if not, I can just turn over and go back to sleep.

These days I especially worry about our president-elect’s warm relationship with the leader of our traditional enemy. It’s as if he and V. Putin, as he calls him on his Twitter account, went to the same Talmud Torah Hebrew School in Queens as kids.

If the new president ever holds a press conference again, the first question I would ask:

Does he know that his good friend, V. Putin, is a Communist?

And the follow-up: Is our president familiar with the communists’ great game plan to dominate the two thirds of the world they do not already control, and that Marx and Engels predicted his children’s real estate empires will soon be withering away?

And while in the questioning mode, does he know his new best bud is the leader of the gang that since World War II has been out to make us roadkill?

We know he had read the speeches of Hitler and employed some of the same rhetorical propaganda tactics Der Fuhrer used so successfully, especially the power of lies as a communication tool, but has he ever read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago?

Forgive the leap into the unknown here, but my guess is he has not even read the Classics Illustrated Comics version of The Communist Manifesto. A Marxist plot to him might mean a Groucho movie.

I appreciate he’s not much of a reader, except for his own Twitter remarks. The media studies those 3 a.m. commentaries as if they are the missing Dead Sea Scrolls. But the author is behind the curve on a lot of things we come to expect of a president.

And it doesn’t matter to him.

He is convinced the struggle with our archenemy for the last half-century is all about negotiations. Making deals. Obama and his predecessors made bum deals. But he is the world’s greatest dealmaker. Very smart, as he’s explained, as the putative author of the Art of the Deal.

If he is such a great dealmaker why was he $968 million in debt, according to his last visible IRS tax filing (1996)? Why has he amassed six bankruptcies, seventeen of nineteen failing business with the magic of his name attached and as many as 3,500 lawsuits pending in the courts before the election? Go know.

The president may be only one of those fellow travelers we used to call a peacenik. Still he may go down in presidential history as Donald the Red, the man who gave us the most friendly relationship with Russia since Seward was buying Alaska from the Czar for $7.2 million in 1867. I will leave it to the next House Un-American Activities Committee, sure to be revived by the Republican congressional leadership any day now, to ask: “Are you now or have you ever been a card-carrying member of the Communist party?” He will have the right to take the Fifth Amendment, of course, if he hasn’t abolished the Bill of Rights by executive order.

But somebody should be asking the president the peacenik, what does he know about the Marxist plot to destroy capitalism and when?

4. Day 61 Amerika Held Hostage

“Why is everybody flying to Russia?” Chris Matthews was asking (March 21, 2017) on Hardball, where the action is. “You would think it’s Paris.”

He was referring to the peregrinations of the president’s inner circle, past and present, an observation triggered by the news that our new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had elected to go to Russia, instead of an important NATO meeting.

Well, it could be the former CEO of ExxonMobil was hand-delivering royalty checks to his buddies, the oil oligarchs whom he is helping make Russia great again.

Tovarich Rex will make a great secretary of state, my reliably informed sources tell me. With Exxon’s far-flung operations, foreign governments are always happy to take his phone calls and inviting him to stop by. Exxon checks are as good as gold.

Every day there are new revelations about the connections between the president’s people and their friends, the Russians. More recently, the names named in the Russiagate case include Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Carter Page, and the old unreliable, Gen. Flimflam Flynn. The White House is beginning to sound like Kremlin East.

(Lock ’em up)

Uncle Vladimir and his associates at the KGB must still be dancing the kazatsky in Lubyanka Square in the Meshchansky District at their success in helping engineer the election miracle of all time, giving us a man they consider, to use the correct Russian word, a

идиот [идиóт]

moron (also: clod, idiot, mooncalf, airhead)

I was listening to the new, improved, fastest-tweeting, supposedly more presidential, made in Moscow, so-called President Trump model being introduced to the TV nation at a Joint Session of Congress a few nights ago (February 28, 2017) to get some insight into this Russian thing that was gripping my cable network news shows. This latest version sounded less like a madman sitting at a blank Twitter page by dawn’s early light.

I found the performance very entertaining, but I was disappointed he did not deliver at least part of the address in Russian, aimed at the constituency that may have played a major role in giving us a minority president.

RT (the Russian news network) is not on my FIOS channel lineup, so I may have missed the mujiks firing their Kalashnikovs in the air in the streets of Irkutsk Oblast or Nizhny Novgorod as their favorite candidate spoke, an event that wouldn’t have surprised a man who saw Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey the day the Twin Towers went down.

Although it touched on all Vladimir Putin’s talking points, it did not address the major question that had—to use the proper oratorical word—schlonged his administration’s first sixty-one days.

What did he know, and when did he know that his friends in the Kremlin were meddling in the last election, possibly subverting an electoral process they have been trying to undermine since the 1920s?

Our novice president has gone on record saying he “knows nothing about this Russian business.”

He never spoke to this guy “Putin.” The closest he has come to anything Russian is lunch at the Russian Tea Room, or words to that effect.

“I never do business with Russians,” as he explained, ignoring the fifty-six Russki oligarchs who bought pieces of the projected Trump Dallas skyscraper, conveniently forgetting the cozy one-hundred-story Trump Tower he was hoping to erect in Moscow, even as he denied it. Nothing incriminating on the face of it.

Let’s not neglect his creepy family. They keep showing up moving in and out of the White House inner councils like the Snopes family of Yoknapatawpha County in Faulkner’s trilogy of novels The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansions.[6]

I especially am wary of Ivanka, who, according to Steve Bannon of the president’s early brain trust in Michael Wolf’s Fire and Fury, was “dumb as a brick.” The smartest and most duplicitous of the Trumps, she either has a security clearance, or doesn’t, which doesn’t keep her out of meetings with foreign dignitaries, with or without the first son-in law, young Kushner, the real estate mogulette with the crooked father, who also apparently doesn’t need a proper security clearance.

(Lock ’em both up.)

Meanwhile, the first sons are traveling salesmen making business deals for the Trump organization worldwide, including Russia, of which the president presumably knows nothing, so it’s all kosher.

I tell you, with all of this secret unexplained business going on, the District of Columbia is starting to seem like Moscow-on-the Potomac. Not being much of a Republican, if at all, the golfer in chief probably isn’t aware that the Plymouth Rock of Republicanism has always been “Better dead than Red.”

However it all goes down, and after being awarded the coveted Crony Capitalist of the Year medal by his best bud, Vlady, Donald Trump will say, “It’s not my fault.”

My prediction as an oracle is there’s going to be a lot of fun as our president tries to wash the red out of his hair before Russiagate is over.

Without meaning any disrespect by comparison, Flem Snopes and his kin were farmers, blacksmiths, bigamists, pedophiles, murderers, mentally challenged, pornographers, venal politicians, senators, and bank presidents who seemed to have their hands in everything, according to the family biographer (Faulkner). When the family was in trouble, they could always count on a barn burning or two. And they never told the truth when a lie would suffice.

5. The Dopey Awards

I always like to give credit where credit is due, awarding recognition in fields of achievement sometimes ignored.

Despite the multiplicity of candidates on the short list of hundreds, my nominee for the dumbest person of the year in the administration prize goes to that dope Donald Trump Jr.

Trump Jr., the president’s namesake and hair apparent, always struck some of us students of stupidity as being dumb as a golf bag. He made his father look like an Einstein.

What impressed the judges most was the secret meeting Donald the Younger took with the shady Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was said to have contacts with the Kremlin, if not the Big Chicken Kiev himself (Putin), but may be in reality just some cocktail waitress near the Kremlin in Red Square with a gift of gab.

Every day, it seemed, there were revelations in the fake press about the number of mystery guests in the Russian Tearoom, as this observer thought of the family executive offices in Trump Tower, judging by the number of Russian lawyers, bankers, oligarchs, and embassy officialdom with access to the Trump Organization samovar.

It had reached eight, according to NBC News, when I stopped following the body count. But I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn participants included the Russian Women’s Olympic Beach Volleyball team. Perhaps even an undercover FBI agent or two.

The way the media was covering what the president called “the Russian thing,” a hoax, like global warming—especially by the failing New York Times and the failing Washington Post in a battle for the Pulitzer Prize in fake news—it was beginning to sound like Trump Tower had become the headquarters of one of those prewar Soviet-American People’s Fraternal Aid Committee for Peace and Brotherhood groups, which sometimes contained as many undercover FBI members as coexistence dupes.

The Trump secret cell meeting with Comrade Natalia and her delegation included almost all of the future president’s men, such dignitaries as campaign manager Paul Manafort, the noted Ukraine election manipulator and, of course, the control freak, Jared Kushner. Just the other day the president’s right-hand son-in-law was throwing his brother-in-law under the bus by telling Congress that “the meeting” was so nothing, so small potatoes, he actually was only passing by Trump Jr.’s office, in effect, on his way to the men’s room, not really taking the meeting.

What was the meeting about?

“Nothing,” Trump the Younger initially told reporters covering the case.

Then, according to Number One Son, it turned out it was all about the Russian ban on baby adoption by US citizens, in retaliation for Congress passing the Magnitsky Act.

Before we could wipe the tears from our eyes about the babies, emails came to light suggesting Trump Jr. expected the meetings to be about the transfer of damaging information against Crooked (“Lock Her Up”) Hillary, which could affect the election outcome.

Holy Father Stalin! That sounded like collusion, da?

Here was the clincher for the Dopey award committee deliberations:

In the spirit of full transparency, and because the New York Times was breaking the story about the secret meeting the next morning, younger Trump released the full email skein.

Donald the Elder expressed full confidence in whatever dumb thing Donald the Junior had done. So much so, he went to the trouble on Air Farce One to write personally his son’s statement to the press, assuring all there was nothing suspicious about nefarious hacking negotiations, the bungling of which won new respect for the recipient of this year’s Dopey. Score one for the value of nepotism.

There is no free lunch in dealing with the Commies. What might a Kremlin expect in return for aiding a Trump administration? Could the price be sanction removal?

I could regale stupidity fans with the title winner’s other exploits in stupidity. To keep this citation on a higher cultural level, I will limit my remarks to observing only his conduct reminds me of another iconic American family, the Corleones. Donald Jr. is the Fredo of the Trump family, which is unfair to Fredo, if you know your Godfather.

You can understand why Father Trump keeps daughter Ivanka by his side, not Junior, at all those big meetings at his day job as president.

I am not suggesting that Fredo Trump register as a foreign agent or lobbyist, although it might not be such a bad idea for the whole family to do so as a precaution.

All of this looks and smells bad to some of us, though not the base. A poll the other day showed that a high percentage of people who voted for Trump do not believe that Donald Jr. even attended the meeting he arranged. As Tony Insolia, my old editor at Newsday, observed, “We have always known that ignorance is bliss.”

6. A Summer Vacation

We the people of the great state of New Jersey were honored that the president had chosen to spend his seventeen-day vacation at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster.

We realize that he is always being criticized for spending so many weekends at his resorts in Florida and Virginia. In his first six months in office, almost every weekend, coincidentally, he visited a Trump-owned commercial property, which some hostile nitpickers said was tantamount to a free infomercial for the Trump brand.

There are those who also say his “vacation” in Bedminster this time is a cover-up for his checking into a rehab facility (mental institution).

He could have picked Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach or Russia. Pres. Putin would have been happy to lend him the summer imperial presidential dacha and golf course on the Black Sea, fit for a USA super czar like him.

Especially after the president thanked his best bud Putin for making us axe 750 employees in our embassy in Moscow. It helped cut the payroll, as he explained.

Of course, not all of us were thrilled by the vacation visit. There were those of us who were unhappy because we couldn’t land our jets at the nearest airport (Morristown Municipal). As a taxpayer, I always thought it was cost-ineffective for him to gas up and fly that monster from Washington or Manhattan to New Jersey for a few rounds of golf at his Bedminster rest home. Cheaper to go by bus. Or call Uber.

Air Farce One is now parked on the runway in Morristown like a beached whale in case the president wants to go out for a spin to Manhattan or savor the cuisine of New Jersey.

Not only is New Jersey the only state that had as its governor Chris Christie—who managed to achieve the lowest gubernatorial approval ratings in history, at least partly due to his friendship with the president—it’s also the fast-food capital of the nation.

As a campaign strategy, His Hungryness Christie pledged to dine in every fast-food franchise on Route 22 between Newark and Phillipsburg in Lopatcong, and he more than fulfilled that promise. Taking the Chris Christie Gourmet Tour, in between exercising in the official presidential golfmobile, may be the reason the president’s jackets are never buttoned.

We also like to think the president chose to get away to New Jersey for a breath of fresh air. Trump’s elimination of pollution regulations nationwide is New Jersey–friendly. We only believe in air we can see.

With a clear head in the New Jersey environment, the president has been able to deal with issues that have befuddled his predecessors.

It is in New Jersey, future historians will note, that the president was able to roll up his sleeves and deal with the North Korea missile crisis thing.

So what if his willingness to get tough with that “total nutjob,” as he called the North Korean president during the campaign, in his historic “fire and fury” tirade might lead to a nuclear attack on Guam.

It would be good for tourism, as he suggested to the governor of Guam. He saw a flood of tourists who might want to experience the threat of incineration at the epicenter of a nuke holocaust.

As Guam goes, the Trump Doctrine might suggest, so go Wake Island and American Samoa.

At this point, it’s speculation but the fine points of the Trump Doctrine may have been hammered out in consultation with his host, former transition head, Chris Christie.[7] If he was president, our Jersey boy might have said to Pres. Kim, “Shut the hell up, and go get a haircut.”

Having said all of this, I still wish the president would be vacationing in the DMZ.

At the risk of sounding un-American, I worry about bellicose nuke rattling. North Korean missile technology is still in the back-to-the-drawing-board stage. Aimed at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster in Somerset County, their missiles might land in my backyard in Bergen County, an acceptable error of twenty-three miles. Call me unpatriotic, but I have just finished paying for replacing our gutters.

Axed from the prestigious job for no reason other than his earlier pursuit of justice in his earlier job as the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey against Jared’s father.

7. The Gang That Couldn’t Loot Straight

Okay, let us assume—and why not; it’s a free country; thus, I am free to assume anything I like—the president is not guilty.

Of what? Anything. Everything. Whatever.

This is a plausible assumption based on my watching the most reliable source of information, more trustworthy than an intelligence agency briefing, the reliable source used by POTUS Himself, Fox & Friends on Fox News the morning of February 27, 2018.

Let us assume further the misunderstood president is just as surprised as we are about all the indictments being delivered by Special Counsel Mueller.

Mueller’s indictment of thirteen Russian cyberwarriors in Russia for meddling in a USA election must have shocked friends of Russia in the 34.9 percent of our electorate who believe the president won fair and square in 2016.

With so many names of the faithful being unsealed, and so many president’s men doing the perp walk on cable TV, the Oval Office seems like an active crime scene these days.

We can further assume that the amount of singing going on in Counselor Mueller’s back rooms these days must sound like Handel’s Messiah to fans of good government.

With all the unsealed indictments to come, if I’m going to continue following the trail of the president who knew nothing, it might help political crime enthusiasts like myself to keep track of the fallen with a catchy nom de crime.

I had been considering “The Russian Connection,” as in The French Connection. Or perhaps a variation on “Black Hand” (Mano Nero, a.k.a. the Black Hand Society), as in “The Small Hands,” using the Stormy Daniels scale in evaluation of her experiences with Tiny Trump.

But I prefer the simpler nom de Internet, pretested in earlier pages, The Gang That Couldn’t Loot Straight.

Here’s what all the Looters have in common with the man a minority made the President of Some of the People All the Time:

1. They are all patriots, like the president.

2. They all would take a bullet for their president, as the Reaganesque test of loyalty went.

3. They all are liars like the president.

I will leave it to the proper authorities to sort out the legalities of the Trump mob’s activities. It may not be organized crime, but so far it qualifies as disorganized crime. The improper authorities, like myself, are in the mode of Inspector Javert of the Paris Sûreté relentlessly following the well-meaning attempts by the gang that couldn’t loot straight to set up an annuity for the boss in building a billion-dollar one-hundred-story tower in downtown Metropolitan Moscow without anybody knowing about it.

Whatever the gang is accused of doing on his behalf in the future, we can further assume the Don, the boss of bosses, the Capo of Fifth Avenue, whose favorite movie is The Godfather and who often quotes its lines, didn’t know anything about it.

8. Collusion Defined

Has it ever occurred to the traitors who are shlonging the president on the issue of collusion that he might not know what the word collusion, as in “no collusion, no obstruction of justice, investigate Crooked Hillary,” actually means?

All the president’s enemies—and they are legion in the fake news biz, keeping “this Russian thing” on the front burner for months now, despite the president’s frank denials of whatever it is—are ignoring a mitigating factor.

The president was never much for reading dictionaries, or any other book that wasn’t about him. If he had read the Constitution, he hadn’t understood it, judging by the number of infractions in his conduct in office.

He wasn’t what we would call a “Quiz Kid,” either, in his early school days in Queens.

Everybody knows what it meant when your parents sent you to military school. It’s what rich people did with “difficult children”; Young Donald was a classic case of the problem child. The street talk in the Jamaica Heights neighborhood is he slugged one of his teachers in grade school. He also was said to be selling switchblade knives under the boardwalk in Coney Island to his young friends.

New York Military Academy was renowned as a school for the educationally and behaviorally challenged. The academic theory was the expenditure of big money at a military school would “straighten them out,” as the expression went.

Young Trump was consigned to NYMA as a thirteen-year-old, and graduated five years later, Trump admitted, “as one of the top guys in the class.”[8]

Top guy in the class Cadet Trump might have been smart enough to become a general had he stuck to that line of work. Unfortunately, medical deferments, such as the world’s most famous bone spurs, prevented him from fulfilling his destiny by serving in the Vietnam or any other war. He couldn’t remember whether it was the left or right foot. So sad.[9]

For the sake of argument, let’s say Donald Trump isn’t as bright as you and me.

Actually, he may be just as stupid as he looks and sounds.

Before I go on with this defense of our commander in chief, I would like to point out that Bush the Dumb wasn’t a MENSA member. Ronald Reagan wasn’t a rocket scientist, either.

How is it possible that the Leader of the Free World (LFW) doesn’t seem to know the word collusion has nothing to do with colonoscopy? Or collusion isn’t something that takes place in bait-and-switch marketing, or when drug companies collude to keep prices high in the free market?

Haven’t any of his high-priced lawyers told him that by collusion the witch hunters conducting the hoax mean “a secret agreement or cooperation, especially for an illegal or deceitful purposes, i.e., acting in collusion with the enemy”?

Maybe he doesn’t know that the Communist billionaires with whom his family and others in the gang that couldn’t loot straight were taking meetings before the election were Communists. By colluding, the Commie rats hoped to get the least qualified candidate in the history of our democratic institution elected as commander in chief of the greatest power in the free world so they would have a better chance of controlling the rest of the free world! And even they were surprised at the outcome!

I’m willing to bet that a majority of the minority who sent him to the Oval Office don’t have any idea, either, what collusion means. Nor do they care.

Anyway, how bad could the Russians be, in the mind of the best president we have, if they preferred him over Crooked Hillary in a rigged election?

Perpetual White House contender Trump, back in his earlier birther crisis days, offered $5,000,000 for release of Pres. Obama’s college transcripts and other documents, but is apparently not so generous about his own academic achievements. The Washington Post was banned from seeing the NYMA records for what proud graduate Trump called “your lousy story.”

In 2015, NYMA filed for bankruptcy, ironically following the same financial path well trod by its most famous graduate.

9. So-Called Presidents’ Day

A number of my left-wing friends told me they absolutely will not be celebrating Donald Trump’s birthday on so-called Presidents’ Day, or any other day, by Act of Congress, or Executive Order, so help them God.

They came to this conclusion while spending the weekend brooding about the meaning of what originally was always known as “Washington’s Birthday,” a most sacred day in the canon of calendar patriotism, along with such causes of national celebration as Super Bowl Sunday and Oscar Night. So sad.

There is much confusion about whose birthday we are actually celebrating on so-called Presidents’ Day (or is it President’s Day?).

As a historian and as George Washington’s only living coauthor (see George Washington’s Expense Account by Gen. George Washington and Marvin Kitman, PFC, Ret.) I think it’s an outrage the way we are now forced to celebrate Gen. Washington’s birthday on the third Monday of February, instead of his original natal day (February 22).

An artifice concocted by the Congress back in the days (1968) when Congress did things before the invention of the Do-Nothing Congress, which judging by what it does today (a tax reform for the middle class that benefits only the rich) is better advised to do nothing—Presidents’ Day was meant by legislators to celebrate the birthdays of all our chief executives.

Not as bad as chopping down the Washington Monument, perhaps, but parity is a slap in the face of our founding father, who should be celebrating a happy 286th birthday.[10]

The downgrading of the founding father to just another POTUS is especially scandalous, as we seem to be marking on a curve in the progression of our presidents. I mean, to go from a Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison to a Trump should be cause for alarm.

Washington was first in war, first in peace, and first in expense account writing, worthy of a singular day of veneration.

Trump, who by definition is also being celebrated this weekend, will be remembered as first in lying, first in groping, first in paying off strippers he claimed not to even know, first in nepotism, and first in being a friend of the Russians.

By no means am I one of those killjoy Calvinists against three-day weekends as a matter of principle because they may contribute to slothfulness at the job. The trouble with society today, au contraire, is there are not enough three-day weekends and too many five-day weeks. Three-day weekends make life bearable.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind celebrating Republican Calvin Coolidge’s birthday with a three-day weekend.[11] Our thirtieth president, Silent Cal understood what it was all about when he first said, “When more and more people are unable to find work, unemployment results.”

Some of us wouldn’t mind a three-day weekend celebrating Millard Fillmore’s birthday (January 7), the thirteenth president famous for the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act and as the candidate of the Know Nothing Party, spiritual forefather of today’s Republican Party.

Or even James Buchanan, number fifteen, born April 23, who not only contributed to the start of the Civil War, which some of us think still hasn’t ended, but also was the first gay president.

Like it or not, I won’t be surprised that before Trump is a blip in history, we will be standing up and saluting a huge military parade down Constitution Avenue, honoring the philanderer in chief’s birthday with a three-day weekend (put June 14 on your calendars).

Until then, a merry Presidents’ Day to you, one and all.

He was born on February 11, Old Style, Julian Calendar. Pope Gregory added eleven days to all Old Style dates to correct an early astronomical error. Hence we find the date of Washington’s birth put with an ambiguous double numeral, as February 11, 1731/2. What would he think of the current style of celebrating his birthday on the third Monday of every February? Knowing my coauthor, he would celebrate all three days. He was a party animal.

Since Silent Cal was the only president born on July 4, we should give him a bye and celebrate on July 11–13.

10. Obesity Crisis

The nation is gaining weight.

An estimated 160 million Americans are either obese or overweight. Nearly three-quarters of American men and more than 60 percent of women are obese or overweight. Nearly 30 percent of boys and girls under age twenty are either obese or overweight, up from 19 percent in 1980. And those are bariatric statistics from 2014, a lean year in eating junk food, the country’s second leading indoor sport, next to playing with their new smartphones.

Whatever the numbers, obesity is a national public health crisis, and the president may be part of the problem today.

With all due respect, the newly elected president is what we used to call, before political correctness, not weight-challenged, but fat.

His actual weight remains one of the two most closely guarded secrets, the other being whether he colluded with the Russkies in 2016.

Only his tailor knows for sure what is doing in the poids excessif department, as the French put it. But my sources tell me he keeps needing to buy new suits. At last count, he has approximately one hundred, costing about $200 each, and all navy blue. So the people won’t notice any change in profile.

Astute weight-watchers notice he hasn’t been able to button a jacket or a coat since Inauguration.

My sources estimate a gain of nine pounds in the first quarter, 2017. That means he will have put on thirty-six pounds in Year One. They can just bring down the William Howard Taft bathtub from the White House attic.

As we wait for the White House truth secretary to correct those figures, it can be safely assumed our new president is on track to become the fattest president since William Howard Taft. They also had golf in common. Taft was the first golfing president.[12]

Nutrition experts say that overeating is one of the major causes of obesity.

When the gastronomic history of the presidency is writ, few could match No. 45 in balanced diet.

His four food groups, my sources say, are:

1. McDonald’s, 2. McDonald’s, 3. McDonald’s, 4. McDonald’s.

This is not to say there isn’t variety in the president’s diet. Some days, for example, he will be breakfasting on a Sausage McMuffin with Egg (1,050 cal.); other days it might be a Sausage McGriddle (1,120 cal.) He’ll also do a Wendy’s, for a taste treat, and still has room for an occasional Domino’s pizza, delivered to the plane.[13]

His doctors are loath to cut out the fast food; that would be tantamount to an assassination attempt.

It’s bad enough that the young are learning how to lie, and distrust facts and truth, and everything they read in the so-called fake news media about this president. Can you imagine what they would make of learning that Air Farce One’s freezers are totally loaded with McDonald’s Happy Meals to go, should the POTUS want a snack?

Tales of the gourmet president’s dining-out experience regale us. At one recent dinner at the 21 Club, I’m told, the president ordered meat loaf, and picked at it.

Bob Woodward reports in his fake news bible (Fear: Trump in the White House) “the president thinks he’s in great physical shape.” He attributes that to all the walking to the golf carts, and his morning exercise of opening up his Twitter feed.

His body language, however, says: a slug, a lazy fat slob, wolfing down too many McDonald’s Happy Meals.

The president is said to be sensitive about his physical appearance, especially the “F” word.

Now I’m not a paid political consultant, I only write like one, but I worry potential opponents in the 2020 election candidates might use the president’s favorite weapon—dreaming up nicknames that stick, the evolutionary lesson learned in the 2016 Republican debates. They might consider “Tubby,” “Porky,” “Two Ton,” and the ever-popular “Fatso.”

That is, if there is a Republican brave enough to challenge the Incredible Bulk in 2020?

Even worse, my sources say, the Democrats’ dark state entertainment media communication complex is tooling up musical videos aimed at what they see as the soft underbelly of the president’s weakness in the overeating weight belt states of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. A first draft, my sources say, of “The President Plump Polka” runs

I don’t want him, you can have him

He’s too fat for me

He’s too fat for me

He’s too fat for me

I don’t want him, you can have him

He’s too fat for me

He’s too fat

He’s too fat

He’s too fat for me. Oh

[Chorus]

He’s a twosome, He’s a foursome

If he’d lose some

I would like him more some

—“Too Fat for Me Polka,” lyrics by Arthur Godfrey

This is not to imply that our POTUS is another William Howard Taft. The twenty-seventh president was known for his geniality and sense of humor. As the American governor of the Philippines in 1901, he sent a telegram to Elihu Root (then Secretary of War) boasting that he had just ridden twenty-five miles into the jungle and back on horseback. Root cabled back: “How is the horse?” Taft got a good laugh. And when after he was president Yale offered him the Kent Chair of Constitutional Law, Taft wrote back that in his case it would have to be the sofa of law.

Without revealing state secrets, the president is also addicted to cherry and strawberry Starburst candies, and the nectar of the gods, Slurpees, a possible major cause of brain freeze.

IV. THE TRUMPONICLES 2018

year two (11/18–11/19)

1. The Sophomore Jinx Strikes

Even I as a loyal supporter of the best president we have was shaken by the really strange behavior of our POTUS as he began his second lap around the track in November 2018. The dreaded Sophomore Jinx must have hit him.

I began noticing something really weird was taking place in the evolution of the chief executive by his performance the morning after Election Day (November 7, 2018).

His Orangeness credited himself with leading his party to a “tremendous victory” in the 2018 midterm elections, even though Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, a result that the fake news has widely read as a protest against the president.

It was painful enough that the Trump Party took a shellacking, but the president saw his victory lap as a chance to single out losing GOP candidates for further humiliation.

“Mia Love gave me no love,” he told reporters at the morning-after press conference about a candidate who hadn’t embraced him sufficiently. The first Haitian American, the first black female Republican, who had been representing Utah’s 4th Congressional District, and had appealed to the president for support, “And she lost,” the president said. “Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.”

The weird thing is that he was publicly rubbing salt in the wounds four days before the final results were in!

While the fires raged in California, he blamed the forest management people, and threatened to withhold federal relief money. He then went the extra mile and blamed residents for not raking their property.

The most bewildering conduct in the line of duty was his defense of his buddy, that great friend of democracy Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely accused of ordering the murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Our president used the revolving-door technique in dealing with the diplomatic problem: the famous “Maybe he did it; maybe he didn’t” defense.

Every day the moral leader of the Free World seemed to change his position. By now, he may be denying he even knows MbS.

Then he began warning us that our southern border was in danger. Not since the attack of the killer bees in 1985[14] had there been anything as scary as the wave of immigrants escaping from poverty, crime, and corruption in our sister republics to the south, in the president’s Twitter opinion.

He means well, it could be argued, as in the case of his dropping in on the Squirrel Hill synagogue massacre crime scene.

The mayor of Pittsburgh had begged him not to come; there wasn’t enough police for security. Eleven shivas were taking place. A presidential visit would be disruptive and disrespectful, religious and community leaders pleaded.

But the presidential campaign plane was all gassed up, and he didn’t want to disappoint his fans at the campaign rallies in the Midwest that night.

As one of the mourners put it, “Only a schmuck wouldn’t have known it was inappropriate to barge in.”

A bell rang! A light went on!

You should know schmuck is a German word for “jewel.” There are distinguished Americans with that surname. Peter J. Schmuck was a judge in the New York Supreme Court when I was growing up. Peter Schmuck today is an excellent sports columnist at the Baltimore Sun.

But “schmuck” is also the word I’ve been searching for since I began this journey in search of the real Donald J. Trump.

President Schmuck sounds just about right.

The Africanized honeybee was introduced in Brazil in 1956. Twenty-six escaping swarms arrived at the Texas border in 1985, creating the classic tabloid journalism headline KILLER BEE ATTACKS in Rupert Murdoch newspapers.

2. The Most Famous Swede of All

Among the achievements the president did not list in the State of Disunion 2018 message—some of which dated to the first year of the Hoover administration (1929) and not including having the greatest number of wife-beaters, per capita, on staff in the history of the White House—was his most recent contribution to civic discourse.

I am referring to the remarks he made during a discussion with congressional leaders regarding immigration reform. As you recall, the greatest statesman of the century, in his mind, questioned why USA should accept immigrants from Haiti and shithole countries in Africa.

Many parts of the world were shocked at the greatest statesman of the century’s vulgar insult of underachieving friendly nations who meant well, taking further umbrage at the codicil to his message that we should be bringing in more Norwegians.

Some picky critics wanted to know what self-respecting Norwegian would want to come to a shithole country like ours that didn’t even have national health insurance and that made students leave university with $100,000 or more worth of debt and still unable to find suitable jobs?

As the shithole hit the fan around the world, our chief executive, as is his custom when it gets too hot in the kitchen, denied he had said the offensive word.

The senators taking that meeting in the Oval Office didn’t hear right, argued the Leader of the Free World (LFW).

What he actually said, the president explained, was not shitholes but shithouses.[15]

Like many incendiary pronunciamentos in his first years in office, there is an illogic about immigration that is so Trumpian. As I recall, there seemed to be some confusion about the Trump family immigration status.

Readers of the official campaign autobiography The Art of the Deal learned the Trumps came from Sweden, as the most famous Swede of them all attested.[16]

That reminded me of the Saturday Night Live transcendental classic family sketch series, “The Coneheads.” Whenever nosy next-door neighbors inquired where they were from, Papa Conehead replied, “We are from France.”

What might have been a misspeaking or mishearing, whatever, had the additional advantage of briefly changing the national conversation. Instead of collusion with the Russians, everybody I know was playing a new parlor game. It began with the question, “And what shithole country did your grandparents come from?”

Whatever, it wasn’t the first time vulgarities had been used in the Oval Office. But the Quaker President Nixon used them in private (“Fuck thee” may have been among the deletions on the missing eighteen minutes). President Trump would be wise to activate the Nixon Memorial Taping System as a defense against those who would misquote him in future books about his zany administration.

Actually, great-grandfather Fredrich Drumpf landed on our shores in 1886 as a penniless sixteen-year-old from a country that would have made Pres. Grover Cleveland’s shithole list. Germany was an unpopular source of immigrants at that time (along with Ireland and Italy), being a hot bed of radicalism and revolution that gave us that shithead Karl Marx. So illegal immigrant Zayde Drumpf, upon jumping ship, changed his name to Fred Trump and lived long and prospered.

3. Patriot or Traitor?

1.

Regarding “This Russian thing,” as our president correctly referred to the hoax invented by fake news to prevent him from making America great again . . .

And before I go on, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not now, nor ever have been, Russophobic.

True, I am a card-carrying registered Republican, a membership dating back to the Precambrian age, when the Republicans were the party of Joe McCarthy and HUAC, when we looked for, and found, commies hiding under every bed.

Furthermore, I am proud to say my mother was a Daughter of the Russian Revolution (DRR), and my father was born in Czarist Russia at the peak of its glory (1898).

Nevertheless, I confess to being the first Kitman in the history of the Kitman family in America (est.1903) to say I don’t trust anything a Republican president today would say about the Russians.

As a registered Republican, I am particularly sensitive about the dealings of the new president with our “friends” the Russians, and Vladimir Putin, the former KGB honcho, who sent more people to the gulag than any Russian leader since Stalin.

I also don’t trust the foreign policy apparatchiks in the president’s inner circle, which is sounding more and more like a politburo. Not so long ago, General Mike Flynn, a star of Russian TV, had been nailed talking prematurely to the Russkies about removing sanctions. He denies it, of course. If anything, he only talks to them about getting new clients for his consulting firm.

If I seem to be a little hard on our new president, blame it on my Republican upbringing.

2.

My Republican Party has become the party of Lincoln the Tunnel, the Car, and a president who has never said a bad word about Russia. Whoever dreamed that our party’s titular leader would be a bosom bud of an ex-KGB killer, a man who can proudly say, “I don’t believe the Intelligence Community (about election collusion), I believe Putin!” Whoever imagined our party would be led by a man who is breaking up NATO and other European alliances it took sixty years to build, a man who sometimes seems to have a twenty-five-word vocabulary, three of which are: “dasvedanya, comrades.”

Does our president know his best Commie buddy is the same friend of democracy who in 2006 signed a law legalizing targeted killings abroad? Our man in the Oval Office seems to have forgotten, or probably never knew, that Russia is the proud sponsor of terrorism. Could we imagine there might be a sleeper in the White House inner circle, other than Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, who is said never to be awake in cabinet meetings after 11 a.m.?

“Putin’s president,” as the current tenant in the Oval Office may be known in future histories, has advocated so many policies that are in line with Vlad the Poisoner’s wildest dreams, it’s almost as if the Republican Party today should be—and it’s worth repeating here—listed as a Communist-front organization on the attorney general’s list of subversive entities that are a threat to national security, as required by the Smith Act of 1952.

3.

I grew up believing the Republican Party was the party that was hard on communism, the mortal enemy of capitalism and the American Way. The Democrats were soft, and had been ever since that “socialist” FDR with his far left-leaning New Deal programs, like Social Security.

We Republicans were the party that thought it was okay for HUAC to smoke out all the possible Reds in Hollywood, including Lassie; to compile blacklists of suspected communists, fellow travelers, or party pinks in TV, making them unemployable for refusing to name names or exercising their constitutional rights by taking the Fifth. People whose crime was subscribing to the Nation magazine, donating five dollars to Russian War Relief during the Battle of Stalingrad, or attending a lecture on the Bill of Rights were ruined.

We were the party that spent years wanting to know “Who lost China?” We knew it was the left-leaning Reds in the State Department and fellow traveler academics like Owen Lattimore, who believed no matter how much money we gave the corrupt Chiang Kai-Shek, his Nationalist Army of eighty-five-year-olds was never going to retake the Mainland.

We are the party that rooted out all the traitors in Hollywood who were making seditious films like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and The Pride of the Yankees. Ten of those rats went to jail for “taking the Fifth.” Thank J. Parnell Thomas, Tricky Dick Nixon, and our House Un-American Activities Committee for making America safe again!

It was we Republicans who supported patriotic organizations like Red Channels that purified the arts by listing potential dangers to the Republic in soap operas, sitcoms and other creative fields, those folks who were into square dancing, singing along with Pete Seeger and the Weavers, or reading Howard Fast novels. All of which led to full unemployment and suicide in some cases. Now those were real witch hunts!

Somehow the Party of Lincoln has become the party that is okay with the “Nyet collusion” president who is doing things that would make even Josef Stalin happy. We Responsible Republicans like myself are just relieved the new president hasn’t made us a Warsaw Pact Member. YET!

4.

Before I interrupted myself with this Red Scare rant, the question I was asking:

Is the president a traitor?

Nyet, I say.

Neither do I believe, at this point in time, the president is a secret agent. He is constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret, as his early morning tweeting will attest. Nor is he smart enough to come up with concealment devices like Colonel Abel’s split nickel trick (See the film Bridge of Spies).

I sincerely believe the problem is our president is a total ignoranus about our American history, especially the part about Russo-American affairs and the Cold War.

For example, there was his initiative at the first meeting with President Putin offering to share our secrets with the Communists in the name of coexistence and friendship. The Rosenbergs had the same idea in 1953, and what did it get Ethel and Julius?

There is nothing in our laws requiring the president to have an IQ of room temperature. And he does not seem to have been accumulating wisdom and enlightenment in his first six months in the Oval Office. If anything, with his narcissistic personality disorder and his sentences becoming shorter and syntactic simpler and more tortured, with fewer syllables and lowered percentage of unique words, standard measurements neurologists use to assess disease-related cognitive impairment, the state of the president’s mind may be alarming.

But none of this qualifies as treason or removal from office on the grounds of being un-American.

Much has been made of the blooming bromance with President Putin. But in defense our president has emotional attachments to all tyrants, regardless of race, creed, political philosophy, or country of origin. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, North Korea, the Emirates . . . they all are in his brotherhood.

Still, I can understand the special fondness for Putin. He is rich. The former KGB killer turned democrat whose understanding of the free election process is that it’s all right to poison opponents, have them accidentally fall off roofs, is richer than the Rockefellers, his role models. Our POTUS has never met a billionaire he didn’t like.

Besides, Putin is not really a communist, as the Nation is suggesting these days.

Every Russian boy and girl today wants to grow up to be a corrupt kleptocrat like Putin, owning a piece of a gas and oil franchise. They admire Putin’s new economic profit-sharing reforms, which made him the richest billionaire in Russian history: equally, one ruble for the state, one ruble for Putin and his crony oligarchs, or whatever parity plan is in effect.

Let’s give them some credit. The Commie leaders today are becoming as American as apple pie in the sense they are reminiscent of our robber barons in the Gilded Age of greed and corruption of the 1880s.

What we are experiencing is the struggle between rival money-hungry autocrats. A real estate gonif vs. a crooked neo-capitalist who is robbing the Russian people blind! I’m betting on our guy. USA, USA!

5.

If you need to call the president any pejorative, I would call him a peacenik, one of those hopeless romantics who believe in coexistence with those who are out to destroy the American way of life, which makes it possible to go bankrupt six times and still call yourself a business genius.

No matter how the unpleasantness of the sanctions thing works out, don’t be surprised if it all ends up with Putin giving his rival in Washington the Order of Parental Glory, usually awarded for parents with seven or more children, waived for the president with only five, not counting his favorite son-in-law, Jared, because Ivanka, Don Jr., and the rest of the collective are such a wonderful family.

Another thing can be said for certain: whatever happens with the fake media–invented witch hunt, the two congressional investigations and the work of the special counsel and all the revelations, fact or fiction, still to come about the Communist cell in the White House, the patriotic Americans who voted for our hero Trump will say “so what?”

So what? is the rallying cry of the Trumpian Revolution. When are we otherwise loyal Americans going to realize: It doesn’t matter what he does, or doesn’t do, in office?

Try never.

4. The Afghan War

The president missed a great opportunity in his speech on national TV (August 23, 2017), delivering his long-delayed new approach to the Afghan War, the longest military operation in the nation’s history.

He could have announced we had won the war in Afghanistan—the first president to achieve that laudatory goal, which already has cost the nation more than a trillion in treasure and countless lives and trauma. He alone is bringing our boys and gals home, thus fulfilling the candidate’s promise to end stupid wars. “No more wasting money —spend on infrastructure,” as he wrote on Twitter in 2013.

By “winning” he would have meant the way we won the war in Vietnam, as he seemed to imply during the speech, a war of which he once said his own personal Vietnam was avoiding sexually transmitted diseases in the Battle of Manhattan. With his war record as a draft dodger, he was no Ike or even the naval officer Lieutenant Commander Nixon, a member of the Fighting Quaker wing of the peace-loving religion. Remember, those with their bone spurs and four student deferments necessary to study the art of dealmaking at Wharton, vital in the war against communism, also served their country.

Of course, the claim that we won in Afghanistan—something the British said after the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842) and the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880) and the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919—would have been a lie.

Nobody ever wins in Afghanistan, where foreign powers have been playing what is known as the “Great Game” for centuries.

But since when has the truth stopped the president from telling a lie?

In the first seven months of his administration, according to the scorekeepers at the Washington Post, he has made more than one thousand misleading public statements that were not true, otherwise known as lies. That’s an average of about five per diem.

We the lemmings of America elected what may be a total nutjob to lead us into a dangerous world based on his ability to lie. His suddenly telling the truth about anything would create credibility chaos. (See, for example, the oil tanker crisis of June 2019.)

Lying to the folks at home about wars is a great American tradition. Remember during the Vietnam War how we were always winning? The body count numbers, the tonnage of bombs dropped on the jungle bike trails by our B-52s . . . For ten years Saint Walter Cronkite was repeating the Pentagon line. And that’s the way it wasn’t! The light at the end of the tunnel the generals were always seeing turned out to be a train coming the other way.

Having established bragging rights as the man who won the war in Afghanistan, our commander in chief could then turn his limited attention span to dealing with the real enemy: our friends, the Pakistanis, who continue to fund, arm, and train the Taliban.

Given his total ignorance of history, our von Clausewitz has been convinced by his generals who have studied at the General Westmoreland School of Military Science that escalation is the way to go in an area like the Middle East, where they have been fighting and killing each other for five thousand years (check your Bible), with the added wrinkle of keeping the numbers secret.

Afghanistan is our Hundred Years War, and there are those who think that reopening the festering Afghan wound provides the House of Trump yet another distraction away from the multiple congressional and Special Counsel investigations into Russian collusion in the 2016 election.

So what’s the big deal if the Big Gonif is practicing bait and switch with his promise to end our stupid wars?

The Republican Party—the Party of Lincoln, the car and the Tunnel, and the idiots who don’t even believe he is lying when he lies—has become the Party of So What?

So what if he missed hearing some very fine people in Charlottesville who were chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil”?

So what if some folks were carrying Second Amendment assault weapons as they gave the “Sieg Heil” salute outside the synagogue?

So what if some of his best friends are neo-Nazis, white segregationists, and other un-Americans?

So what if he flip-flops on health care, moving from a campaign promise of insurance-for-everyone to being okay with throwing twenty-three million under the bus with a new unimproved Affordable Care bill?

So what if there was collusion with the Russians, without which the election of a minority president wouldn’t have been possible?

So what if there is obstruction of justice?

So what if the president and his avaricious family have conflicts of interest up the kazoo?

So what if he talks the North Koreans into launching a nuke strike against Guam?

So what if our big fat total nutcase destroys the world? The next one might be better.

5. Dotard Controversy

In September 2017, after the president discussed the nuclear arms race situation in North Korea at the UN, Premier Kim Jong Un had some nerve in calling our president “a mentally deranged dotard.”

He may sometimes seem like he needs to seek professional help for his narcissistic personality disorder . . .

He may be goofy, dim-witted, if not downright stupid, a closet fascist, a man who knows nothing about governing . . .

He may be a spoiled brat who grew up to become a first-class megalomaniac, a corporate cheat, prevaricator, scoundrel, real estate gonif, and the poster boy of Fake News . . .

He may call him Kim Jong Uh-uh . . .

But he is no dotard![17]

In the Democratic People’s Republic of Trump USA Inc., we believe in free elections. If we the minority of the people elect a dotard, whatever it is, so be it. He is our dotard, and mentally deranged or not, deserves all the respect he is getting from elsewhere in the free world.

Admittedly, our dotard has displayed some strange behavior since taking office.

For instance, in honor of the opening of our pro football season, the fifth and most popular of our seasons for real Americans, he wrote seventeen tweets in four days about the way our national heroes, NFL players, were not respecting the flag. Those “sons of bitches,” as he called our heroes, should be fired by the team owners for expressing their opinions by kneeling.

What’s so deranged about seventeen tweets?

This is not to say we agree with him about kneeling. There is something religious about taking a knee. Turning your back is more of an insult.

There were those who said our dotard was playing the race card as distraction. From what, the North Koreans might well ask?

Well, there was the Puerto Rican crisis, which he ignored on Twitter for a week, finally acknowledging, among other things, that the great Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was an island, and implying they were a bunch of welshers for being so heavily in debt.

Then there was “that Russian thing,” and the solution of the North Korean thing, which he promised to solve in the campaign. So far, it looks like we can forget about that Nobel Prize the president was saying he’s being talked up for, although Kim is up for a Grammy now, because he has played Trump like a fine instrument.

I’m not saying our dotard is perfect. He has an anger-management problem, as he demonstrated during his maiden address at the UN. He seemed to find fault with all of our enemies in the world, except the Russians.

Not since Khrushchev banged his shoe on the rostrum have the delegates witnessed such diplomacy.

Our dotard had already called the honorable leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea a “bad dude” and “a maniac.” And now he was using the world stage to insult him as “Rocket Man.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, off the floor he amended that epithet to “Little Rocket Man.” Everybody knows what little means in our dotard’s thesaurus of insults.

Any tweet now, the president might refer to the North Korean leader as a gook. Bush the First referred to Mr. Kim’s grandfather as “a Pygmy.”

What I worry about is that our dotard is enjoying all the attention he is getting for threatening to start a fire-and-fury nuke blastoff with his debating pal. He’s liable to destroy the whole world by accident, given his incompetence in governance.

Better the two overweight masters of their domain would agree to fight it out in a sumo wrestling world championship bout on the DMZ.

Not that we in New Jersey know exactly what a dotard is. It may have been a spell-check error in transmission. Or some obscure Korean curse word. The ultimate insult in Chinese, for example, is calling someone a turtle.

6. Playing the Trump Card

Steve Bannon—the president’s brain, until he gave the boss a kopfschmerzen (headache) and was relieved of duty—had a memorable farewell address in the American Prospect, regarding the insoluble Korean nuclear crisis:

“Until somebody solves the part of the equation that 10 million people would die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons . . . There’s no military solution here; they got us.”

Not so fast, Bannon, I was thinking. You are ignoring the one option not on the table, which is playing the Trump card.

There is a Republican Party tradition of former university presidents running for president making campaign promises. In 1952, Ike (Columbia University) promised the voters in time of an earlier Korean crisis, “I will go to Korea.”

It would be Eisenhoweresque if the former university president in our midst (Trump University) now that he is running for office in 2020, similarly could be like Ike and promise “I will go to Korea.”

He would win even more votes by promising not to come back from Korea.

May I be so bold as to suggest it’s time we consider unleashing our ultimate weapon, the president himself!

I propose a face-to-face meeting with the leaders of the two powers threatening to end the world as we know it by rattling their missiles. Trump v. Kim will be like Godzilla against King Kong, a battle of hairdos unprecedented in modern diplomacy.

To broker the meeting, I would suggest the president call on the one man the North Korean leader truly respects, Dennis Rodman.

As an ambassador without portfolio, but with basketball, Rodman could play North Korea’s national sport, hoops, with Kim and his generals and be more of a factor in peace negotiations than even Ivanka sitting by the president’s side.

In following Teddy Roosevelt’s carrots and big stick formula, with the mightiest nuclear arsenal in the world, Team USA could offer juicy inducements.

In exchange for North Korea warehousing its nuclear weapons programs, like Iran, the Trump administration might make the following commitments:

1. Promise to build a Trump Tower in downtown Pyongyang, even taller than the Trump Tower in Moscow, operated by the Trump family group, profits shared equally with the Kim family.

2. Build a Madison Square Garden in a city of their choice.

3. Get Kim an NBA franchise.

4. Autographed Michael Jordan Nike sneakers for him and his generals, contingent on the deal going through.

Failing that, the president might warn Kim and his generals that we are building a secret weapon, a giant magnet that will be aimed in the next parade at all the medals the generals wear even though they haven’t gone to war in sixty years.

And while I’m being constructive, whatever happened to our CIA? In the old days, the agency could always be counted on to help Republican presidents out of sticky foreign policy situations with total nutjobs, all of whom seemed to be leftists. Sic transit Mossadegh (Iran), Allende (Chile), Fidel (Cuba). Remember the loaded cigars caper for Castro? We taxpayers are not getting our money’s worth from the CIA and its bloated budget these days.

7. Nobel Prize

All loyal and patriotic Americans were proud to learn this past week our president has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The nominating process is secret and confidential, so it is not known the basis for this decision. Possibly it was for not destroying the world by encouraging a nuclear Armageddon through his fire-and-fury diplomacy directed at the big little rocket man with the funny haircut from North Korea.

This wasn’t the first time he had been nominated for the Nobel gonfalon; it happened the prior year, too.

One of the 329 candidates—217 individuals and 112 organizations so nominated this year—his is the only nomination suspected of being a forgery.

Reports from Oslo suggested last year’s nomination also raised suspicion of monkey business.

Who might have done it?

Scholars of our president’s search for fame and honor in his earlier life say that, so intense is his passion for winning the gold, they would not be surprised if he nominated himself.

This is not to say he doesn’t deserve the prize.

Among his achievements in foreign affairs in his first year in office: he is the first president to be sued by a porno star with a name like Stormy Daniels while sitting down face-to-face with an Asian madman in negotiations that might end civilization as we know it, with one slip of an epithet from either inexperienced leader.

He is also the first president to practice diplomacy with a State Department that has so many vacant desks it looks like a Going Out of Business sale.

The head of the North Korea Desk quit. The secretary of state from ExxonMobil didn’t even know the president would be suddenly agreeing to talks, just as his office was announcing the talks would never happen.

Not that the president needs Foggy Bottom’s help in negotiations, as long as he has by his side his trusted son-in-law with limited security clearance, Jared Kushner, his ambassador-with-multiple-portfolios, including settling the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Not to mention being the first president to have six of his most trusted foreign policy advisers waiting to go to jail after pleading guilty of lying to the FBI, among other crimes and misdemeanors the president knew absolutely nothing about.

So what does all of this have to do with the riddle of awarding a peace prize? Don’t ask me; ask the Norwegian Nobel Committee. They will be able to tell us about the deliberations in fifty years, as the rules dictate.

In conclusion, I will only say that if our boy in the race doesn’t get the prize after all he has done for stability in the world today, and isn’t considered worthy because of some technicality, he will have every right to claim election fraud, threaten to call in the FBI, and put Norway’s citizens on the “Do Not Let In” list.

8. Hurricane Donald

“The president asked me to convey his appreciation for your support,” a source, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media, informed me one day in October 2017.

I was not surprised. I know some people who blame everything on Trump. An ankle hurts, it’s Trump’s fault. A stomachache, Trump’s fault. High blood pressure, can’t sleep at night: all Trump’s fault.

Not me. He’s doing a great job, I mean, for a mentally deranged dotard.

Along these lines, I would like to pause in the writing of these pages as the best president we have leaves his mark on political history to comment briefly on how impressed we all are with the great job he is doing, best in history, as he puts it, in the handling of “this Puerto Rico thing.”

“Puerto Rico is an island,” he was explaining on the TV news the other night. “Surrounded by water.”

Most islands are.

“Big water,” he continued. “Ocean water.”

All true.

Why, he could be a geography teacher, if they taught geography as a subject in schools anymore.

As the fact-checkers might also find, Puerto Rico has been in that textbook definition of an island since at least 1898, when under another Republican president (McKinley) we acquired that water-challenged island during the Spanish-American War (that was the war against Spain, he might have explained).

El Gordo (the fat one, as he is known en español) was showing his grasp of geography about the 108-mile long, 40-mile-wide island surrounded by water because, in his words, that’s what was creating a logistical challenge in rushing aid to our fellow citizens in the Commonwealth.

Aid was desperately needed because our fellow citizens lacked food, potable water, tarps for roofs ripped off by Hurricane Maria. The electric grid was down. Streets were flooded. Roads and bridges were out. “We are dying,” the mayor of San Juan told Anderson Cooper on a leading name in fake news, CNN.

From his command post in the Twitter bunker of the presidential golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, El Jefe took umbrage at the pleas for help, which he called “politically motivated,” engineered by Democrats to make him look bad.

Anyway, folks on the island surrounded by so much water shouldn’t be in such a hurry to get the essentials for survival because Puerto Rico was $73 billion in debt, owed to hedge funds and banks. They were a bunch of deadbeats, expecting overnight deliveries by FedEx or Amazon!

Nevertheless, only fourteen days after the hurricane hit, by October 3 the King of Debt was rushing to survey the devastation in his only Commonwealth island surrounded by water.

It wasn’t his first visit to the waterlogged paradise. Back in the day when Trump believed he was the greatest gift to mankind as a golf course genius, he had bought into the Coco Beach resort with partners. Renamed Trump International Golf Club of Puerto Rico, by 2008 the company filed for bankruptcy. Did this mean that Trump bankrupted the golf course? Not at all. He merely did the honorable thing, walking away from the problem, just as he did in Atlantic City four (4) times. The Coco Beach deal was one of those Trumpian fiscal coups, leaving the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico with a $25 million plus debt package, while confirming his qualifications as a great dealmaker who would run the federal government like a golf business.

Presidente El Gordo finally landed on the island surrounded by water in his presidential ark (Air Force One), like the Conquistadores of the Spanish realm, immediately praising what a great job his administration is doing. That kind of high praise should shut up all the politically motivated ingrate chatter heard on the fake news.

Some will say he acted like a moron as president, joking about how Puerto Rico recovery aid was throwing the budget out of whack, something he hadn’t laid on the people of Texas and Florida after Hurricane Katrina or those who will benefit from his tax reform.

Among his other insults was diminishing the disaster of Maria by comparing it with Katrina. You should be happy you didn’t face a real tragedy, like Katrina, was his message. Playing the numbers games with the death toll was his idea of sharing their pain, in Bill Clinton’s phrase.

The highlight of the half-day tour was throwing paper towel rolls at the victims, like a modern-day monarch, who was saying, “Let them eat paper toweling.” As he told the reporters on his way out the door, “Lots of love in this room.”

9. James Comey

I do not know for a fact that the president did not read James Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership. But that would not be surprising.

Many intelligent Americans, like myself, read only reviews. So we know just enough to hold our own should the subject come up at cocktail parties.

However POTUS found out about it, he apparently did not like it, especially the part about him.

He called the author “a slimeball.” Not only once, but twice in a three-day period (April 13–15, 2018).

As if that wasn’t hurtful enough, he called Comey “an untruthful slimeball” on his Twitter account, the official record of the Trump administration, whose tweets will be ensconced in the Library of Congress until the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library opens (Donations now being accepted).[18]

A “slimeball,” you should know, is a serious charge. Not as strong as “stupid putz,” perhaps, but nothing you can get away with on the sidewalks of New York, where the president learned English as a first language.

Basically, what the book suggests, as I gather, is that the president is unfit to govern. But what really upset him is the Steele dossier allegation that he attended a golden showers performance by two Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room in 2013 for his edification.

According to multiple sources, the Steele dossier alleges that the real estate mogul, who had come to Moscow on a nookie inspection tour as the czar of the Ms. Universe Contest, which he also owns, reserved the Ritz-Carlton’s presidential suite, had the prostitutes defile the bed previously slept on by Barack and Michelle Obama, a rite secretly recorded by the Kremlin for historic purposes unknown.

“Do I look like the kind of guy who needs to pay hookers?” he asked his soon-to-be fired FBI director.

Besides, as he explained before he ran for president, he’s germophobic. “There’s no way I’d let people pee on each other,” he informed his chief law enforcement officer.

Furthermore, he didn’t even spend the night in his room at the Ritz-Carlton. He had flown in, used the suite to change his clothes, and flown home to his wife at Trump Tower New York the same night.

The husband of the year wanted his FBI director to say those allegations about the urination bit were not true. It hurt his image as what a great guy he is, indulging in a perversion that was un-American, and made him sound, as he put it, “like a pee brain.”

If it happened, which it didn’t, as he said, he was only there to inspect plumbing facilities at your average Russian hotel.

Whatever.

Our commander in chief was already bummed out with the seeming breakup of his romance with Vladimir the Poisoner. For months before Comey’s book, Trump’s enemies had been alarmed at the bromance with the ex-KGB killer, making him look like some kind of Communist sympathizer or even a traitor. Just when we were about to learn that, as an act of friendship, our POTUS was planning to endorse the Moscow plan to set up Soviets in Lowell, Massachusetts, and elsewhere his friends the Russians were implicated in Syrian chemical warfare.

The president was being hammered on major issues like the size of his hands and what made his complexion so orange these nights on the TV news.[19]

And then that of the 155 missiles—including forty of the extended-range version of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, carried by Air Force B-1B Lancer stealth bombers—launched in the midst of Lyin’ Jim Comey’s media blitz: true weapons of mass distraction!

Violating his own policy of not telegraphing military action, our emotionally unhinged commander in chief had called the Operation Slimeball (unofficial nomenclature) weapons “nice, new . . . and smart.” As The Orangeman wrote on Twitter of record, “Mission accomplished!”

But it turned out they were not that smart, leaving the Russian-Iranian-Syrian axis of evil supply of poison gases untouched, a military action which left everybody, except the president with small hands, scratching their heads.

The escalation from hurling epithets to launching missiles, unpresidented in this pundit’s view, as a policy initiative will be debated by future chroniclers of the wild and crazy Trumpian epoch.

What worries me now is what the war of words between His Orangeness, a sensitive president more concerned about his image than saving the planet, and a self-righteous Dudley Do-Right lawman conducting a mea no culpa campaign, might accidentally provoke before winding up in the waste basket of history?

Like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow that is said to have knocked over the lantern in the family barn that caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, or the accidental assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914 that caused World War I, it would be ironic if the end of our world was a result of a hissy fit over literary criticism.

Go know, as they say in Serbo-Croatian.

Architectural drawing, projected Trump National Library, dimensions of a Samsung 7 smartphone, TK.

Blaming the invention of the incandescent light bulb.

10. Second-Year Report Card

There is more to being president than calling “that Russian thing” a hoax and a witch hunt, something he has done 612 times (approximately, final count in progress) by the end of Year One since the possibility of foreign government meddling in the election of 2016 was raised by our seventeen top intelligence agencies.

What he loves most is the part of the job requiring travel abroad, showing the famous face, the hairdo, the flag, representing our nation at international conferences and important events.

It’s a chance to pose for pictures shaking hands, exchanging words with other powerful leaders, getting tips on governance and problem-solving from the world’s top tyrants. He can say off the record he admires the way this Asian strongman cracks down on dissenters or that great African democratic leader is extending his term of office to thirty years or his lifetime, whichever lasts longer. All of which goes unreported by fake news, unless they resort to the un-American tactic of sourcing their treasonous negative stories that make him look bad.

Not everybody is thrilled with these international trips. Things can go wrong. There is a school of thought that argues the president’s name should be added to the “No Fly List” his administration has imposed. His passport should be lifted. Cancel all future travel plans to any foreign capital expecting him by the year 2021.

To be further on the safe side, as part of the Code Blue damage control protocol, these critics would ground and terminate use of what they consider Air Farce One, an expensive boondoggle. It’s a lot cheaper, for example, for the president to call Uber for those trips from the White House to New Jersey.[20]

The thinking is our guy is a leading threat to national security today, an unguided missile, who cannot be trusted to act in the national interest instead of his own interest on the international stage. With his ideas of diplomacy, he can do things like destroy peace treaties and shake up world stock markets.

I disagree. We wouldn’t have been able to see on TV all those memorable junkets where the best president we have did great, in his view.

My favorite in his first year in office was the Trump version of Dwight Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe. Like a rock star on concert tour, with big noisy crowds, fighting with police, balloons being released, media panels pontificating, every day he seemed to be in another European capital, bashing our friends and allies.

In Brussels, he performed his Top 40 hits, calling the NATO partners shmucks. Not clear whether he meant them or us, as he demanded more defense spending—or else! What a super way to make our Military Industrial Complex great again!

He banged away at EU with threats of escalating the tariff wars with friendly nations.

In London, he was twelve minutes late to pay respects to the Queen, before escaping to Scotland. The whole trip may have been an infomercial for his wee money-losing golf club in the Highlands, Trump Turnberry, a favorite lodging for USAF pilots while their planes are being gassed at a nearby airport. The sun never sets on the Trump Empire!

Wrecking alliances, sowing distrust among our allies, undermining a united front that worked for the last seventy years. Well, that was a concept that hadn’t been tried.

The highlight of the 2018 concert tour was the president’s performance in Helsinki, the two-hour, one-on-one duet with super-tsar Vladimir the Great.

That was the one in Helsinki in which he told the worldwide TV audience he trusted an ex-KGB thug so-called president more than our own revered institutions like the CIA, FBI, and fifteen other national intelligence agencies.

Presidents sometimes act in mysterious ways. Who knows whether, in that secret, no-notes, behind-closed-doors session, he asked Vlad the Poisoner if, the next time he ran for president, he should do it the Russian democratic way by jailing the serious opponents.[21]

And then there was the unforgettable trip to Singapore, where our commander in chief was able to end nuclear threats from a pipsqueak shithole country.

After only five hours with the Rocket Man (Kim Jun Uh-Huh), our POTUS was able to fly home with the good news:

“Thanks to me, you will be able to sleep well tonight. There is no more nuclear threat. I alone have solved the insoluble!”

You could almost hear President Art of the Deal rubbing his hands together as he explained to those country bumpkins the benefit of not destroying the world with nukes: It was bad for the real estate business.

He even showed the press the sales-pitch video, which extolled the enemy country’s beaches. “Exploding their cannons into the ocean, right,” it explained. “I said, boy, look at the view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo? You could be the best hotels in the world, right there.”

Who would be more qualified to make the deal with our enemy for the last sixty years than our First Real Estate Gonif, a man who was so smart, and so rich, despite his six bankruptcies and seventeen of nineteen failing brands? We wouldn’t have been surprised if President the Greatest Negotiator hadn’t pulled out his pen and had Chairman Kim signing on the dotted line.

Skeptics might wonder why a tyrant who killed members of his own family, a man who President Plump said loved his people even though he was starving them, could be trusted to give up his nuclear weapons. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to keep his nukes, like other friends of democracy such as Pakistan?

And how about Trump’s greatest foreign policy coup? At last, a president with the guts to stand up to Canada!

Arriving late for the G7 summit in Quebec, and leaving early, he declared our closest ally and oldest friend, Canada, a threat to national security.

The burning of the White House by the Canadians during the War of 1812 has yet to be avenged, he reminded us. He must have used South Park to get his facts. (In truth, it was the British who did the torching, but that was close enough for a history-impaired chief executive.)

Trudeau, who is soft and weak, is stabbing us in the pocketbook, as well as the back, in this tariff war that President Good for Business had launched. Dairy products 75 percent, or whatever the number he gave for the injustice! A tariff war is hell.

What worries me most is our northern border with Canada is completely unprotected.

It would help us sleep better at night, Mister President, sir, if you would build a wall across the border that would keep out all the deplorables from Canada, like those clods from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, who are stealing jobs from our native-born hockey players. Every night in the winter months the TV news is also telling us that cold air is coming down from Canada. Sneaky Prime Minister Trudeau may be sending it in by truck, our sources say. Refrigerated trucks.

The Government Accountability Office, an independent investigative arm of Congress, and nonprofits like Judicial Watch estimated the hourly rate for flying Air Force One at between $142,000 and $272,000 per hour. Four trips the peripatetic president took from DC to Mar-a-Lago over a one-month period in early 2017 cost federal agencies about $13.6 million, the New York Times reported.

He also won brownie points in Quebec for asking why aren’t his newfound allies, our Russian friends, included in the G8 meetings any more?

The president didn’t seem to know the Russians, were being punished for annexing Crimea, meddling in Ukrainian elections, and supplying the weapons that shot down the Malaysian commercial jet.

V. THE TRUMPONICLES 2018–2019

more year two

1. The Evil Twin Theory

How lucky can a so-called president get?

In the indictment of thirteen Soviet cyber warriors caught red-handed making the world safer for communist domination, Special Counsel Mueller documented the latest Marxist plot to tarnish our sacred free elections, the gold standard by which we judge the honesty of and find lacking in so many Third World and other shithole countries, pardon the Trumpspeak, new to democracy. He neglected to mention a possible accessory to the crimes.

He Who Was Not Named (HWWNN) saw the omission as a clear victory.

He has adopted as his 2020 mantra:

No collusion! No collusion! No collusion!

The jury was in. The jury of one. Foreman Donald J. Trump read the indictment to his 48 million followers on Twitter: Not guilty! . . . Not guilty! . . . Not guilty!

As He Who Was Not Named told his coalition of the willing on Twitter that happy Saturday morning, he had been exonerated.

HWWNN did everything that weekend but award himself the coveted Congressional Medal of Honor for dodging the bullet. He lived to lie another day. Hail to the Chief!

It mattered not that the Mueller indictment covered one paragraph of what was to turn out to be a sad 342-page story. If I may mix a metaphor, and why not, it’s my ink and paper: it was the first shoe from Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection.

Somehow he was able to ignore an alarming realization: the Commies’ election mongering in 2016 has made all future elections vulnerable. Our elections can no longer, a priori, be thought pure and trustworthy for the first time in our 229-year history.

His reaction to this awful predicament did not prevent him from playing an extra round of golf that weekend. He was marching to a different glockenspiel.

It was his Evil Twin who did all those bad things his enemies are trying to pin on him.

As the two presidents try to keep afloat in the rising fetid waters of the swamp, already up to the chin, I am reminded of what the legendary Sidney Zion said whenever Trump the Younger was erupting in some way, making unpleasant waves in Gotham: “The problem with Donald today is that he misses the restraining hand of Roy Cohn.”

2. The Hondurans Are Coming

In October 2018, the best president we have warned us about an invasion.

A caravan of Hondurans and others from our formerly Good Neighbor Republics down south of the Rio Grande was spotted on a march to our wall-less border.

They included “MEN,” our commander in chief explained about what he called “a threat to our national security.” Some of them even may have been “Middle Eastern terrorists.”

The horde of invaders also included women, some of whom might be pregnant, whose only interest was off-loading their unborn on our sleeping country, so they could grow up to be welfare cheats and scroungers who wanted to live off the fat of our land—at least until our vigilant Republican legislators finish their work of eliminating those examples of government overreach (food stamps), so they could reduce the deficit, growing by trillions since the tax cut for the rich.

The mob of the unwanted is being funded by George Soros, the Democratonaire who is importing the huddled masses to cast their illegal ballots in fraudulent elections.

The masas amontonadas were claiming they were making the arduous journey from their native countries, mostly on foot, because of death threats, gang violence, sexual abuse, poverty, and starvation—the usual lame excuses.

No way, José! El Jefe said, in effect. A country built on the suffering, deprivation, and the lack of economic opportunity of our forefathers who came from foreign lands, including the president’s immigrant grandparents, here from “Sweden” (as he claimed in his autobiography, another word for “Germany”) could no longer tolerate any more of these illegal voters.

When the barrage of Twitter-ese didn’t stop the wretched refuse, El Gordo called out the troops, 5,800 at first to the border war zone, with up to 15,000 on the way.

These were not the usual National Guard troops, those poor souls, many of whom had already five or six deployments in the Hundred Year Wars (Afghanistan), but regular Army soldiers, who thought they were going home for Thanksgiving and Xmas.

Our boys would stop this guerrilla invasion seeking to undermine the American way of life, stealing less-than-minimum-wage jobs as fruit pickers and leaf blowers we Americans find beneath our dignity.

Our commander in chief had strapped on his metaphorical sword and MAGA campaign hat, mounted his golf cart, and was going to war to stop this invasion—or his name wasn’t Donald the Brave!

And what a beautiful war it was going to be! The world’s mightiest military power versus the oppressed people (yearning to be free), whose numbers kept varying, depending on foot blisters, poor nutrition, and inadequate protection from the elements.

After all, we hadn’t won a war since Grenada!

Suddenly, on November 5, 2018, the day before Election Day, the bugles stopped blowing. The invasion disappeared from the Official Twitter Page and el presidente’s lips.

The silence was deafening for us Justaminutemen, who were as fired up as the base about the menace of these gringo illegal voters.

What had happened?

Had los Houndureños hordes stopped coming? Had the caravan taken a right turn and decided to go to Cancún and Cozumel, where the beaches and hotel accommodations were said to be superior to Tijuana?

Had our chief executive been mistaken—that is, lying—about the threat to our borders and national security?

Next question, please.

Was he a coward?

Don’t be so fast to award him the four white feathers, despite his bone spurs that kept him out of Vietnam. As The Coward’s Almanac, or the Yellow Pages, edited by Marvin Kitman, notes, the old American maxim says: “He who runs away, lives to fight another day.”

Was it a coincidence, some of us patriots are wondering, that the threat to our national security seemed to end immediately before Election Day?

Was the president using the military as a political weapon?

Will the regulars of the standing army be called out before every crucial primary in the 2020 election?

Had we become like some banana republic or Third World shithole country where the leader uses troops for personal political gain?

Does our president understand the military is not his military, tin soldiers to be moved around like some tin-pot fake tyrant president?

Will the military be used to lock up Hillary to make everybody in the base happy in 2020?

We better stop all this before we lose our appetite.

We fans of the best president we have wish you a merry Thanksgiving Day.

3. Here Comes the Judge

Would it be Alan Dershowitz, the president’s volunteer Harvard professor lawyer advocate? Judge Pirro of Fox News, his favorite TV judge? America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, the Oliver Wendell Holmes of his legal team?

Those were the possible questions the president contemplated as he wrestled with naming the successor to the still-vacant seat left by the late Justice Scalia.

Trump had been teasing the choice. Originally, it was to be announced at 9 a.m. that Monday (July 9, 2019). Then twelve noon. He was still deliberating, the word was. I kept adjusting my schedule, so as not to miss what Jake Tapper of CNN called “a momentous event in the history of the nation.” It was like the opening of the envelopes at the Emmys, or the ribbon cutting at a new golf course. HUGE. Finally at 9 p.m., the door was opened.

The winner was none of the above. It turned out to be some judge I had never heard of. The major asset of an unknown named “Kavanaugh” seemed to be a legal paper he had written, saying presidents couldn’t be indicted or otherwise harassed by the courts while in office.

It was disappointing to learn that all the president’s time-consuming deliberations were limited to a short list handed to him as a public service by unbiased right-wing institutions (Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, among other stink tanks). Sad.

It wasn’t as if our commander in chief had no training in the law. He had studied as a callow youth at the Roy Cohn School of Law.

The most despicable lawyer in the country at the time, Roy Cohn mentored a man who some believe is the most despicable president. The dean of attack law already had taught young Trump that, when accused of lying about groping, or fleecing students at Trump University (known in academia as Fuck U.), or stiffing his Atlantic City casino contractors, the legal defense is “See you in court.” At the time of his inauguration, more than 1,200 (New York Times count) to 3,500 (per USA Today) cases were still waiting to be seen to.

For Trump to file a lawsuit is nothing, Vincent Lo, a former Trump partner, said after Trump sued him for $1 billion. “It’s just like having lunch.” At the time of his election, according to James D. Zirin in Plaintiff in Chief, the reported 3,500 lawsuits in which he had been involved would average roughly three per business day spanning the forty-eight years from 1968, when he graduated from Wharton, until election day 2016.

Serial litigator in chief Trump, Esq. had a full docket picking a new Supreme Court justice that week. There was his obligation of creating controversies and other distractions on the official Twitter feed every morning. Where would the cable news shows get their false facts, lies, and other bubbe meises to fill their hours?

Then there was finding new ways to attack our friends and allies while kissing up to traditional enemies. Just the other day he was accusing the Canadians of scuffing up new shoes, so they could cheat us on new shoe tariffs. “Something he picked up from an FDR speech,” speculated Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe (July 9, 2019). “In 1943.”

He was also busy kowtowing to Chairman Kim, as he now called the former “fat little rocket man.”

Which NATO alliance leader should he push out of the class photo in the Brussels meeting next week, as he did Montenegro last time?

The biggest presidential chore on the to-do list was figuring out what to say to Putin at the private one-on-one summit meeting in Helsinki. People were starting to talk about how enamored he is of the ex-KGB killer, what they used to call “a crush.” Maybe he only admired Putin as the master of all Russia. If only he could become the master of all America.

It made some law junkies a little sick to hear the president talk in his brief remarks announcing his choice about revering the rule of law and the Constitution, a document that he still may not have read or had someone translate, especially Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8, dealing with the inappropriateness of emoluments. Apparently, some limited government purists thought, it is not okay, during a press conference on the White House lawn, to urge us to buy Ivanka’s products, even if she is a member of his brain trust.

4. The Great Debate

1.

There is a debate going on that has divided the nation since Inauguration Day 2017.

Is the president a moron, an idiot, an imbecile, or as the more extremist wing of etymologists argues, all three?[22]

The debate began with the report that Rex Tillerson called the president a “moron” and Gen. Kelly reportedly calling him “an idiot.”

At the time, the former secretary of state from ExxonMobil, no Henry Kissinger himself, would neither confirm nor deny using that label for the president’s intellectual capacity. There was speculation he might have called him “a Mormon,” confusing him with a former presidential candidate and rival for the plum State Department job.

General Kelly’s use of the I-word, as reported in the irresponsible press, in a derogatory meaning of the term, might hurt the Republican Party’s chances in 2020, as a large segment of the population might take offense.

This is not to say all the people who voted for the minority president in 2016, and the 34.9 percent in the base who still don’t believe or care about the fake news revelations, are idiots. Some of them are morons with a sprinkling of imbeciles and other intellectually challenged voters.

Whatever.

2.

The debate grew more complicated. A lawyer was telling Chris Cuomo on CNN (May 2, 2018) that the president was “an absolute moron,” while another lawyer used the pejorative “total moron.” On the other hand, as Chief of Staff General Kelly was reportedly using the I-word in the White House, Rupert Murdoch was in the trenches calling Trump “a fucking idiot.” Or it might have been “moron.” My notes are garbled.

Mika Brzezinski, on the president’s second-favorite morning cable news talk show, The Morning Donald, on MSNBC, summarized the great debate:

“One man’s moron is another man’s idiot.”

3.

The president has suggested that congressional committees, instead of wasting their time on “that Russian thing,” should be investigating NBC Fake News, which may get a Pulitzer for breaking the original moron story.

The latest laurel for the man who may or may not be our greatest moron in chief was handed him by his secretary of state, it was said, after he heard the president compare our Afghanistan policy to renovations at the 21 Club.

To clear up the M-word confusion, the secretary called a press conference (October 4, 2017) that lives in the annals of courageous acts of State Department diplomacy.

Mister Secretary ended the suspense after the first question. He would neither confirm nor deny using the M-word. It is against his policy to deal with petty matters, he explained.[23]

4.

America’s Idiot? America’s Moron?

Where did I stand—or sit—on the issue that divided the nation in two groups?

I was in a third group, the don’t knows.

Calling him something like dunderhead, airhead, butthead, flake, birdbrain, jerk, twit, dork, hoser, schmuck, bozo, boob, chowderhead, goofus, goofball, pea brain, dumb cluck, lamebrain, dead from the neck up, dumb as a post, and, especially, blithering idiot,[24] I might feel competent to weigh in.

I ask you, do any of those words above describe our president? Or is the correct answer, all of the above?

Frankly, I don’t know if he clinically qualifies as a moron—he has refused to release his IQ numbers, possibly lower than his shoe size, along with his income taxes.[25]

I will leave it to the more learned to determine if he is a moron or just an idiot. But I will go out on a limb and claim he is an infant, if this doesn’t insult infants.

5.

The infant in him demonstrated itself in his recent trip to Puerto Rico to comfort the victims of Hurricane Maria.

When he should have promised the Maria victims that he would send in the Army with M*A*S*H-style field hospitals, and engineers to put roofs on houses, Seabees to fix the roads, and Marines to throw up those steel bridges, and all the other things the military does in devastated war zones we devastate. Instead he threw paper towel rolls at them! Like a clown hired for kids parties!

How presidential can you not get?

Due to lack of space, and forgetfulness, rather than denial, in my bungling attempt to find just the right word to describe our last presidential choice—the nominations included moron, idiot, or imbecile—I omitted that he also may be a cretin. I apologize to all my cretin readers. It’s not often one of their own reaches the pinnacle of the highest office in the land.

The follow-up question by the press should have been: How much of a moron could the president be if he picked you to join the cabinet? The president himself had praised himself as a great cabinetmaker, the best since Chippendale or Hepplewhite.

They don’t call America’s favorite form of entertainment and news, I knew from my thirty-five years as the TV critic at Newsday, the “idiot box” for nothing.

The term “moron” has been defined as another word for George W. Bush, i.e., someone who lacks one shred of intellectual curiosity. “W” won the world moron championship in 2003 for his moronic conduct as POTUS, starting the Iraq War.

Proper usage of the term, the experts tell us, include:

“What moron left the ice cream on the stove?”

As one authority summed it up, if you require the word be explained, you are probably part of the problem.

THIS JUST IN . . .

By 2019, the president was remembering his ex–secretary of state being “dumb as a rock,” after the man he chose for the important cabinet post told a House committee the president was totally unprepared for a two-hour meeting with Putin, the one without translators and that somehow never got transcribed.

5. Wharton v. Wharton

1.

I began the second year of following the adventures of Donald in the Fun House known as the Oval Office still puzzling over this mental fitness thing, a subject being raised frequently by biased head-scratching pundits trying to make him look like a certified idiot or moron. Is it just another hoax, perpetrated by the witch-hunting fake news establishment that is out to get our commander in chief, the best one we have? Does the president have all his marbles? Is he totally insane, whatever?

Trump for the defense:

Throughout my life my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being like really smart. . . . Not only smart but VERY smart, a genius . . . and a very stable genius at that.

And not only that, he continued on the Pravda of the Trump presidency (Twitter), he went to “a good college.” Not Brooklyn College or Queens College or even CCNY, the Harvard of his New York metropolitan area, and my alma mater! “I went to an Ivy League school,” Trump told a crowd in St. Augustine, Fla. “I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words,” he said at a rally, according to Politico magazine (November 6, 2016).

2.

During the campaign debates I had heard the soon-to-be-elected president certify how smart he was by bragging endlessly about his education at the University of Pennsylvania, an overrated, overpriced, overfunded school, like most of the Ivies.

“Wharton,” he proudly explained on Meet the Press about the part of Penn he attended, “is probably the hardest there is to get into.” Nailing it, he added, “Some of the greatest business minds in the financial world have gone to Wharton.” His, he was not ashamed to imply, was one of them.

There are those who say Wharton is a sort of a trade school branch of Penn, dealing with commercial real estate, a field closer to high-stakes gambling than high-class education. It may have been at Wharton that the junior transfer student from Fordham learned his art of the deal, an M.O. which involved getting contractors to do expensive jobs, refusing to pay them, and loosing on them a pack of shady but crafty lawyers when they threaten to sue. Ironically, the motto of the University of Pennsylvania, I’m told by a reliably informed source, is Leges sine Moribus vanae, or “Laws without morals are useless.” “It’s not ‘Lawyers without morals are shameless,’” explained my source, a Columbia grad and not a big Penn fan, “but it’s close.”

Having gone to Wharton is an achievement he waves around like the Shroud of Turin. Not only is the president proud of having studied at Wharton (Class of 1968), but he told the New York Times repeatedly he graduated “first in his class.”

This First In His Class doesn’t appear to have accumulated any of the usual honors, such as the Dean’s List, according to an investigation by the student newspaper Daily Pennsylvanian, or any of the Latin laurels associated with top-of-the-class rankings (magna this, magna cum laude that and any other magnas signifying academic greatness).

The president is also guilty of misleading the public about his studies at Wharton, his enemies say. Apparently, there are two Whartons, and two Wharton degrees. The undergraduate Wharton awards a BS in Business Administration or Economics. The graduate school awards the famous MBA/Masters of Business Administration. An undergraduate degree is not the same thing as an MBA.

“If he so claims, or even implies that he has a Wharton MBA,” a Wharton MBA-holder told the Daily Pennsylvanian, “he’s so obviously lying his pants are not just on fire, they’re a blazing inferno. Nobody in Wall Street or in finance/bulge bracket investment banks would be fooled in the slightest.”

It’s widely believed on campus that young Trump earned the lesser undergraduate degree (BS). “Any implication that he has an MBA is completely untrue,” a real Wharton graduate MBA explained, “and CANNOT be an innocent mistake (especially if it’s by him).”

To all of which, members of the base say, “So what?”

3.

Much is made of young Trump leaving the Groves of Academe in Philadelphia with a glistening new BS in Economics, further enhanced by a graduation gift from his father, Fred C. Trump, the slumlord and rental apartment titan, of $10 million (other estimates reportedly range from $1 to $25 million, whatever the number it was more than my father gave me, graduating from CCNY). “See what you can do with it, son,” were the only instructions the graduate reportedly got from Daddy Fred C.

Some say he promptly lost all of it, not a feather in Wharton’s curriculum cap. I don’t believe it. He may have managed to lose a lot of it in his deals, but not all of it. A blind, mentally ill person could make money with $10 or whatever million in New York real estate.

In his studies at Wharton he must have learned how to build Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which he claimed cost $1.2 billion, and was “the eighth wonder of the world.” An even greater wonder is how he managed to not pay the carpenters, electricians, plumbers, window installers, and other contractors, the workers who put in the guard rails, doors, stalls, and paper dispensers in the almost 300 public bathrooms, and the 253 contractors who in turn hired the thousands who did the work of sculpting the 70 onion domes and minarets that towered over the boardwalk. It was an honor to be stiffed by the self-anointed “King of Debt,” not shared by some waiting since 1990 to be paid.

In his postgraduate years, he developed a brilliant financial strategy that he also may have learned at Wharton: whenever you’ve totally fucked things up to the point where you owe everybody money and the banks won’t lend you any more, declare bankruptcy and start over. He did that at least six times at last count. Is this a great country, or what? Talk about your Horatio Alger stories.

Of course, a few crybabies borrowed money to learn how to get rich at Trump University, with a course of study that turned out to be a few CDs promoting Trump U., and they wanted their tuition back. Get smart; that was the valuable lesson to be learned at Trump’s school of hard knocks.

And then there were the folks who made down payments on some gorgeous projected houses overlooking the ocean off the Mexican coast. The 250 condo buyers at the coming-soon Trump Ocean Resort at Baja, Mexico, south of Tijuana, put over $32.5 million down, according to James D. Zirin’s Plaintiff in Chief. The 525-unit development deal promised infinity-edged swimming pools, tennis courts, and views of the Pacific money couldn’t buy. “The most spectacular place in all of Mexico,” proclaimed the sales literature featuring a portrait of the smiling future president, sitting in a gold leaf chair.

The houses had not technically been built yet, and never were, technically, expected to get built. The home “owners” were trying to get their money back for a few decades with remarkably little success.

But this is what capitalism is all about: lying, cheating, stiffing workers, and generally screwing everybody if you can get away with it. That’s what made our country great, and what is making it great again with the first Wharton graduate in the Oval Office.

4.

When the Wharton graduate proudly claimed the honorific “King of Debt,” he actually sold himself short. As it became known later in his administration, he actually was the Aga Khan of Debt.

Through business practices he may have learned at Wharton, according to the New York Times (May 8, 2019), the potentate of debt from 1985 to 1994 managed “to lose more money than nearly any other individual taxpayer in the nation.” His core businesses—casinos, hotels, and retail spaces in apartment buildings—in 1990 and 1991 alone lost more than $250 million each year, and those losses were more than double those of any other taxpayers, according to IRS information.

“There’s something not right when every single one of your projects doesn’t work out right,” analyst Marvin Roffman said of Trump’s casino business going six times to the Camden, New Jersey, bankruptcy court. By 2004, all of Trump’s fantabulous Atlantic City casinos, including his cathedral of glitz, Trump Taj Mahal, had filed for bankruptcy. Also underwater, according to Zirin’s Plaintiff in Chief, were the stiffed contractors and workers who had built the Taj.

He does not seem to have had a talent for business, does he?

What was especially impressive about his achievements as the business tycoon who almost single-handedly took Atlantic City down, though, is the message it gave to fans of the self-made billionaire (if you ignore the $400 million or so Daddy Megabucks Fred pumped into the sinking Trump family ship): Debt is good! You, too, can have six bankruptcies and grow up to be president.

5.

The way the University of Pennsylvania is treating its most famous graduate on the planet is reprehensible. Unlike Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League schools that had their share of presidents, William Henry Harrison had been the only other president Penn can claim.[26]

You would think the brainiacs running the show at Penn would have given their contribution to American democracy at least an honorary degree, an LL.D (Doctor of Laws), which is what presidents usually get, even if not known for scholarship. Doctor Trump would have mentioned it from time to time. Nada. Zip. Borscht. Shameful. So sad.

As for the president being very smart, I would like to see his Wharton report card before I start boasting about his intellectual achievements. Along with SAT scores, and his more current tax filings, his scholastic records at Wharton (and Fordham, too) are buried in the Trump schoolhouse vaults forever or until the end of time, whichever lasts longer, so help the Trump lawyers’ case banning their release.

But he didn’t graduate and lasted only a month in office, dying of pneumonia in 1841.

6. Mussolini v. Hitler

I was at a cocktail party one night during the 2018 midterm primaries when the guests were discussing how great the president has been at the rallies he had been stealing away from his duties at the White House to attend. Not only was he the greatest, quoting from his Twitter postings about the appearance in Ohio, but Facebook liked him a lot. An argument broke out. Who does he sound more like at the campaign rallies?

Is he the new Mussolini? Or is it Hitler?

He also looks like Mayor Giuliani, speaking from the balcony at City Hall, I argued the tertium quid, recalling Il Rudi waving his hands around like a traffic cop in the Via del Corso in downtown Rome.

FULL DISCLOSURE: You should know that I am a leading authority. My next book is the definitive guide, The Collected Great Nonverbal Speeches of Donald Trump, a.k.a. The Handbook.

In general, Trump in his rally mode most reminds me of Italy’s Greatest Fascist. His facial gestures and body language are almost the same as Il Duce’s, but his claims to greatness are far more outrageous, a performance worthy of Italian comedic opera.

In fairness, I also can see the resemblance with Hitler as a campaigner.

The similarity struck me as early as the convention in Cleveland and his acceptance speech, which looked like it was choreographed by Leni Riefenstahl.

His ability to tell lies would leave Dr. Joseph Goebbels openmouthed. He could win the gold in any Olympic speed-lying contest.

Der Donald’s vision of America the Not So Beautiful that he delivered in his first Inaugural Address evoked the Weimar Republic in the dark days of the late 1920s. His promise to make America great seemed to be remarkably similar to the Little Corporal’s speeches in the 1932 Reichstag election, promising to make Germany great again. Although Trump is said to keep a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, I’m sure it’s just one of those coincidences that turn up in comparing the two believers in democratic process.

Watching Trump as he launched his 2020 election campaign the day after the 2017 inauguration at a rally in Indiana a week later, a sensitive nose could smell the beer hall atmosphere of early National Socialist Munich rallies. I needed to force my right arm down so as not to give the stiff Sieg Heil, Der Donald salute.

Violence is also in the air at Trump rallies. He seems to encourage the beating up of protesters. His lawyers are on hand, he assures, and don’t worry about the court fines. Judging by the way he stiffs his workers and lawyers, I wouldn’t stop worrying.

What impressed me most about Der Donald’s army is the dedication of the 34.9 percent hard-core followers for whom their leader can do no wrong.

His troops are not bothered by his apparent ignorance of foreign affairs. Not since Gerry Ford in the 1976 Republican debates said the Soviet Union did not control Poland had there been a future president who seemed such a dummkopf. What Trump knew about foreign affairs, a major part of being president, he may have learned from his “Miss Universe” contest business. The bold initiatives proposed during the campaign speeches, like abandoning NATO and turning our back on the rest of the free world, made no sense other than sounding like Russia’s foreign policy.

It didn’t seem to matter, either, that his domestic programs were based on the principle of not paying taxes. That’s because he’s smart. What a lesson for future generations of dumb taxpayers.

The most awesome number to come out of the exit polling on the first election is that so many of Der Donald’s faithful already believed months in advance that the election of 2016 was rigged. Even if he lost that November, according to one poll, only 21 percent said they would accept the election results.

Mussolini or Hitler?

It may be too close to call. Either way, the fact that Der Donald has been campaigning for tyrant in chief in 2020 ever since Election Day 2016, keeps some people awake at night.

“I keep thinking I’m seeing,” one of the nervous Nellies at the cocktail party told me, “a scene from the dark comedy classic The Great Dictator with Charlie Chaplin playing Donald Trump. I just wish they would wake me up and say it’s over.”

It already may be, I assured him.

7. Helsinki Summit

1.

What I’ve noticed about the president in his first two years in office is that he seems to relish leaving the White House. Next to riding in a golf cart, his favorite form of exercise may be walking to Marine One, the chopper waiting on the South Lawn, to transfer him to his magic carpet, Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, whisking him off to some far-off mystical place, like Florida or Bedminster, New Jersey, where he can escape from the White House Fake News gang, trying to trap him in another lie or two.

There is nothing the best president we have seems to like better as an excuse for getting away from the office than summit meetings. He thinks he’s very good at summits.

Sitting down with obstreperous perennial world problem-makers like Chairman Kim of North Korea or President Putin of the Russian Federation, he can get things done, unlike previous presidents. Because he is the greatest negotiator, as he has explained. “Great dealmaker.”

We saw how effective Trump summit diplomacy was in Singapore with Kim Jung Uh-uh where he was awarded the Alfred E. Neuman Prize for ending the North Korean nuke threat.[27]

A few details still needed to be ironed out, judging by the North Koreans continuing missile tests and rebuilding of nuclear development sites said to have been dismantled after Singapore.

Predictably, the president is now saying he is open for another summit meeting with Kim of North Korea, what leading Koreanologist Richard Lingeman calls “a Hair Summit, between the two hirsute chiefs of state in their best hair shirts.” It’s part of his game plan for crafting a deal that will save the world from a nuclear Armageddon.

The wrinkle in the strategy is that every other day the president is dithering about the next summit, which means it will be on every other day and he will change his mind on the off days. The other side never knows what our policy will be about saving the world. Brilliant!

His greatest success in the summit meeting game so far, according to the president, was Helsinki 2018.

2.

The Helsinki Summit of July 2018 will live in the annals of great summits attended by American presidents: Potsdam, Teheran, Casablanca, and Yalta. FDR was accused of selling out to Russia at Yalta, as Comrade Trump, excuse me, President Trump, is now being accused of having sold out to Putin in Helsinki.

Helsinki was the one in which the president in front of the TV cameras said he believed the Russian denials of meddling in our 2016 presidential election, whatever our seventeen supersleuth intelligence agencies concluded. Why? Because Putin sounded so sincere.

He had said that many times before (917 times, according to an unofficial count, as of June 12, 2018). Ergo, it must be true.

Somehow, at the Helsinki summit’s concluding press conference, it sounded as if the president was reading a script from the Politburo’s Ministry of Propaganda.

The USA was responsible for the bad relations between the two countries, he explained. It was all Obama and Hillary’s fault.

Our seventeen intelligence agencies were conducting a witch hunt about this Russian interference in the 2016 election thing. It’s all a hoax.

Trashing his own country, and embracing the enemy, was a great moment in history for the Blame America First movement.

3.

The big mystery of the two hours and ten minutes meeting in July was why, at the president’s request, the Helsinki summit was conducted in secret with no note-takers or the usual advisers.

It reminded me of the Cone of Silence in Get Smart when Agent 86 (Don Adams) took meetings that way with The Chief.

What was settled in the Cone of Silence? Whether Vladimir the Poisoner wanted the Lincoln Bedroom or the Red Room in the White House? Who knows?

Even the locked-out director of national intelligence expressed astonishment at this second summit idea. The look on Dan Coats’s face was “priceless,” as they say in the Mastercard commercials. It was the first he knew of an impending visit, he told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News.

4.

With no better explanation of the secrecy, a pundit is free to suspect there was something to hide.

National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster was fired, my sources say, because the respected war hero used big words that the boss didn’t understand. Our vocabulary-handicapped chief executive didn’t know what the general was saying most of the time.

The next designated brain in the White House who called the foreign policy shots was John Bolton, whose answer to any policy question, no matter how complex, was: “Let’s bomb the hell out of ’em.”

Standard operating procedure before a summit meeting is reviewing intelligence, especially important in dealing with a cutthroat thug commissar like Putin.

This president, as he says, does not need to read any intelligence briefings. He goes by his gut.

As a result, he seems to have gone into the 130 minutes behind closed doors with a certain lack of preparation. None of this prevented him from acting like a shill in Putin’s shell game.

What really happened behind closed doors to make our president sound like a Chatty Donnie doll? Wind him up, and he says, “Nyet collusion.”

My sources say Putin played his Trump card. Behind closed doors, he was able to play on his SmarterThanYours iPhone the complete unexpurgated golden showers videos. That’s why the summit meeting took so long.

The so-called What Me Worry? Prize.

8. Kavanaughgate, Part I

1.

I’m not a legal scholar; I only write like one in these pages. Nevertheless, it sounds to me that the nominee for the last open seat in the highest court of the land may not be as pure as the driven slush, the medium we use to judge moral character these days in the greatest democracy ever invented.

In judging the nominee’s moral bona fides our president has attested that his selection is “one of the finest people I’ve ever known.” Not only that, he is “without a single blemish on his record.”

There must have been something missing in Judge Kavanaugh’s résumé.

It turned out, if we believe the research psychologist in Northern California, that the DC Appeals Court magistrate neglected to mention he was guilty of sexual misbehavior in his teenage years.

Of course, it could have been some other teenage dork who got all likkered up and inflicted on a fifteen-year-old girl some unspecified heavy groping behind a locked door.

There may well have been other accusations of thuggish conduct unbecoming of a teenage werewolf-in-training who was in the habit of packing away the brewskis while relieving the tension of being at one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools (Georgetown). Possibly that’s why there was such a rush in the summer of 2018 to fill the seat formerly occupied by Antonin Scalia, which had only been vacant since February 2016.

Soon the fake news might be telling us the judge, a squeaky-clean champion of family values, girls’ basketball coach, and other conservative Republican verities, a veritable altar boy, even smoked pot.

Very little, however, is being said about the altar boy jurist’s gambling addiction. Betting on baseball games—even among friends, as the baseball-crazy judge claims, can be habit-forming, and lead to deficit spending. Apparently, not only had the judge maxed out his Bank of America card, but two others in his plastic card portfolio, and also a personal line of credit—twice.

None of which prevented him from buying four season baseball seats each year from 2005 to 2017. He still managed to scrape up $91,000 for a country club membership, all on a DC appeals court judge’s salary ($220,650)! The president, who became an expert on escaping debtors’ prison (six bankruptcies, and failing brands like Trump Steaks, Trump Airline, Trump Mortgage, Tour de Trump, et al.) before improving his financial picture as president, can get further details about his nominee’s perilous financial condition in Mother Jones.

The president and his nominee du jour—he claims to have twenty-four other equally clean candidates up his sleeve—seem to share one trait. As POTUS acknowledges in Bob Woodward’s book Fear, he “has had some bad behavior towards women.”

By that he apparently meant the fourteen cases of women accusing him of groping.

Our president suffers from what is known as habeas gropus, a condition causing unwanted pawing of the opposite sex. I leave it to Krafft-Ebbing to fill in further medical details. It is similar to Tourette’s syndrome, which makes the president lie so frequently, e.g., every time his mouth is open.

We are lucky he did not grope Theresa May at her last NATO meeting. As far as we know.

But I digress. What the president most admires in his nominee is his legal theories. His favorite is the one that states a sitting president should be immune from prosecution while serving in office. Having to deal with due process would be distracting to a president’s golf game or visits to summer White Houses in Florida and New Jersey and other properties still not divested.[28]

We may yet find out where the latest associate justice stands along with his eight colleagues on the issue of a president self-pardoning himself even before he is charged with any wrongdoing.

My guess is that by the time you read this book the president will have declared his choice the greatest jurist since Oliver Wendell Holmes.

2.

The last time there had been such an engrossing drama over a presidential appointment of a judge to an important position in the government was in 1993. President Clinton had tried to ram through Kimba Wood, a respected federal district court judge, as his attorney general. She was knocked out of the box as a nominee because she had employed an undocumented immigrant to look after her child, and questions were raised about relevant tax issues. “Nannygate,” as it was called in the papers, ended with the judge’s withdrawal from consideration.

For a fortnight or so, We the People were serving in the venerable court of public opinion, weighing whether we wanted a Supreme Court justice with the cloud of a possibly credible accusation of attempted rape over his head sitting on the Highest Court of the Land.

As they say in Danish jurisprudence, something may be rotten.

As anyone who watches Law & Order: SVU knows, sexual abusers tend to have a pattern. The condition usually sticks with the perpetrator until they are too old to abuse—or too broke.

The question for our future Supreme Court associate justice: Was Dr. Ford the first on the hit list or was she a one-off by a drunken teenager?

Either way, if he lied under oath to get the judicial plum of a job, he is not qualified to serve in any court, let alone the US Supreme Court. Some of us would not put such a miscreant on the animal control court.

If the case fits the pattern, it is likely that other women will come forward now that Dr. Ford has broken the ice. Many abused people of both genders do not report their abuses for many reasons, but the most common is shame.

3.

By the week’s end, the case got even more morally challenged by the arrival of a witness for the alleged perpetrator. President Veracity himself was attesting to the qualifications of his nominee, “a fine man with an impeccable reputation.”

His advisers had warned him to keep his mouth shut. They didn’t want to give voters, especially women, the impression he was bullying an innocent alleged victim.

Perhaps not the best judge of character, given that seven members of his inner circle (so far) have been indicted or found guilty of lying to the FBI and other crimes, our POTUS couldn’t abide standing by idly while an issue was being debated in the media that wasn’t about him!

Throwing caution to the wind, the First Prevaricator had the gall to question the truthfulness of Dr. Ford.

What we see in action is a basic principle of media law that the greatest liar in the history of the presidency learned at the Roy Cohn School of Law: deny, deny, deny. No matter how many charges of alleged groping, for example, they are all lying. The road to the White House was paved with denials. “Deny . . . deny . . . deny” as the groper in chief’s immortal defense went, followed by a “See you in court,” a legal term he uses that means “never.”

4.

As a friend of the court, I have a suggestion. I see the nominee as a fine man with an impeccable reputation who would not choose to serve as the designated rookie on the Supreme Court Nine with the dark gray cloud of suspicion hanging over his head. It would have been the honorable thing to tell his friends and supporters that he had decided to stick to coaching girls’ basketball, betting on baseball games, being in debt by spending over his means, like any other red-blooded patriotic American. He did not want to be yet another blot on the integrity of a court that already has Clarence Thomas sitting in the corner.

Yes, Virginia, he would have been doing the right thing by withdrawing his name for consideration. Let POTUS, who is beating the rap for sexual abuse, nominate the second most reputable person he knows.

Of the first 608 days in office, according to NBC News, POTUS spent 199 days at Trump country clubs and 154 days at Trump golf properties.

9. Kavanaughgate, Part II

Football can be harmful to the human mind, recent medical research is discovering.

Every time a lineman makes a tackle, as one veteran NFL player told a friend of mine, it’s an experience like being hit by a truck moving at 15 mph.

The game can also be mentally harmful to those who only sit and watch it on TV, according to my wife, a football widow, but that is the subject for another essay about human behavior.

Judge Kavanaugh listed football as his favorite activity in his formative years at prep school, next to his studies, community activities, and going to church on Sundays.

I am not blaming football and all its hits to the head and other bumps and bruises of the game for what may appear to be cognitive problems, such as memory lapses, in connection with the whodunit mystery regarding the allegations that passionate ex-football player Judge Kavanaugh may or may not have been the assailant of Dr. Ford, both of whom claim 100 percent memory certitude of the alleged event thirty-six years ago.

It could have been, the judge’s defenders argue, the alleged perp was a winner of a Brett Kavanaugh look-alike contest.

Some say the memory lapses may have been caused by an extracurricular fondness for an occasional beer in his teenage years, as he admitted in his precedent-breaking Fox News interview of a judge in the dock of TV cable news (September 24, 2018). It also could have been a six-pack or three of Schlitz, considered essential to enjoying a popular sport at Georgetown Prep, “100 Kegs–or Bust,” mentioned in the Judge’s official calendar/diary record, submitted in his defense.

Football teammates remember young Brett proudly holding aloft an empty keg in a 1983 social gathering. Three football team members who hosted parties, according to the failing New York Times, accounted for fourteen of the thirty-eight kegs the class of 1983 had finished at one point.

The slurred speech and staggering around the Yale campus in later years may not have been caused by the weight of his studies. Fighting his way through the watering holes of New Haven and ending mock trial hypotheticals by throwing glasses of ice cubes at disputants are among the recollections of classmates about the Rover Boy at Yale’s academic career, which fell down on the case like acid rain.

It is easy to blame alcohol for the SCOTUS candidate’s memory lapses or problems of veracity as he puked his way around campus, too drunk to remember this or that.

In the case of the president, a man who doesn’t touch the devil’s brew, it’s the hair spray that may have affected his mind. He has used enough of those aerosol cans, as previously credited to his record of achievement, to cause the hole in the ozone layer, even though global warming is a hoax.

Was the ex-footballer, a jock who was continually in training to become Saturday’s Hero in high school, now inches away from the goal line, scoring the Big TD in the Supreme Court Bowl, only to be tackled by a mere memory lapse or falsehood?

I suggest that fair-minded spectators usually can give a guy with a drinking, anger management, gambling addiction, and women problems a break, but memory lapses and veracity issues may be too much in picking a judge for the highest court in the land.

As I’ve already confessed in these amicus curiae on the Kavanaugh 4 SCOTUS case, I’m not a JD (Juris Doctor) but I am a graduate of the Perry Mason School of Law. A memory is just as important to a judge as fingers for typing are to a writer.

If he doesn’t remember staggering around the campus at Yale and getting into fights in New Haven bars, what else might be forgotten in the practice of being an associate justice in the Supreme Court?

For example, recusing himself in cases involving the pardoning of a president who has found him eminently “qualified” (quote marks included for irony). So what if his rabbi in the nominating process is such a judge of character, seven of his closest advisers already have been indicted or found guilty of lying to the FBI, and whose rap sheet includes fourteen current pending allegations of sexual misconduct?

As a friend of the court, I would further suggest the use of waterboarding as a memory-loss corrective. It is just another information-gathering device, as the nominee argued while a member of the Bush war cabinet legal team in the 1990s. No worse than taking a shower with one’s mouth open, according to Vice President Cheney.

Is Brett Kavanaugh, whose mom is a judge, guilty of nothing more than one stupid drunken thing as a teenager, or was he a serial committer so blitzed out in college he lost count? Is this a pattern of a character defect of telling less than the truth?

If Judge Kavanaugh is guilty of what some called “lying” under oath in the Dr. Ford case or any of the other current allegations of sexual misconduct, should he have been sitting as a judge in the United States Court of Appeals to the District of Columbia Circuit, let alone on the one-yard line of becoming an associate justice of the Supreme Court?

The nation waited with bated breath for the FBI to conclude its investigation. Is there anything on the market, some kind of mint or mouthwash for bated breath?

Meanwhile, what kind of message is being sent to the youth of America? Once you start not telling the truth in high school, who knows where it can lead? Why, you might even grow up to be president picking Supreme Court justices.

10. Kavanaughgate, Part III

If I were Judge Kavanaugh . . .

And I’m not.

I didn’t go to Georgetown Prep or any other private school, where you’re liable to become a self-entitled sociopath.

I didn’t keep calendars of my high school years, which were years I mostly want to forget, listing all the parties I never went to and times I threw up.

I don’t have a gambling problem, bet on baseball games, nor buy four season tickets every year.

I am not maxed out on three of my credit cards, nor in hock for a $100,000 personal loan from Bank of America.

I am not a lawyer or a respected judge in a Federal district court. Thank you for your service, Judge.

My mother was not a judge, and I wasn’t guilty of even one stupid thing in my teen years that I was too blitzed out to remember.

In fact, the only thing I have in common with the judge of the year is love of beer, although in my case it’s ale. UK ale. Skull Splitter from the Orkney Brewery, the Isle of Orkney, Scotland (“5,000 Years in the Making”), 8.5 percent alcohol by volume, is my current favorite.

The judge made his last Judiciary Committee confirmation appearance (September 27, 2018) sound like an episode of Cheers, the way he asked several senators what they preferred in the way of beverage.

It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had a Bud Lite or Coors by his side as he spoke, instead of the steady stream of bottles he kept taking swigs at, as Dr. Ford had of Coke. (My notes read: “What in the world is in the judge’s bottles, given the vehemence of his testimony?”)

I can’t pack away more than two “skis,” (as his diary/calendar referred to brews) before things get too hazy. Enemies of the People (the fake press) made it seem as if prep school boys in the 1980s were drunk as skunks, noting record-setting events of a “100 Keg Club.”

What else was there to do in the 1980s, it could be argued, but drink yourself blind without benefit of Facebook, cell phones, or taking and sending selfies?

As a duty to my Republican Party, I didn’t have to sit down for a third degree grilling on Fox News, as Judge Kavanaugh did (September 24, 2018), where I attested my school years were all about my studies, my sports, my community service, and my going to church every Sunday. The judge should have won an Oscar for his performance, saying seventeen times, as if rehearsed, all he wanted was “a fair hearing” and to “confirm his respect for women and his lifelong record of promoting dignity and equality.”

For his second performance at the rebuttal to Dr. Ford in Congress (September 27, 2018), his new act was as the angry jurist, a man who shouted at the committee members. I gave him four Kleenex for the weepy part of how he was not guilty of whatever he was being charged with, before startling dozing senators by screaming. It was all a political circus, revenge for losing the election, all orchestrated by the Clintons. Boss Trump couldn’t have written the tirade scene better himself.

The judge claimed Dr. Ford was ruining his life and career. Even I knew that couldn’t be true. He already had a job for life, provided he does not shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue, as his rabbi claims he can do. The DC Court of Appeals is not a bad gig for a young lawyer.

His performance as a judge, aside from lacking the judicial temperament and tone we expect from a pillar of rectitude, also raised the question of his academic credentials. “Did the vetting process for this candidate for the Supreme Court miss a very major flaw, namely inadequacy in Latin?” asked a source well versed in the legal profession’s mother tongue.

“Despite spending 12 years in Catholic school, Brett Kavanaugh was unable to translate the phrase Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,” my reliably informed source said. “Even a Latin know-little like me could have come up with something approximating ‘False in one thing, false in everything.’ Especially since this is a phrase commonly used in connection with jury charges and Kavanaugh has spent a lot of his life in courtrooms.”

This is the kind of “smear, pure and simple” that the judge warned us about on Fox and elsewhere.

As I was saying, if I were Judge Kavanaugh, what I would have done is go to the president. Tell him you appreciate his thinking of you. It’s been a great honor to serve as the designated associate justice these last few weeks, but you have decided to withdraw your name from consideration.

Even at that late date, as I have written, I’m sure the president had a list of other qualified jurists willing to serve. Offhand, he could have named Judge Moore of Alabama and Sheriff Joe of Maricopa County.

When the Democratic senators were asking for a “yes” or “no” on the need for a further FBI investigation, between you and me, Judge K., we know why you weren’t that enthusiastic. You did everything but whistle “Dixie.”

You and I know the Feds will get around to finding your former best bud, Mark Judge, author of the definitive account of the adventures of America’s frat boy, a character named “Bart O’Kavanaugh.” Judge’s work of fiction—Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk, which tells the story of the hero vomiting in cars and at scholarly parties—is not going to help your case.

And then the Republican Party can get back to trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

11. Kavanaughgate, Part IV

Well, I did my best. Every night, as we waited for the Honorable Senator from the Great State of Maine to make up her mind, I poured beer on my Susan Collins voodoo doll.

Would she vote nyet on the Kavanaugh seat on the bench?

Like many gullible registered Republicans, I hung by the thumbs all week. As Senator Collins goes, so goes the Supreme Court.

Then, after wrestling with her conscience, she came to a decision: BRETT’S IN! With that, the good guys in favor of preserving what was left of the sanctity of the highest court of the land lost the match, 1–0.

How was it possible that the distinguished legislator, the darling of us gullibles who was considered the leading moral force in the Congress, could vote for the dubious choice of the first pussy-snatcher, a man with fourteen allegations of sexual misconduct?

In her concession speech as the moral conscience of the Senate, she explained there just wasn’t enough corroborative evidence in the quickie FBI supplemental report for her. So what if we now have for the next thirty or forty years a court that may or may not be tainted? She could proudly say in words, to the effect, “He is what he is.”

Her decision left inquiring minds asking:

Why didn’t the gullible FBI talk to the twenty-six witnesses Dr. Ford’s lawyers had provided who might corroborate the professor’s allegations? Not to mention Counselor Michael Avenatti’s stable of witnesses ready to testify under oath regarding his client’s infamous charges?

And speaking of gullibles, why hadn’t the fake news, as the president has made a synonym for responsible journalism, pursued its own investigations, finding out exactly what the Ford 26 had to say? What were those gullibles in the press waiting for?

A reporter could contact six of those witnesses, my old editor at Newsday reminded me, and know if there is a story there or not. Depending on how open the witnesses are and whatever they have to say, maybe there’s nothing. Anything is possible. But the press not trying to find out was inexcusable.

Furthermore, why hadn’t the Bureau stumbled across any of Kavanaugh’s apparent glaring character defects during its previous six investigations as the altar boy of the year swiftly rose to the top of the Federal justice system like the cream in a bottle of spoiled whole milk? It’s not for nothing that we call it the Gullible Bureau of Investigation (GBI).

We gullibles of the nation have a right to know what it was the GBI didn’t have time to unearth in its fast-lane speedy drive-by probe that may besmirch a court that already leaves the nation hanging by its thumbs.

12. Armistice Cemetery Non-Visit

Somebody should explain to the more than two thousand Americans buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, at the foot of the hill where the Battle of Belleau Wood took place, some fifty miles outside of Paris, why their current commander in chief was MIA in the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the end of your war on November 11, 2018.

Something funny happened to him on the way to the cemetery.

It was raining.

Some Trumpologists opined the foul weather might have mussed his hair. The moisture makes it so frizzy; a “do” can be absolutely unruly in the rain.

What a golden opportunity it would have been for the president to express the dignity and majesty of the office of the most powerful nation in the world by wearing one of his MAGA hats to protect him from the elements.

Medical authorities were of the opinion the damp weather also may have affected his bone spur condition for which he was awarded the distinguished 4-F medal in the Vietnam War.

But you should understand it wasn’t his fault the game was called because of rain.

The White House apologies secretary blamed the Marines who didn’t want to fly a chopper in foul weather, although they had been known to do so on battlefields and under enemy fire.

You, the Fallen, who had gone over the top come rain or shine, might well ask, couldn’t our President Snowflake have gotten an Uber or Lyft driver to get him to the cemetery? The leaders of France and Germany and many others who were in Paris to mark the end of World War I came by the highway.

That would be demeaning. He had to arrive by chopper. That is what American Exceptionalism means. Pulling up in a car would have lowered our standing in the free world, unlike all the other things our first potentate has been doing by attacking our friends and allies in NATO, threatening to break their legs if they didn’t cough up more dough-re-mi in keeping the world safe from its enemies, like the Russian commies who are our best friends now.

You don’t understand that? Our brave dead could not know POTUS is involved in a hot relationship with Super Czar Vladimir the Great that will live in the annals of diplomatic romance fiction.

Neither rain, nor snow, nor the gloom of night, could have stopped the president from showing up, we bet, if it was a campaign rally at Aisne-Marne.

The problem is you guys don’t vote.

While it is said the dead always vote in Cook County (Illinois) and Hudson County (New Jersey), your country is rife with election fraud today.

It was bad enough that at most only 65 percent of the people—in a contentious election year—exercise the franchise you fought and died for. Our First Prevaricator keeps seeing three million “illegals” voting against him—even before an election takes place. He is what we used to call a sore winner.

Nobody likes to speak ill of the brain-dead, but there are a few other things you should know about our President of Some of the People All the Time.

He doesn’t know squat about World War I, or even World War II. The Cold War hasn’t crossed his radar screen yet. As Winston Churchill and other wise men have said, “We ignore history at the peril of its being repeated.”

Our Leader of the Free World is treating the rise of nationalism like it’s a beauty contest, a geopolitical Miss Universe. He doesn’t care who wins as long as he owns the franchise.

Should we forgive him for blowing off this day to honor you for making the ultimate sacrifice?

Look, he probably thought it was just another photo op, the old carrying-the-100th-anniversary-wreath thing. He has no knowledge that yours was the war to end all wars, as President Wilson explained, after promising during the campaign of 1916 to not get us involved in European wars. That’s politics.

The Wilsonian experiment might give pause to a president whose latest foreign policy adviser (Mr. Bolton) thinks the solution to any issue is going to war.

Yes, peace is hell for some of us, and, yes, it was a time of misery and misfortune for those who were otherwise detained, and couldn’t join the people dancing in the streets of Paris at 11 a.m. on that November 11, 1918.

If only the battles could have been canceled by rain.

Long after this controversy about why the president didn’t come to pay his respects, such as they were, to You the Fallen is forgotten, may you still rest in peace!

Thank you for your service.

13. Parade Deprivation

I felt bad for the president whose dream of having a big parade in his honor down Pennsylvania Avenue on Veterans Day (November 11, 2018) was shot down by penny-pinching bureaucrats, first the mayor of Swamp City (Washington), then by the bean counters at the Pentagon, cheered on by those traitors, the enemies of the people, fake news media.

What are we, anyway—ingrates? After all he had done for us in making America Great Again in only 585 days!

Knowing my president, I’m sure he also would have been grateful for the greatest parade ever, after the reading of the Inaugural Address (January 2017) to go with the greatest crowd ever for an Inaugural Day, according to his count.

Everybody loves a parade, and the president is no exception.

He considers it a perk of office, like being able to create a “national emergency” whenever a president wants for whatever reason, even when the emergency is self-created. It’s some country when a president can’t utilize the outrageous abuse of powers doctrine as a WMD (weapon of mass distraction), just because he wants to!

I tell you, this president is the Rodney Dangerfield of presidents. Gets no respect. So sad.

The parade thing came up again when the president was taking a victory lap for avoiding another shutdown over the southern border crisis. The newspapers were saying the president was relaxing from the rigors of the war against Fifth Columnists Laura Ingram, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and that Coulter woman by thinking about the glory of the military parade he originally saw in Paris, with the Fourth Republic’s troops marching down the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe.

True, we don’t have a Champs-Élysées or an Arc de Triomphe (but we may someday have an Arc de Trump, if Nancy, the Wicked Witch of the West, would loosen the purse strings and use some food stamp money to build one in the president’s honor).

Some also say this president couldn’t find Paris on a map, no less pronounce Champs-Élysées better than a fifth-grade student who is not taking French as a foreign language.

I’ll leave it to the psychobabblists to analyze fully the president’s fixation on military displays of power. He may suffer from parade deprivation, a condition associated with collecting toy soldiers growing up. Or it could be the chief executive has discovered a full general’s outfit with the fruit salad on the chest, left over by the West Wing costume department, and is hankering to wear it one day while waving at his military, the strongest in the world, since he has taken over as commander in chief and made it great again.

In our country, parade etiquette suggests parades are held for something important, like winning the Super Bowl or the World Series.

They also mark winning wars. We haven’t had one of those since beating Grenada in 1980. But we did have one for the return of a war hero, General Douglas MacArthur. Not after he was said to have missed the Bataan Death March, leaving Corregidor in a launch with his family and household help, or when he crossed the Yalu against the orders of President Truman, and caused the massive bug out enshrined in the truce with the North Koreans at the DMZ since 1953.[29]

If everybody wasn’t against treating the president with the respect he deserves, there would be a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue for the hero of the Second Mexican- American War of 2015–2019. The wall that someday will be securing the nation from being inundated by rapists, murders, drug lords, and criminals, not to mention leaf blowers, kitchen helpers, fruit and vegetable pickers, and others willing to do the jobs real Americans don’t want to do anymore and that would never have been discussed without the best president we have.

The wall is a symbol like the Alamo, and the president will be a legend like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, William B. Travis, and John Wayne, if it ever gets built.

I bet his friends the Russians would give him a parade worthy of his achievements in the field of Russo-American friendship. Not even Joe Stalin or Alger Hiss could have shut down a great capitalist state for thirty-five days, like Comrade President Agent Orange, whatever he is called in Cyrillic.

Those Russkies really know how to do military parades. In the old days, parade fans would see the same troops, tanks, rocket launchers, and missiles, as they turned around the far corner of Red Square and marched back, a strategy that inflated the ego instead of the cost. The North Koreans probably do the same thing.

My guess is The Big Orange will have to wait for the opening of the new one-billion-dollar one-hundred-story Trumpskaya Towerski in Moscow that the gang that couldn’t loot straight is handling for such a suitable honor. It would be testimony to his contributions to world peace.

Maybe not. With the Russian hoax thing still going on, the most the best president we have can expect is an orange-faced balloon the size of a blimp in future Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades.

All of which I believed as a veteran of the Korean War, but is refuted in William Manchester’s epic biography American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964.

14. Xmas Greetings

Mister President, sir:

First of all, thank you for your service. I never dreamed you’d last so long.

Secondly, I am sorry to hear about the problem at the Trump Foundation. I had been planning to send them a donation. Is it too late?

In my humble opinion, you’re doing great, sir, as you yourself opined on the official Twitter feed the other morning.

My compliments for not awarding yourself prematurely the honorific of GOAT, which in social-media-ese, as you know, is the millennial-friendly laurel Greatest Of All Time.

I don’t know how to tell you this, sir, but some of your constituents are nevertheless disappointed with your performance in office so far.

Well, what did they expect, I tell them—another Abraham Lincoln? Teddy Roosevelt? Even a Gerald Ford?

They should have known what they were getting when they voted for you: a totally inexperienced, unqualified real estate guy from Queens who got lucky. You were, after all, a man who did not read Foreign Affairs Quarterly, the Constitution, intelligence briefings, or anything else for that matter.

I appreciate it has been an especially bad week for you, sir, with this wall thing.

Some people don’t understand you have the right to act like a spoiled brat and shut down the country because Congress wouldn’t use our tax dollars—not yours, as you explained in the campaign debates, smart people don’t pay taxes—to build the wall that every real American wants.

“It’s my wall,” as you’ve explained, even if it may not be a wall anymore so much as “artistically designed steel slats.”

“It’s my government shutdown,” you said proudly, lest the Schumer-Pelosi mob try to steal your honors.

Some hypercritical citizens still don’t understand that it’s your right to say you’re pulling your troops out of those shithole countries in the Middle East one week and the next week increasing the number pulling overseas duty. Anyway, Syria and Afghanistan weren’t your concern; they belonged to that putz Bush, who started his Iraq War eighteen years ago.

I don’t think many of the majority who didn’t vote for you appreciate the magnitude of your achievement in your restraint in not starting the second Mexican-American War over this border thing. Before you nominate yourself for the Nobel Peace Prize, if you haven’t already done so, I second the nomination.

You alone deserve the credit for shutting down the government over this border thing, creating the most serious threat to the Republic since the British burned down the White House in the War of 1812. Magnanimity has never been one of your marks of leadership. Yet another feather in your MAGA hat, Mister President. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Too bad about the federal employees who did not get a paycheck during the holidays.

I’m sure the troops who did not go home for Xmas didn’t mind spending the holidays stringing up concertina wire to keep out those mothers and children and other victims of inhumane violence, corruption, crime, brutality, and lack of freedom who would be invading the country if not for you. Our troops are learning valuable skills useful in future immigration battles.

As I tell those Emma Lazarus “huddled masses” fans, being a president is a rotten job, but somebody has to do it.

Another achievement you don’t get credit for is creating new job opportunities. A sterling example is the unsung hero at the Toronto Star named Daniel Dale, the Washington bureau chief, whose claim to fame is being the most reliable counter of every false claim POTUS has made since Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017. As of December 5, 2018, the most reliable counter had reached 3,924 false things.

Sounds like fake news to me. I personally counted 9,500. Either way, he will be enshrined in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Dale candidly admits that his paper can’t be sure each and every false statement was intentional. In some cases the president may have been confused or ignorant. Nevertheless, future historians will say there has never been such a constant liar in the annals of the presidency.

Who says you haven’t made America great in some way?

It’s still amazing how at least 34.9 percent of us in the base still haven’t figured out that your relationship with truth is worse than your relationships with Ivana and Marla.

As the win-win president when the game is all over by 2024 or whenever, in your opinion, your services are no longer needed, we can say with certainty that you will be declaring yourself the greatest president we ever had including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, as a random sampling.

Until then may I wish you a merry Xmas and a very rich and prosperous New Year. Wink-wink.

VI. THE TRUMPONICLES 2019

1. The State of the Union

I was appalled and disgusted by the number of presumably loyal citizens who didn’t watch the State of the Union Address on February 5, 2019. Where was the respect for the highest office in the land?

There were mitigating circumstances.

A number of the absentees were still asleep from the Stupor Bowl thriller two days earlier.

The nation also was in the midst of an outbreak of dreaded acute Trumpitis. After 690 days into the administration of the best president we have one third of the nation was recovering from a previous attack of the malady, one third was following doctors’ orders to limit exposure to the bug, and one third is wondering what the fuck I’m talking about. Watching the president on TV, as previously warned in these pages, can cause acute stomach pains and nausea. Public health advocates believe his appearances should be added to the FDA list of the most dangerous and addictive substances. There is no known cure, other than abstinence.

It turned out that only 43 percent of the nation’s Republicans actually watched the 2019 address, according to a CBS poll. I was one of them. Feeling like a designated viewer for the no-shows in my crowd, as a public service, I prepared the following report.

With all due respect, the eighty-two-minute SOTU, the third-longest in history, was offal. It was the most boring State of the Union, since the last one, a pep rally without the pep. I fell asleep three times during the first half when he was taking credit as the Great Unifier.

By the time he was listing his achievements in foreign policy, it reminded me of those speeches politburo members gave to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where the importance of a speech was measured by its length and how many vodka toasts could interrupt it.

Nevertheless, it was a valuable learning experience. You got to see and hear what our boy sounds like when he is nervous.

What could he possibly be nervous about? Well, it could be the six witch hunts being launched by the new, unimproved (in his unbiased opinion) House of Representatives with its Democratic majority, those “partisan, ridiculous investigations,” as he called them, any one of which could throw his children in the clink, or his impeachment, either or both.

Beyond “the unlimited presidential harassment,” as he calls congressional oversight of the executive branch, as required by the Constitution, is the final report by the Mueller team. Despite his “nyet collusion” assurances, who knows if the Mueller people found a president listed in the KGB payroll as “Agent Orange”?

Furthermore, the un-American crazed Democratic witch hunters, believers in the political science “follow the money” principle, are starting to work on finding the greatest business genius’ missing tax filings. The search for the Holy Grail is easier.

Following the rubles may raise questions about the remarkable number of Russian kleptocrats with ties to Putin who have bought condos in Trump Organization properties in New York and Miami. The family is said to have already earned $300 million off the top on penthouse suites sold to the oligarchy even before the billion-dollar, one-hundred-story fabulous Trump Tower in Moscow is built. All of this may be coincidental.

In an apparent digest version of his Twitter communiqués that year, the president’s SOTU addressed the economy, tax reform, immigration problems, Venezuela, ISIS, Afghanistan, veterans, the need for unity, and savage M-13 gangs. The only thing left out might have been updates on his love affair with Putin.

My favorite part of the speech was the president’s going nuclear in his attack on the menace of SOCIALISM!

I knew what he meant. I grew up in the days when my Republican Party leaders used to denounce FDR’s New Deal as pure socialism or impure socialism, I forget which. Either way, it kept me awake at night as a kid worrying about the Social Security evil that would bankrupt the nation by the time I got to use my contributions.

And who in my greatest generation will ever forget the dreaded AMA (American Medical Association) warnings about socialistic medicine—Medicare! The evil was equally denounced by the super-patriotic NAM (National Association of Manufacturers).

As Donald the Red raved on about the dangers of socialism, I could almost hear the cheers breaking out in the Kremlin TV den:

“USA . . . USA . . . USA.”

Or maybe it was:

“USSR . . . USSR . . . USSR.”

No presidential appearance on TV would be complete without “the wall thing.” There are those who say the president’s fixation on the wall as the final solution to immigration reform makes him seem like un pendejo (Spanish slang for “idiot”). They ignore the symbolic content of his obsession.

If only the best president we have would take the advice of Prof. Nick Johnson of the University of Iowa College of Law, who proposes that a big beautiful wall on the Southern border be built out of Legos. “A simple, fair, humane, cheaper solution,” argues Prof. Johnson. “Legos are a staple in every American home, often under foot. All real Americans would be willing to donate their surplus used Legos, which would keep the nation as safe as any other more expensive material.”

All real Americans, regardless of party affiliation, to avoid another stupid shutdown, I might add, would even be willing to donate their Lincoln Logs.

2. National Coulter Emergency

Our president is taking a lot of abuse for his courageous act in declaring a national emergency on the Southern border.

“It’s an invasion,” as the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet said in the first of his series of Rose Garden National Emergency Addresses of 2019 (January 15 to February 15, 2019). He saw the influx of Central American rapists, murderers, criminal gangs, drug lords, and mothers with children who have been walking north not to mention the terrorist leaf blowers, kitchen helpers, fruit and vegetable field pickers, and others willing to do jobs real Americans don’t want to do anymore as “a national emergency.”

Despite his, in effect, thanking himself for ending the thirty-five-day shutdown he had caused, some of his best friends—not including Vlad the Poisoner and the fellow oligarchs in the kleptocratic wing of the Politburo who think he is still the best thing to happen to Russia since the invention of vodka—are less than thrilled with his conduct in the current crisis.

Some are praising him for not causing Mexico—in retaliation, to revoke the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, ending the Mexican-American War of 1847, which Abraham Lincoln opposed—to go to the UN, citing the right of return, demanding as reparations the return of its beloved Texas, not necessarily a bad thing. It didn’t shut up the loony birds in the bleachers of cable and talk radio.

I’m talking about the members of the far-right lunatic fringe of the punditocracy, the Fifth Columnists who are now stabbing the president in the mouth, folks like Laura, Rush, Hannity, Tucker, and all his friends at Fox & Best Friends who see his conduct at the border as an existential crisis.

“Caver” is the good thing these other unsung enemies of the people have said about the ending of those glorious thirty-five days in the trenches the president spent without playing golf or taking a vacation from Oval Office duties.

As if it wasn’t bad enough, Ann Coulter—once a pro bono adviser, who the president now says he rarely talks to—called the big beautiful wall of the president’s dreams “a monstrosity”!

A premature critical ejaculation since it hasn’t even been built yet, and won’t be for a while. Remember, it took 2,500 years for that other famous wall in China to be finished completely in 1635!

It took courage for the president to face Coulter, leader of the Stepford Wives far-right wing of the media. “The only National Emergency,” motormouth Coulter said on KABC Radio in Los Angeles that day that will live in her infamy (February 15, 2019), “is that our president is an idiot.”

Furthermore, she called him “the greatest wimp since George W. Bush,” a low blow against the nation’s wimps. The president may read at a fifth-grade level, but he is no wimp.

Witness his rebuttal: “Maybe I didn’t return her phone call or something.” Touché![30]

It had been a profile in courage watching the president establishing his credentials in the art of compromise by reopening the doors of the government he had closed down.

Similarly, he had the courage to say the real Americans who worked for the federal government didn’t mind not getting paid in the fight for the wall. Real Americans, as his Commerce Secretary argued, could always take out loans from a Wells Fargo bank or some other financial institution in which the First Family might own stock.

Others questioned his use of the self-declared terminology “national emergency.”

Previously, just for the record, “national emergency” meant real emergencies like the bombing of Pearl Harbor. A “national emergency” today, we are learning, is something a president can do for whatever reason, even when the “emergency” is self-created, a perk of office, like flying to Bedminster, New Jersey, for a golfing weekend, only 212 miles from the Oval Office, as crows and Air Force One fly.

Well, it is some country, indeed, when a president can’t utilize the Outrageous Abuse of Powers codicil to the Unwritten Constitution—the Trumpian Doctrine, as future historians might name it—as a WMD (weapon of mass distraction) just because he is, say, not getting his way with other branches of government.

What this means: if the Wicked Witch of the West, Horrible Nancy (Pelosi), and her open-border Democrats had given him the money to build his wall, the infrastructure plank in his MAGA program, there wouldn’t have been a “national emergency.”

I will leave it to constitutional scholars to decide if all of this is good or bad for democracy. What I’m concerned about here is clarifying my position on the wall, which the president says every real American wants built.

I would agree that a wall should be erected along the border. The ENTIRE border, including in front of Mar-a-Largo and all the other expensive oceanfront properties in Florida, California, and up the coasts to Sea Island Kiawah Island and Clint Eastwood’s Carmel—everywhere.

In short, I am a pro-wall freak, a believer in the theories of Prof. Andrew Fisher IV, a leading wallologist at the New Jersey Institute of Applied Irreproducible Sciences. Dr. Fisher especially advocates a wall in Manhattan, one tall enough to block from view those hideous spiky apartment towers where the empty apartments are all owned by Chinese, Russian, and Arab trillionaires.

Such a wall also would be advantageous to residents of New Jersey who think the West Side Trump Towers mar the view from the bucolic Sopranos State.

Among the president’s weapons in strengthening border security, I was the first to suggest, might be recordings played over the loudspeakers at the border of Ann Coulter’s radio rants. Who would want to enter a country where hers is the voice of reason to real Americans who want the wall?

3. Is He a Communist—or Just a Dupe Taking Orders from the Kremlin?

It’s not nice suggesting anybody is a fellow traveler, a party pink, a commie rat, an un-American subversive by any name. It’s so 1950s. That used to be something our Republican party was very good at whenever we had a Red Scare. We still use the technique in labeling some Democrat a left-leaning “Nancy Pelosi progressive” or the even scarier “liberal.”

I was reminded of the persuasive power of suggestion while listening to Justice with Judge Jeanine one night in January on Fox News, the second most reliable source of information after the Congressional Record.

“Are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?” asked Judge Pirro, TV’s best-known judge since Simon Cowell of America’s Got Talent fame, who keeps me up to date on the president’s thinking.

“I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked,” POTUS responded, without answering the question.

Judge Pirro was not unhappy with the president’s nonresponse. The Westchester Torquemada, who was also serving at the time as a legal analyst for Fox, often calls finding fault with the president a mental health problem, which she terms “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

In regards to Trump’s possible collusion with Putin, she argued earlier on Fox & Friends, “I mean come on, snap out of it, everybody, the guy is doing what he’s supposed to be doing and that is protecting us.”

As a registered Republican who occasionally has fits of derangement—I diagnosed myself as having come down with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) during the Republican presidential primary debates of 2016—I begin to think, maybe that wasn’t such a trick question from Madam Judge, after all.

What if our president was working for another country, say, Russia, to choose one at random, when he should have been working on his golf game or figuring out other ways to make a mockery of the emolument clause so he can profit from public service and ensure his kids will not fall below the poverty level after his second term?

In the thrall of TDS, I asked myself, what has the president done for his other employer lately in the way of suspicious activity? Well, let’s look at his employment record.

I’d give him an A-plus on this shutting down the government over this wall thing.

It was something Sacco and Vanzetti couldn’t do. Eugene V. Debs . . . Harry Bridges and the International Longshoremen’s Union . . . Norman Thomas . . . Owen Lattimore . . . Alger Hiss and all those Reds in the State Department that Uncle Joe McCarthy warned us about who lost China . . . Henry A. Wallace . . . Pete Seeger and The Weavers . . . The Hollywood Ten, who were making subversive movies like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Pride of the Yankees . . . Corliss Lamont . . . the Rosenbergs . . . Eugene McCarthy . . . Jimmy Wechsler and other editorialists in Commie rags like Dolly Schiff’s New York Post and Marshall Field’s PM . . . I. F. Stone and his newsletter . . . Walt Kelly and Pogo . . . Paul Robeson . . . the hundreds of soap opera bit actors, writers and wardrobe assistants who became unemployable after making the Red Channels blacklist . . . Pert Kelton, the original “Alice Kramden” on The Honeymooners . . . Herblock . . . Woody Guthrie and folk singers in general . . .

Not even Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and all those other potential threats to American democracy enshrined in J. Edgar Hoover’s secret files, none of those people were able to shut down the government for a single day.

A single day would have been an achievement worthy of the Hero of the Soviet Union, a gold star medal awarded for courageous feats in service to the Soviet Union, bestowed on only forty-four foreign citizens since 1934.

But the best president we have shut down the government over the wall thing for over a month! Holy Whittaker Chambers!

It would have been enough that he managed to turn our Republican Party into one of those communist-front organizations on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, required under the Smith Act. The Grand Old Party, riddled with cowards afraid of incurring the presidential snarky nickname on Twitter, has replaced CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States of America) as the party whose titular leader has never said a bad word against Russia.

The answer to Judge Pirro’s question will not be known for a while. By law, the files of the KGB, now known as FSS (Federal Security Service) and FIS (Foreign Intelligence Service), will not be opened for seventy-five years. Until then, we are free to refer to our president as Agent Orange, or not.

Suffice it to say that Commissar Stalin would be very satisfied with how the Make Russia Great Again campaign is progressing under the leadership of its man in Washington.

I was appalled and disgusted with myself that I had written the above claptrap at the height of a massive TDS attack. It told me it may be time for the best president we have to drop that no collusion/no collusion thing.

Even though there was no collusion, what could he possibly been colluding about?

4. A Patriot Talks to His President

Citizen Trump,

Can we talk?

Excuse me for interrupting your busy day, sir. As a man who has had nothing but good to write about you, regardless of what the fact-checkers might say, I have a modest proposal.

I realize this is a lot to ask. It may be virtually impossible, like expecting chimpanzees to write Twitter messages equal to yours. The CAPS would throw them, even the smart ones who, put in a room with a keyboard and given enough time, could write Shakespeare’s plays, or at least a sonnet.

I might as well blurt it right out at the risk of your taking umbrage: Why not come clean with the American people, sir? Tell the truth! Not what you called it in The Art of the Deal, “truthful hyperbole,” or “innocent exaggeration.” Not the truth as you see it. But the real truth. The truth truth!

Not the truth you delivered on the stump as a presidential candidate, of which PolitiFact evaluated more than five hundred assertions and found 69 percent of them “mostly false” false or “pants on fire” false.

Not what the Washington Post truth-seekers documented to be 2,140 false or misleading claims in your first year in office.

That sounds like fake news. By my count, it was closer to 5,000.

I’m talking about the plain truth, the whole truth, so help you God, Mammon, or whoever is the holy of holies for a real estate developer.

What I’m proposing is for you to tell our fellow citizens the real truth about “this Russian thing,” the hoax cooked up by the FBI and Crooked Hillary about so-called collusion with the Commie Red rats.

Your administration is doing GREAT, as you have written. Better than the first hundred days of FDR’s! And that was before you accomplished anything.

You already are the most popular president in Russia since FDR, who gave the USSR billions in military aid. Of course, that was during World War II when the Commies were on our side, losing twenty-two million people by fighting Hitler and the Nazis.

Is it worth, I ask, ruining your reputation as the best forty-fifth president we ever had by sticking to the nyet collusion theory?

The reason I am suggesting this difficult course of action is because denials aren’t what they used to be.

Everybody knows today that denial is a river in Egypt.

Anybody can deny anything on TV news. Buzzers do not go off. The truth police don’t shut the channel down.

No matter how many times you write on Twitter.

Nyet collusion

As one of your fans, Chris Matthews, said on Hardball (MSNBC) the other night, “What could possibly be so damned bad that he’s hiding?”

Let us assume that everybody, except the base or total idiots, pardon the redundancy, has believed for the last eighteen months that it seems like you are covering something up.

As Marx (Groucho) said, “Whaddya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but here is how it all went down:

First of all, it wasn’t your fault what happened.

You ran for president in 2016 as a joke. Lesser untalented, inexperienced, unqualified TV personalities had done it, such as Pat Paulsen, who ran for president in 1968. None of them were self-made billionaires like you. Herman Cain, the pizza king, had 999 reasons to run in 2012. Rick Perry, the Texas gas and oil man, couldn’t remember why he was running.

While you were busy collecting material for the next volume of your autobiography, research for your reality TV series, blockbuster movie, or all of the above by running for president, your Gang That Couldn’t Loot Straight was running around making deals with the Russki oligarchs for you and themselves, all based on the premise that you would lose the election and be able to cash in.

Was it your fault you didn’t lose?

Meanwhile, you fell in love with the leadership qualities of the democratically elected (98 percent of the vote in a one-person election) President Putin, while in Moscow looking over the talent in “Miss Universe” pageants, which you owned. Little did you know the ex-KGB thug Putin was conducting experiments with new cyber warfare tools, which the Russians liked to claim they invented, along with radio, the airplane, synthetic rubber, the steam engine, the electric light bulb, the locomotive, penicillin, the harvester combine, the Antarctic continent, and baseball.

Could the Politburo’s scientific geniuses, by utilizing most trusted social media sources of misinformation—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever—affect an American election, something the Communist Party (CPUS) had failed to do at the polls with such legendary Stalinist presidential candidates as Gus Hall and William Z. Foster in the 1940s?

Incredibly, you won. It was as if you, Mister President, and Commissar Putin had won the lottery.

That’s why it looks so bad now. Blame the minority of the American people who elected you.

There was no post-election strategy plan to deal with the embarrassment of victory. That’s why your team looked like the Gang that Couldn’t Loot Straight.

But all of that is ancient history, tovarich.

You can continue being a Stakhanovite liar adding to the world record for saying “nyet collusion”—or you can try my new radical approach, telling the truth.

In the unlikely event that this caper ever goes to trial, you can plead nolo contendere. You don’t need a pundit from New Jersey to tell you the value of pleading “not guilty” with “No Admission of Guilt,” the way crooked big banks and corporate polluters beat the rap these days.

Keep in mind also, sir, we Americans are quick to forget anything. What we can’t abide is stonewalling. If Nixon had simply taken the blame and promptly fired his clumsy Watergate bunglers, he would be remembered as a great statesman for opening the door to China.

What do you have to lose? So you won’t get to own the tallest building in Moscow, which can be used by Putin opposition candidates for accidentally throwing themselves off the roof. Or those golf clubs in Siberia.

Come clean with the American people.

The base will still love you. You are the Messiah of the Republican Party, the conservatives’ wet dream, the man who finally gave conservatives all three branches of government, especially a Supreme Nine that bats from the right side. Not to mention packing the lower courts with 190 right-wingers, some of whom are as ignorant about the law as the president of the United States. At last, your people are doing away with all those silly regulations so we can have polluted air and undrinkable water.

The faithful following the Trumpian Know Nothing religion never believed that Russian thing, anyway. To whatever shortcomings of electing an ignoranus POTUS, they said, “So what?”

So why don’t you tell us in your own words what happened. And then we can all get back to the really important story: What was Stormy Daniels really like?

(signed)

Your Favorite Pundit, The One Who Has Consistently Said That You Are the Best President We Have.

P.S. Where do I send my donation to help build the wall?

5. Third-Year Report Card

Thank you for your service again, Mister President.

Using the Standard & Poor’s bond rating scale, I give your work on behalf of yourself and the other American people an AAA, the tops, awarded only to such other business enterprises as Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson in 2018.

It’s shameful the way some people don’t appreciate your efforts. All the abuse you’re taking from the socialists who can’t get over your winning in 2016 violates the Constitution’s ban against cruel and unusual punishment.

Weren’t they impressed by your claim that you were at 9/11? Not as a first responder, as you explained at the ceremonies hailing the signing of the long-delayed 9/11 compensation act. That was because you were piloting the Enola Gay when it was dropping the bomb at Hiroshima. Or so it sounded. You are so creative, Mister President, although your enemies might call it further proof you are the greatest liar ever in the Oval Office.

Too bad about your friend Jeffrey and his latest scandal. Of course, you hardly knew him, as you say now. But the two of you were party animals before you went into politics, according to the fake news. Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump back in the 1990s were the moral center of the nation.

Your economy is still doing great, although your tariff policy confuses some people, including the fake economists. They say you don’t seem to know what you’re doing throwing those rate numbers around, making it up as you sit down at the Twitter feed. If only they had gone to Wharton, like you.

You couldn’t even volunteer the use of your Trump National Doral Miami as the site of the next G7 Summit Meeting after Biarritz without the socialists trying to smear your motives.

Didn’t matter that a White House study of possible sites found it was the best place in the nation to hold such an international gathering. Didn’t matter that going to Miami in June is cruel and unusual punishment. Didn’t matter that the prestigious golf.com named Doral the Golf Resort of the Week in November 2019.

So what if the property was “severely underperforming” for years, as the Washington Post reported, and had been heading further south ever since customers began avoiding your brand name during the 2016 election. Not only did Macy’s drop Trump neckties, but the PGA yanked a major golf tournament from Trump Doral. In a statement to WaPo, your son Eric Trump, who runs day-to-day operations in the family business, blamed the sales declines on Miami-Dade’s Zika outbreak in 2016 and 2017’s Hurricane Irma.

Where did stupid people get the idea the Trump Organization was trying to profit from the offer?

You’re getting no credit for your selfless generosity and willingness to ignore the positive publicity side factor in the patriotic gesture. We seem to forget, as Mick Mulvaney explained it, the president “still considers himself in the hospitality business,” presumably on loan to his country for the duration.

A lot of the so-called experts still don’t seem to understand the thrust of your administration is to create chaos. And it’s working.

Look at how successful one of the major initiatives of your third year in office is doing. You are dividing the nation better than any president since the Civil War.

There are still some parts of the country where people are living in peace and harmony with mutual respect for their friends and neighbors, regardless of race, creed, or country of origin. It was ingenious getting the hotheads in the base to suggest we send them back to wherever they came from, even if they are legal citizens.

Admittedly, it’s a risky idea since everybody except the Native Americans whose land we stole came from somewhere else.

I’m okay since my family arrived with the founding immigrants on the Mayflower, if family lore is to be believed, in steerage. But your people are from Sweden, according to the official campaign autobiography (Art of the Deal). Hej och, Svenska! We’ll be lucky if one of your fans doesn’t burn a fiery cross in front of the White House.

You’re doing a splendid job riling up the base, sir. Race-baiting is an old American tradition that, despite 600,000 dying in a war to end it (you may have heard of our Civil War), still is not over. Somebody needed to throw lighter fluid on the hot coals of racism always smoldering in this country, and you’ve been doing it to acclaim from the white supremacist wing of the base on the 2020 campaign trail. Four MAGA hats off to you, sir!

The word from “the racist in chief” to the devoted followers about the message for 2020 is out. As a patriotic poster or commercials for the next campaign might put it:

ALL IN FOR RACISM

Stumbling on to the center stage of history from the wings is the latest Trumpist contribution to American civilization:

MAHA. Making America Hate Again!

JOIN THE NEW FOUR-H CLUB!

• Hate is good.

• Hate is real.

• Hate is natural.

• Hate is American.

Members are instructed to Hate like there’s no tomorrow!!!

DON’T BE LEFT BEHIND! Join in and start hating again! Be the first one on your block to hate like a real American!

DIVIDE AND CONQUER! Onward to victory in 2020!

At least the guy is honest, some might argue. Not like all those other phony politicians.

6. Artificial Stupidity

We all know that our president is a loyal, red-blooded, patriotic American who is being smeared by socialists in Washington who think the Democrats won the election in 2016, just because they got 2,864,974 more votes.

He believes Ukrainians hacked our sacred election process, not the Russians, a fact confirmed by an objective authority, V. Putin.

He doesn’t trust any of our seventeen major intelligence agencies, especially the FBI. “Human scum,” he calls them, a term he also uses for some Republicans who are less than enthusiastic about him (such as Senator Romney of Utah).

He has accused politicians like Sleazy Sneaky Shifty Schiff and Crazy Nancy Pelosi of being corrupt. Every politician is corrupt, in his opinion, except the man who could be the most venal in American history.

Everybody is lying, with the possible exception of himself.

He doesn’t have any clear foreign policies, except he’s pro-Russian.

But one thing makes No. 45 stand out from all the other corrupt, lying unpredictable presidents: he is the stupidest president of all time.

Being stupid is not an impeachable offense. It’s not even a pejorative in the land of Gulliblesylvania, a democratic country ruled by 34.9 percent of the people, a minority better known as “the base.” The Always Trumpers know stupidity when they see it. That’s what they like about No. 45. He is one of them.

He has Made Stupidity Great Again (MSGA).

His accomplishments in the field of highest-level stupidity are regularly seen and admired by his 40 million followers on Twitter, often several times a day. One day in January 2020 he posted or reposted 142 messages on Twitter, smashing the previous record of 123 he set in December 2019. Many also see him being quintessentially stupid in inaudible press conferences on the South Lawn of the White House, mercifully drowned out by the roar of Marine One. His stupid remarks are repeated later by the Official Hearing Aids, Fox & Friends every morning and the Sean Hannity Show every night.

All of this works for No. 45 because he has a unique power: Artificial Stupidity!

Everybody has heard of Artificial Intelligence or A.I. Less widely known is Artificial Stupidity, the latest development in human mental growth. It’s what experts call seriously stupid.

No database has yet been created for Artificial Stupidity. Such a database would codify all stupid ideas, concepts, initiatives, changes of mind and other things those blessed with Artificial Stupidity know in their gut, where decisions are often made by the transcendentally stupid, although their wisdom is often confused with gas on the stomach.

While we wait for software to be invented to help us understand it, an early example of Artificial Stupidity is POTUS’s performance in the Ukrainian thing, that “utterly discredited, long debunked far left smear,” as the impeachment inquiry hearings in the House are described by Stephanie Grisham, current holder of the Sarah Huckabee Sanders chair of honest journalism in the White House secretariat.

Thanks to Artificial Stupidity, Mr. Trump portrayed his asking “for a little favor” from a foreign leader—namely to dig up some mud to throw at a political opponent—as an act of fighting corruption, rather than the Trumpster version of a mob boss conducting a shakedown.

The anti-corruption crusader is using Trump metrics, the old 2+2=5 (or any other number) formula for cleaning up the Ukraine.

Not resting on his laurels, the corruption fighter is now imploring his camp followers at rallies to “READ THE TRANSCRIPTS!”

This assumes they can read. Furthermore, it seems to suggest the Artificial Stupidity–impaired president doesn’t realize that “the perfect beautiful” phone call, in which one president is holding anti-tank Javelin missiles to the head of another foreign leader in exchange for slime about a domestic political opponent incriminates him rather than exonerates him.

With full-blown Artificial Stupidity, POTUS says he even plans to read the Whistle Blower transcripts of July 25 on his coming fireside chats, as America’s Real Mayor (Fiorello La Guardia) read the comics during newspaper strikes during his childhood in the Big Mango.

For this and other stupid acts too numerous to mention here, including intimidating a witness with one of those stupid tweets during the second day of the I-hearings, another impeachable offense, it’s easy to see why the First Doofus[31] deservedly has been nominated as the 2019 poster boy for Artificial Stupidity.

“Doofus” is a Latin word, the plural of which is “Doofi.”

VII. THE ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT

Article I: Why Are We Impeaching the President?

We the minority of Gulliblesylvania elected a president of Some of the People All the Time who, let us not forget, was only 2,864,974 short of a majority in the 2016 election. A distinguished alumnus of the Electoral College (class of 2016), he gave up a life as a famous New York real estate mogul, reality TV personality, and Page Six star to answer the call to serve the public for four more, or eight, years. Or, maybe, among the term limits he has been suggesting at campaign rallies lately to the really rank and file, “12 . . . 16 . . . 24?”

As it turned out, his first three years of duty as POTUS have been a monstrous, disgraceful, idiotic, and frightful period in the history of the republic. But is that any reason to terminate him?

Where is our respect for the Electoral College with this impeachment thing?

So what if the Electoral College elected a totally inexperienced, unqualified, incompetent, stupendously stupid candidate who claimed to be an incredibly great businessman with only six bankruptcies on his C.V., smart enough not to pay taxes, a stable genius, who has turned the White House into the nuthouse in only thirty-six months.

How can we now try to get rid of the First Conman, the first ever put in the highest office in the land by Russian hackers or the Ukrainians. His dog’s body-man Giuliani has been working like a dissident in a Siberian salt mine to prove it was them.

Now I realize this Ukrainian thing the socialists in the House are using as evidence of abuse of power makes him look bad. From sworn testimony, the beautiful perfect phone call asking the Ukrainian president to do him “a little favor” sounds a lot like Al Capone suggesting he become a 50/50 partner in a Chicago dry cleaning store, or it will blow up, accidentally.

But in the first three years of his acting “presidential” there were so many other impeachable offenses, like that silly emolument clause thing. He swore to obey and uphold the Constitution, but isn’t not reading or understanding it a mitigating defense?

Anyway, how do you get the best people to run for office, without honest graft?

Sure, he’s corrupt. “A corrupt politician” is redundant. As a New Jersey Republican consultant told me, that’s why people go into politics. “Democrats, at least,” he added. “Republicans do it as a public service.”

That first “greatest cabinet ever in the history of the presidency,” as No. 45 described it on opening day, was filled with lobbyists and executives from the industries their departments were supposed to be regulating. With the president at the head of the table, it was like a page out of The Thousand and One Nights: “Ali Donald & The Forty Thieves.”

No. 45 is so well respected in world affairs that he has been invited to attend the May Day Parade in Red Square next year. At least In Moscow, there will be none of those “Lock him up” chants like he got on Veterans Day 2019 in New York.

Furthermore, how can we impeach a man who will be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest liar in the history of American politics? As of his 993rd day in office (October 14, 2019), according to the Washington Post, he has made 13,435 false statements or lies. That’s fake news. I counted 15,245 myself, including an awesome five fibs in one sound bite on Fox & Friends on Fixed, I mean Fox, News.

Can you imagine what would happen to the nation if a president suddenly started telling the truth about WTF is going on? It wouldn’t be the morning in America that Ronnie Reagan promised we’d get by electing him in 1984.

Without President Plump, who is going to warn us about the huddled masses of immigrant thugs at the southern border gates?

Who is going to befriend all the misunderstood and unappreciated fellow tyrants, like Putin and Erdoğan?

And, even worse, without Trump doing something wild and crazy every morning when he sits down at his Twitter feed or flies off to another campaign rally on Air Farce One, the New York Times will be only two or three pages long.

Article II: Yet Another Case of Presidential Harassment

Listening to MSNBC, my favorite socialist cable news network, I keep hearing all these enthusiastic radical voices, like Nicole Wallace, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and their guest experts discussing the Impeachment, even though it is “a scam, a hoax, the greatest witch hunt in American history.” All give the impression that by the end of the next commercial break, it will be curtains for our reality TV president.

Nobody likes to rain on a victory parade, but IMO impeachment won’t happen. And here’s why:

1. Putin won’t allow it. After all the hard work by his tech people getting the Muscovite Candidate elected, it wouldn’t be fair for him not to be allowed to finish his allotted term, as per the Constitution.

Who better is able to fulfill Putin’s remaining foreign policy objectives, like readmission to the G7 summit? Comrade Trump champions the Russkies’ cause at every summit, no matter how much it makes him look like a Putin puppet.

What other American president could have pulled off that Kurdish thing? Only he could have told Erdoğan on the phone call, look, it’s okay to bomb the Kurds, just don’t do it too hard. So what if the Kurds were the only members of the Coalition of the Willing willing to fight ISIS on the ground, fourteen thousand of them dying for the president’s USA . . . USA?

And wasn’t it great the way Moscow’s guy in the White House said he was ending our Endless Bush War by bringing our troops home, when actually they were only shuffled off down the road a piece from Syria to Iraq?

That was four shot glasses’ worth of vodka in diplomatic moves by Agent Orange, as the president is rumored to be listed in the old secret KGB pay book. It opened the door for the Russian military to become a dominant player in the Middle East, something the commissars have been trying to do since Stalin’s day.

And let’s not forget the way Giuliani has been working like a dissident in a Siberian salt mine trying to pin the meddling in the 2016 election on the Ukrainians.

2. Moscow Mitch won’t allow it. The Senate Republican majority leader told us he didn’t like that nickname. So in deference, I will not call him that. Even before the House impeachment hearings began, Leningrad Mitch pledged that impeachment in the Senate was as dead as Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

It’s not Nizhny Novgorod Mitch’s job to allow impeachments. His job is to pass tax cuts for the rich, the major achievement of Volgograd Mitch’s “Do-Nothing Congress.”

Even as the evidence mounted daily, Rostov-on-Don Mitch stood firm on his tabling of any House Articles of Impeachment bill.

You should know, Stalingrad Mitch is one of the greatest tablers in the history of the Senate. He is currently tabling 125 bills that were marked up by his Senate colleagues of both parties and ready for debate. He says there is no point in bringing anything to the floor unless President Orange will sign them.

The president’s handlers in the politburo didn’t mind if St. Petersburg Mitch tabled the Impeachment, or chaired it, or floored or walled it, as long as their duly elected man in the Oval Office could continue to Make Russia Great Again.

3. The twenty Republican senators won’t allow it. True, it only takes twenty Republican votes to make the sixty-seven needed to convict. But that’s twenty too many for the Grand Old Party, our newest communist-front organization.

These are the same Stakhanovites who for three years have been hiding under their desks while the president has merrily destroyed democracy, as we know it. Swearing to obey and support the Constitution and the Rule of Law has withered away, as the apparatchiks in the Senate supported the president’s taking Putin’s word on nyet collusion, throwing our intelligence agencies under the bus, dismantling the alliances that have worked for sixty years in keeping the peace. Nothing was worse than having an infantile nickname on the Executive Twitter feed.

To be fair, there were some brave ones among the cowards. They played the rhetorical game of “You First.” The way it works: sure, I will speak up in protest, if only you go first.

Anyone counting on the Twenty to break ranks to allow the removal of the worst president in history has a better chance of getting their wish fulfilled by telling Santa what they want for Christmas.

In the unlikely event that I am wrong, for a change, about any of this, I will go further out on a limb and predict the best president we have would not accept a Senate vote on the Articles of Impeachment against him. He would claim election fraud. Crooked Hillary rigged the vote.

Article III

Article III: Nyet Quo Pro Quid

Our president is not getting enough credit for allowing the White House to declassify and release to Congress the whistleblower memo of July 25.

The first whistleblower memo should not be confused with the second whistleblower memo, which confirmed the first, both of which triggered the Great Impeachment Crisis of 2019, a highlight of the first Trump administration.

The memos told the story of how a president asked a favor of the Ukrainian president. He would be happy to release the anti-tank missiles Congress had appropriated in exchange for some slime about his unworthy future political opponent, Sleepy Joe Biden and his corrupt son.

Our president was very happy with the phone call. “A beautiful call,” he said. “Perfect. No quo pro quid.” Or was it quid quo pro? They mean the same thing to him. Just two friends of democracy talking shop.

Still, the release of the memos made our president look bad.

Sending the memo on to Congress is required by the Whistleblower Law. Normally, not even a subpoena can make Donald Stonewall Trump turn over documents. Why he kicked the equivalent of a hornet’s nest by suddenly following a rule of law this time has bewildered the punditocracy.

One theory is the president is actually a Jeffersonian, a closet champion of a free press.[32]

Allowing the memo to go public is a chapter from his next book about his years as president, Profiles in Courage.

Another theory is that he hadn’t actually read it. And why should he?

He had gotten into the third year of the presidency without reading intelligence briefings. Or advisers’ talking points. He goes by his famous gut, which has gotten noticeably larger in the first 959 days. When it comes time to memorialize the president in the Capitol rotunda, an appropriate symbol of his greatness would be a representation of 45’s digestive tract in formaldehyde, mounted on a plinth.

If he had read it, a corollary to the theory of alimentary decision-making goes, he didn’t understand it.

He wasn’t able to connect the dots. “Quid pro quo” to him was the name of the North Korean minister of beachfront property development.

The intelligentsia in the Oval Office may have seen the connection, but none had the courage to warn him about possible impeachment for a high crime or even a medium or low crime, let alone a mere misdemeanor. They would run the risk of being marginalized in the president’s brain trust or being defenestrated in a Twitter attack for telling the emperor he is doing a dumb thing.

You know, a lot of people don’t appreciate Stonewall Trump’s achievements as—pardon me for repeating myself here, I’m being presidential—the most incredibly stupid president in history.

Don’t blame it on politics. He was stupid prior to 2016, when he first became infected with My Country Needs Me Fever and spread that birther nonsense about Obama’s birthplace. He was stupid as a businessman, as his six bankruptcies will attest. The key to being a success in the real estate game, another realtor told me, is knowing how to add. And, she added, subtract!

For such a genuinely stupid person to still be in office after three years of sheer stupidity is HUGE. He deserves all the cheers from the dunce corner of the electorate—at his campaign rallies.

God must have loved the stupid. She made so many, including the 34.9 percent of the base who firmly believe that no matter how many unadulterated incredibly really stoooopid things he does, this impeachment thing is total garbage.

Although Jefferson also was a known briber of newspaper editors.

Article IV: Charge of the Right Brigade

My principle is never to attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

The power of stupidity as a political motivator was demonstrated by the twenty-four members of the Trump Loyalist wing of the Republican House—a.k.a. the Intellectually Lite Brigade—who charged into the normally hushed secure rooms of the House Intelligence Committee where impeachment investigators were conducting private interviews, wildly brandishing cell phones (normally verboten), chanting “Let Us In . . . Let Us In” when they were already in.

POTUS had been innocently sending out marching orders of the day all morning on the official Twitter feed, calling the House inquiry a scam, a witch hunt, a scandal, a star chamber, a kangaroo court, being conducted by “scum,” as he referred to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Shifty Schiff, all triggered by the famous phone call.

That was the so-called “perfect” phone call demanding the president of the Ukraine dig up dirt on Trump’s allegedly corrupt potential opponent in the 2020 election, or else he wouldn’t get the anti-tank weapons Congress had appropriated. “No quo pro quid,” he trumpeted proudly.

Latin was not the president’s bag. To others it sounded like extortion, a shakedown, with all the class of a Jersey mobster reminding the owner of a mom-and-pop bodega in Bayonne that if an “insurance premium” remained overdue much longer, consequences might occur.

The hearings being conducted behind closed doors, ipso facto, to the troops breaking in represented fraud of the most nefarious kind.

How stupid could these two dozen members of Team Trump be? Had they no respect for their forefathers, who in these very hallowed rooms conducted the famous closed door hearings by the United States House Select Committee into Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack on Benghazi, better known in history by the immortal words: Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi.

For more than two years (September 11, 2014, to December 12, 2016) the nation was enthralled by the closed-door attempt to nail Crooked Hillary. Actually, it was the last of six investigations pursued behind closed doors by Republican-controlled House committees (Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, Oversight and Government Reform).

To be fair, Team Trump must have been under the influence of Trump the Stupid. From his foxhole in the Oval Office, the dumbo in chief had been firing off tweets, whining about how his party was not coming to his defense. Nobody was standing up for him against these traitors who were following the Constitution behind closed doors.

All twenty-four of the Let Us In . . . Let Us In Brigade are now in line for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which according to the rule book, can be awarded by the POTUS to any person who in his opinion has made an especially meritorious contribution to American life through work in national security, world peace, cultural, or other significant public or private endeavors.

My nominee for the bauble would be Rep. Steve Scalise, the No. 2 House Republican who stupidly said as he went into the basement battle: “This is a Soviet-Style process. It should not be allowed in the United States of America. Every member of Congress ought to be allowed in that room. The press ought to be allowed in that room.”

Adding insult to injury, the Lite Brigade chargers ordered pizza for all in the hearing room during the protest. Pizza, mamma mia! What an unintentional slap in the face to their beleaguered commander in chief! Had they not noticed presidential cuisine preferences with cabinet conference table lunches littered by McDonald’s hamburger wrappers?

Article V: The New, Improved, Fairer-to-Me Constitution

In his first thirty-five months in office, President Trump proved that he was:

1. Pro-collusion

2. Pro-obstruction of justice

3. Pro-abuse of powers

With this Ukrainian thing—the famous phone call of July 25, 2019—POTUS is on record as being pro–shakedowns of foreign governments for personal political gain. Without threatening to break his knee caps, wasn’t it awesome the way he held those Javelin anti-tank missiles to the head of the Ukrainian president, asking to do him “a favor, though” by digging up schmutz on the corrupt Sleepy Joe Biden & Son—or else!

President Can-You-Do-Me-a-Favor-Though since Election Day 2016 has been as busy as the Framers—the thirty-nine who eventually signed the document that has been the supreme law of the land since 1789—serving as a one-man Constitutional Convention, eliminating the need for a costly assembly of delegates from all the states, savings that can be used for building his wall, which Mexico and Congress refuse to finance.

Mr. Trump claims to love the Constitution. He would marry it, if third wife Melanoma doesn’t work out. But it needs fixing.

We have already seen such improvements as a self-revised emolument clause that allows the president and his family to operate a hostel at 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., an oasis for foreign delegations and lobbyists catering to the Great White Father up the street at 1600 Pennsylvania.

I’m talking about the fabulous Trump International Hotel, where a standard one-bedroom suite (on October 29, 2019), went for $16,282.02. I was afraid to ask if that was for a month or a year, but suspect it was the daily rate. Nonrefundable! BOOK NOW, as the hotel website urged. A brief visit to negotiate, say, an arms deal would put a serious dent in the GNP of some shithole nation while its delegation curried favor with the First Hotelier.

It also makes possible the strategy of Air Force personnel patronizing the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland after refueling at Prestwick, an airport only twenty miles away, rather than at a military base, which would have been cheaper.

According to Politico, the USAF has lodged Air National Guard crews at the beautiful Turnberry waterside property at least forty times since 2015. Crews of five to nearly forty people have had such good fortune at least four times since September 2018. Did the innkeeper president at least comp his airmen?

Turnberry, according to Politico, lost $4.5 million in 2017, but saw an increase in revenue of $3 million in 2018. They must be doing something right. Maybe it was adopting a new slogan: DONALD TRUMP SLEPT HERE.

“I know nothing about an Air Force plane landing at an airport (which I do not own and have nothing to do with) near Turnberry Resort (which I do own) in Scotland, and filling up with fuel, with the crew staying overnight at Turnberry (they have good taste),” Honest Don tweeted (September 13, 2019) “NOTHING TO DO WITH ME.”

Elsewhere in Washington, the practice raised conflict-of-interest concerns in the House because the Constitution prohibits the president from receiving money from the federal government, other than his salary.

In fairness, Trump the patriot eschewed taking any salary when elected. But, of course, there is no way the zero paycheck can be confirmed or denied, until he releases his tax forms.

Besides the inalienable right to lie or make false statements—he has made 12,019 false or misleading claims over the first 928 days of his administration, as compiled by the Washington Post—the president’s most impressive accomplishment in office has been his interpretation of the executive powers part of the Constitution.

As he sees it, Article II, Section 2 allows him to do whatever he wants to do. For justification, he cites his gut, gastric central from which all executive decisions emanate, and which sometimes can be confused with breaking wind.

Although he has sworn to obey and uphold the Constitution, etc., etc., as the duly elected president, he has given himself a bye on whatever he swore to. That’s because the Constitution, which he hasn’t had time to read or have it read to him, is a complex document that is still being debated by scholars in conservative think tanks. Until they find out what it really means, he has the right to abuse his powers to the best of his abilities, so help him God.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia chose to disagree. Observing on a case of Executive Office stonewalling, Judge Jackson stated, “Presidents are not kings.”

Well, that’s her opinion. The judge, who is on the president’s “DO NOT INVITE TO DINNER” list at the White House and can forget about free golf days at the four Trump golf clubs in her jurisdiction, added the presidential legal arguments are “a fiction.”

That doesn’t cut ice for a person with an emperor complex whose reign is an absolute fantasy come true.

The pen is mightier than the sword, as it has been written earlier in these pages. Even mightier is the eraser, the tool the president is employing in dealing with the annoyance of an Impeachment Inquiry and Trial, as required by the Constitution.

His new rules include:

1. No subpoenas for White House officials.

2. No answering questions from congressional committees.

3. No releasing of documents, transcripts, emails, texts, correspondence, etc.

4. No congressional oversight of any kind.

5. No following of Rules of Law.

6. No whatever else the Constitution or traditional practice deems proper, especially if it might tend to be incriminating.

In the unlikely event that such an unlawful waste of time and energy called “impeachment” be perpetrated on the American people, the president has the right to label it “a partisan scam, a hoax, a witch hunt,” the greatest since Salem 1692.

All of which raises the profound question:

Is this president above the law?

Which law is that? In his execution of the presidency, he is so far above the existing laws he is out there where the buses don’t run. High up in the sky, in the wild blue yonder of the Trumposphere where only true Trumpistas can breathe, Donald J. Trump is the law!

What quick-to-find-fault critics who are still trying to undo the 2016 election results don’t seem to understand is that Trump, the party of one, currently revising and improving the basic law of the land, thinks this is his Constitution, just as it is his Javelin missiles, his SEALs, his army, his air force, his ambassadors, whom he can claim not to know when they testify against him.

I, the People, as the preamble to the Constitution Second draft might begin, will make clear that premature removal from office is a nonstarter for No. 45, if not future presidents.

A priori, therefore, Ukraine-gate is a Trumped-up case. All the socialists in Congress have against him are his own words. As we say in New Jersey, fuggedboutit.

Article VI. Mr. President, Take the 25th

Every loyal patriotic American should be worried about the president’s state of mind. Ever since the socialists in the House began trying to impeach him, he has been acting very strange. Sources close to the White House have reported he is deeply depressed. The outrageous hoax of a scam impeachment thing by Crazy Nancy and her lieutenant crazies has gotten to him.

What a shame.

He was already first in paying off porn stars, first in withholding tax returns, first in running a crooked charitable foundation, first in profiting from his real estate business while in office, and now he could be third in impeachment!

Even though he has done more for venality in office than any president since Ulysses S. Grant, the president is understandably bummed out by the fact that history books will duly note he was impeached, marring the otherwise greatest administration of all time, as he refers to his time as POTUS.

If the president was smart—don’t laugh; this is a hypothetical, as they say in law school—he would have done himself a favor by taking the 25th!

Section Four of the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution states: “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments [i.e., his Cabinet] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

A lot of evidence exists that the president qualified for replacement under the 25th. For example, his foreign policy decisions, such as abandoning our friends the Kurds in the fight against the Islamic terrorists, as he explained, “because they weren’t with us at Normandy”—that was insane.

After he dumped the Iranian nuke agreement, he had no idea how to deal with the Iranians, whose foreign policy is blowing up New York City.

Then there was the time he fired Gen. Jim Mattis, calling the man who was widely considered to be one of the smartest officers ever to sit in the Pentagon the dumbest general he ever knew.

Now that he is so depressed with the potential impeachment blot on his record, he could do something really stupid. The fact is our president doesn’t think like a normal person. The problem with not needing intelligence briefings or smart advisers in the decision-making process, and going by your gut, is that a bad lunch—or some gas—won’t do.

A weakness in the Constitution is a duly elected president must be of sound mind and judgment as well as being thirty-five and native born. It should have included an article or clause saying that an Electoral College provost or chief legal officer, after much due process, of course, will have the duty and obligation to rule, for example, in the case of a newly elected Trump-type to be in need of a guardian. King George III ruled through a regent for his last fifteen years.

The beauty part of taking the 25th, sir, is that it would have enabled you to avoid the disgrace of impeachment, and, more importantly, tarnishing the Trump brand. Your cronies in Congress could simply find that you have achieved your goal of making America great again and are taking some well-deserved time off.

So as not to alarm the people, the president’s press secretary-in-charge-of-lying could announce that our president is “overworked” (surely no disgrace for a workaholic business genius like Donald Trump) and will be taking yet another long vacation at his old Florida home, where from the porch at Mar-a-Lago he can see the southern border. He’ll be able to use lots of free time to work on his orange tan, play some golf, and keep in touch with his 68 million followers on Twitter. And with Vice President Pence running the show, the nation will be so shocked that it will forget all about Trump. Then sharp as a tack, he could return to the 2020 election wars and run as the first president in history to take the 25th!

Article VII

Article VII: How to Watch Four More Years of SOTUS—And Live to Fight Another Day

A State of the Onion speech, as it is widely called on social media because it makes so many cry, is the traditional opportunity for the chief executive of the nation to lie to the people about past achievements and get a head start in lying about future promises. SOTUS 2020 will be remembered not only for being a mega-lie-athon, but also for its length and reality TV showmanship, paying homage to principles that made “Queen for a Day” such an inspirational hit in the last century.

At seventy-eight minutes, it also reminded this loyal, patriotic registered Republican of those six-hour remarks on the state of his nation by Fidel Castro, one of the few tyrants our Leader of the Free World hasn’t embraced yet because he is dead. True, he was a Communist, but that wouldn’t have been a deterrent judging by the Putin-Trump love affair.

Some disloyal Americans, who should be ashamed of themselves, pled exhaustion from the excitement of the Iowa Caucus the previous night for not watching it. They missed seeing one of the greatest moments in the annals of SOTUS oratory: Crazy Nancy Pelosi ripping up her copy of the official script. “That was not a State of the Union, that was a state of his mind,” Nervous Nancy said about the brainless president.

A more moderate form of protest against the chief of state was demonstrated by a woman I know who watched SOTUS in its entirety on MSNBC and kept the mute button on. Even more effective is watching it with both the sound and picture off. The president’s hand gestures can be harmful.

What I do to protect myself, while fulfilling my duty as a citizen by listening to what the president has to say, is assume everything in the speech is a lie. Without bothering to fact-check the president’s previous lies in speeches and Twitter writings, 97.5 percent of the time I am right. No system is perfect.

But there I go bragging like the president.

Those who boycotted the speech, a goodly number judging by its scoring the lowest TV ratings for a SOTUS in the history of the Trump administration, missed hearing the president promising to protect Second Amendment rights, never in danger, and his passionate defense of health care, which he is trying to kill with the repeal of Obamacare. Also ever-popular falsehoods about US energy supremacy, distortions about his predecessor’s record on the economy, inflating manufacturing gains, migrant detention policies, and protecting people with pre-existing medical problems.

He also found time between the lies to extol his achievements in office.

In only three and a half years the panderer in chief is first in sexual assault, first in mocking the disabled, first in tearing a child away from a parent, first in paying off porn stars, first in insulting a gold star mother, first in calling Nazis fine people, first in stealing from a charity in his own name, first in starting a fake university and cheating its students of borrowed tuition money.

Not to mention being first in corrupting the youth of the nation, teaching them that lying is not as bad as it’s always been cracked up to be.

What impressed me most about President Four More Years’s appearance in the House of Representatives on this SOTUS night (February 4, 2020) is the remarkable restraint he showed by not bragging about how he had beat the rap in the so-called impeachment trial. Despite his being guilty of the two articles of impeachment, as he proudly says of doing nothing wrong, “no crime,” he did not rub his enemies’ faces in it that night.

Kudos to him for waiting until the next day to launch his victory revenge tour. His post-SOTUS performance in the White House was stunning, naming names of all the horrible, evil, really evil people with different opinions, including the “top scum” of the FBI.

He can now use anti-tank Javelin missiles against the socialists who have been out to get him since a minority of Some of the people elected a President for All the Time. If he wanted to! The Constitution gives him that power (Article II, Section 2) to do whatever he wants.

In all modesty, he did not take credit for his greatest achievement in the greatest administration in our history. I’m speaking of his destruction of the tripartite system of governance, the checks and balances of three bodies (legislative, judicial, and executive departments) that the founding fathers thought would protect us from a tyrant in chief. Well, they were wrong. It only worked for 231 years.

VIII. THE TRUMPONICLES 2020

1. There Is an 80 Percent Chance There Will Be an Election in 2020

Will there be an election in 2020? Or will our President wake up at 3 a.m. one morning and announce he is signing an Executive Order delaying the election? The Twitter bulletin, where important news often appears first, will explain the slight delay is necessary due to threats to our security at the border.

As he might be clarifying his action later in the day at a campaign rally in a Michigan airplane hangar, before a random cross section of average corporate executives and campaign donors, to chants of send them back, the president will explain that we must unite to stop the invasion. They are coming through the windows and doors left open by Obama and the open-door Democrats who won’t fund the wall real Americans want.

Then President Four-More-Years will argue the next morning on Fox & Friends, the Pravda of the Trump administration, that your president loves his country too much to abandon it in time of crisis.

On the Sean Hannity Show later that day, he will ask why we have elections every four years. Some of our fellow democracies, even in shithole countries, have presidents who serve the people for twenty or thirty years, and even lifetimes.

The next night Tucker Carlson will remind us that the president’s role model, Idi Amin, served twenty-eight years.

Across cable network news, authorities like Kellyanne Conway and her legion of yespersons are debating the need for elections in a democracy. They were a nice idea before trains and TV were invented and before we had sources of reliable information and enlightenment like social media and cable network news. Elections today are repetitive, cost-ineffective, polarizing, a waste of time and money, and a general nuisance.

Besides, old-style elections are not that popular. Only 68 percent voted last time, and that was a third more than usual. So sad.

Night after night at campaign rallies across Trump country, the best president we have is explaining more important things need to be done than waste our resources on elections. One third of the nation still has clean air and drinkable water. One third of the nation still has health insurance to eliminate. One third of our nation is still getting food stamps to avoid starvation. One third of our nation voted for Trump in the last election. Deplorable.

And let’s not forget eliminating funding for “K through 12 public education,” “early childhood education,” “workforce regulation,” and that huge glut of federally owned land standing in the way of good clean real estate development. Especially those National Parks, on which the building of condos and skyscrapers is still banned.

Keep in mind, the more elections we have, the greater the risk of the Russians meddling in them.

On Trump talk radio, constitutional scholars like Laura, Rush, Hannity, and Ann Coulter point out the Floundering Fathers came up with the idea of the Electoral College as a way to make what is known as “the raw vote” more meaningless. Neither did they anticipate the power of social media as the true Fourth Estate (replacing fake media). The likes are the new Vox Populi, thanks to the public service heroes like Mark Zuckerberg, who was only looking for another way to sell advertising to the boobousie.

As a backup, polls confirm in advance the winning candidates, so why bother with elections, as President Trump’s mentor Putin often stated.

You must be kidding, Kitman. None of this could happen.

Why not?

Well, there is the Constitution.

You mean that document the president swore to uphold on Inauguration Day? But there is nothing in the Constitution requiring the document be read or understood, especially with all the big words like “emolument.” Nada, except 229 years of tradition, against preventing a president staying in office as long as he deems necessary for public safety and defending the country’s values from terrorism or other threats, such as a lack of a wall on our southern border.

Then there is the Senate. They can do another impeachment. Yes, we are lucky to have Majority Leader Moscow Mitch McConnell—sorry, I keep forgetting—Novosibirsk Mitch, such a strict Constitutionalist he wouldn’t even let his Republican troops do the “advise and consent” thing on President Obama’s Judge Garland for the Scalia seat.

Irkutsk Mitch can always count on his brave band of Republican brothers to back him up by doing nothing in his Do-Nothing Congress, except do away with anything Obama did to save the environment and all the other examples of government overreach. McConnell Republicans can always be counted on to support Mr. Constitution Mitch from under their desks, where they have been cowering the last two years for fear that Trump will give them a killer nickname on Twitter.

And, of course, there is the Citizens United Supreme Court, which voted to recognize that corporations have the same rights as people to keep a friendly president in power, something the founding fathers never anticipated. By 2020, another associate justice might be hanging up the robes, doing a Justice-Kennedy-retiring-ahead-of-time act, making it 6–3 for the real Americans who want the wall.

Some might call the negating of the three branches of government in a system of checks and balance a coup, a bloodless coup d’état. But that’s FAKE news for you.

2.

If I am wrong about any of this, and there is an election in 2020, may I be the first to congratulate President Trump on his second term in office.

The only thing that can stop him in 2020 is his coming out of the closet as a girl. Not that there’d be anything wrong with that.

Or the Democrats nominating Oprah Winfrey.

2. Go Fourth!

In the unlikely event that the big favorite in the 2020 election should lose, Donald Trump will not fade away like old political soldiers do. He will not be like George Washington, the Cincinnatus who retired to his plow, sitting on the porch at Mount Vernon by his fig tree and vine, watching the sun setting on an illustrious career.

After four or eight years of contesting the rigged election—how else could he have lost except by foul play?—well, he can always go back to the practice of being the world’s greatest real estate salesman, enjoying the sight of his greatest achievement, the one-hundred-story Trumpskaya Towerski that will soon rise in Greater Downtown Metropolitan Moscow, and owning the most golf courses in all of Russia and the former Soviet republics.

But would that be enough? Nyet. Every four years in the heat of an electoral season, the vegetable oil in the brains of a political animal starts to bubble.

President Trump emeritus would not be like George Washington, happy to be drinking mint juleps on his Mount Vernon veranda. His role model my guess would be more Millard Fillmore. After serving as our thirteenth president, Fillmore returned to the political wars as the candidate of the Native American Party, renamed the American Party, commonly known as the Know Nothing Party in the 1856 election.

No existing established party would be a comfortable fit for a former chief executive with so many achievements as President Trump emeritus. Along these lines, I am proposing a new party that might replace the Grand Old Republican Party (Born 1857; Died 2016) he has managed to destroy in only four years in office.

I’m not talking about a third party. We already have the Tea Party. Worse, they always fail.

What the country needs is a fourth party, one that appeals to a large body of voters who feel underrepresented by existing parties, I’d call it the American Idiot Party (AIP).

The AIP would be the party for those angry citizens who are sick of both the socialism of the Democrats and the old fartism of the Republican Party. It would be the voice of the folks who have grown tired of the objectivity of Fox cable news. Too fair and balanced. Our demographic studies show that potential AIP voters are the people who get all their political news by listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, and for balance, Sean Hannity on TV.

It would be a party that stands four square for the verities, a party that recognizes we once had a president who is a Muslim who wasn’t born in this country—never again!—a party that is against that hoax of climate change; a party that is for patriotism, God, guns, and true grit; Christmas; good olde time marital status; and lower taxes for the rich, and that believes adultery is between a man and a woman.

This is not meant to deprecate Trump supporters. Some of his followers are not, as I have previously implied, idiots. The term is used loosely. Some of them are morons. Mainly, they include people who feel cheated by our political system, who are disgusted with all politicians, regardless of race, creed, or party affiliation.

A lot of them are just ordinary folk, people who live by the Bible and keep AK-47s in their closets against the day when the government tries to take their guns away. They are people who hate gays and love guns and God. People who hate foreigners, especially from Mexico, although they are not too fond either of Guatemalans and Hondurans! It does not matter that we are all descendants of emigrants, starting with the Mayflower steerage crowd. You call them crazies. I call them the salt of the earth.

The AIP would appeal to this hitherto-overlooked minority. It would bring this forgotten voting bloc out of the shadows.

They want a candidate who knows how to use their favorite medium of information, TV reality shows, who looks like a million bucks, even if he is always on the verge of another bankruptcy.

The typical AIP voter would choose a candidate based on his (never her) personality, rather than the old lame idea of issues. They want a candidate who would reduce the size of government, while increasing spending on the military, while balancing the budget. How would we do this? As political scientist Rich Little suggested during the first Reagan administration, by having two sets of books.

They want a candidate who would spare no expense in building a wall across the border with Mexico that would stop our country from being invaded by drug dealers, rapists and chefs introducing un-American fusion cuisine. They want a candidate who doesn’t mind insulting a friendly power with which the country shares a 1,000-mile-plus-long border. So what if we risk disrupting friendly relations with a nation vital to US interests that could argue for the right of return after the Mexican-American War of 1847 of such Hispanic treasures as Texas and California.

The AIP, of course, would hold a national convention and nominate candidates for prez and veep. It would also hold state conventions, nominate guvs, congressional people, and so forth.

The beauty part of the 2024 campaign is one candidate already stands out as the standard-bearer of the AIP.

I’d need to run this past Laura, Rush, Hannity, Tucker, and Ann Coulter, the real powers in American politics today, of course. But, as of today, my support goes to the one man guaranteed to run not on divisive issues but his personality. He alone would appeal to that overlooked minority, all the folks who get their political news from television, mainly Sean Hannity and the Fox Channel, those who believe in patriotism, God, guns and grits, religion, marital status, sexuality, the gold standard, and the real Americans who want the wall.

And that man is, let me check my notes here, Donald J. Trump!

For vice president, the party might turn to a well-qualified former governor who could see the vice presidency from her front porch, Sarah Palin, who was just such an idiot in the 2012 campaign.

Out of the ashes of the destroyed Republican Party will rise not another Phoenix, but a Tucson. A Trump-Palin ticket will make America even greater again in 2024.

Or am I not the oracle in chief!

Go fourth, America!

3. How Will It All End?

1.

Will he be impeached a second time, a first in the history of American presidential misconduct; schlonged for violating the Logan Act by trading with the enemy; indicted for tax fraud, like that other iconic American, Al Capone; do a Julian Assange and ask for asylum in the Russian embassy down the block from the White House; or take the job of commissar of Crimean real estate development at the politburo?

I VOTE FOR NONE OF THE ABOVE.

In the course of these Trumponicles, documenting what some saw as the plague years of American democracy, I predicted eleven times that the president would not serve out his term of office. He would say something like “My business needs me” . . . “I’VE MADE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” . . . “You don’t deserve me” . . . “I’m taking my ball and going home” . . . Whatever.

Despite my reputation for perspicacity as an oracle, I am now about to violate the Hypocrite Oath of the punditry profession and admit I was wrong.

The mistake I made was not realizing President Four More Years loves his job. He is having too much fun to give it up.

What other position, I ask you, would give him the freedom of spending so much time away from the office? Of his first 1,044 days on the job, according to NBC Fake News, which wastes stockholders’ money counting these things, as of October 22, 2019, 313 days were at Trump properties and 237 days at Trump golf locations. That includes 99 days at the “Southern White House” (Mar-a-Lago) and 90 days at the New Jersey White House (Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ).

So much for those who think the president is on vacation all the time. It just seems that way.[33]

What other job could guarantee space on the newspapers’ front pages every day? He doesn’t need a PR agency, or posing as a Sore Throat, calling in stories to friends in the press, to guarantee him and his brands a four-year, no, make that eight-year-long, infomercial.

True, he may be tired of the charade of pretending to pay attention to those other boring foreign leaders; he’d prefer playing golf at Mar-a-Lago rather than meeting with assholes like Kim Jung Duh. Fortunately, he has his number one daughter Ivanka Be Alone Trump serving as the next secretary of state, in charge of withdrawing the United States from NATO in protest against the way Christiane Legrand of France and the other Euro leaders snubbed her recently.

Where is it written he needs to put up with criticism from all those socialist whiners about separating children from parents at the border? His parents sent him off to military school when he was in knee pants, and look at how well he turned out?

What is less appreciated is the way he has had to put up with all that crap from FAKE news trying to portray him as a character out of a George Orwell novel, a man who with a straight face can say a lie is the truth. Evidence of the falsehood is proof that the lie is truth. Truth is fake news, and all that other left-wing seditious horseshit.

When is the media going to realize it doesn’t matter whether anything is true or not. The fact that he said it is proof enough that it is true—that’s his greatest contribution to political discourse!

2.

Everybody knows 45 is the greatest president, some believe even better than Lincoln, who got us into a war, didn’t he? The smartest businessman, despite his six bankruptcies! The best negotiator, who claimed God was helping him with the China tariff deal, and looked up at the sky to prove it. A foreign policy authority that knows more than intelligence agencies! And the greatest wall builder since the Ming Dynasty!

Yes, the last State of the Union address was delayed a week or so because of some irregularities in “the best-run administration in history,” such as the thirty-five-day shutdown caused by the president over finding a few billion to build the wall.

A temporary delay, POTUS knew. As Senator Ev Dirksen said in an earlier financial crisis: “A billion here, a billion there . . . pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

This president’s place in history as the greatest is carved in stone for his base.

He will be remembered as the war hero, the man who climbed out of the trenches during the Battle of the Great Impeachment Scam of 2019 to announce suddenly on nationwide TV the night of October 31, 2019, that he, President Bone Spurs, in effect, had killed the terrorist monster Abu Baker al-Baghadi in that underground tunnel in northwest Syria. It was his special operations command, his soldiers, his sailors, his airmen, his attack dog who chased the whimpering, crying, screaming coward . . . in utter fear, dying like a dog, and other details that made it sound as if he, personally, had been in the tunnel of death, the details of which could not be confirmed by his Pentagon brass.

Furthermore, while he was at it, he reminded us that under his direction as commander in chief, ISIS had finally been “obliterated . . . 100%.” Those “losers,” as he called them, seem to have as many lives as a cat.

A great day for America, he said. And a great day for the scriptwriter in chief. The man is a source of inspiration to anyone who thinks watching the Military Channel makes them fit to command.

3.

Nobody likes the smartest guy in the class, but I further predict that a well-vacationed POTUS, with that same kind of presence he’s had since 2016, and still orange, the color of an orange Cheeto, whatever happens in that scam of an impeachment trial, His Orangeness will come down the aisle to deliver his last State of the Union as a conquering hero.

There will be tears in the eyes of Trumpista Republican legislators, still chanting their famous “Send them back . . . Send them back” (Pat. Pending).

In the bedlam, the anti-Donalds might be heard slipping in a “Lock Him Up! . . . Lock Him Up!”

A lone voice or two also might revive the old Republican slogan from the second Obama “State of the Union” address: “He lies!”

Since the reading of the last line of the Inaugural Address in 2017, what we have been living through is Donald Trump’s farewell victory tour, interrupted for brief visits to his properties including the national treasure in Florida, the fabulous Fort Mar-a-Lago, where on a clear day you can see the Mexican border.

My gut instinct coming direct from the stomach—the same place the president makes important decisions such as what kind of burger he will eat for lunch—now tells me the First Florida Robber Baron President is here until . . . well, the end.

They will have to carry the Impeached One out of the Oval Office bodily. No reason why he can’t continue to govern by Twitter from the South Lawn, with Fox News reporting all the latest every morning and in time for Hannity.

Should it come to pass that despite my passionate defense of the best president we have and in the unlikely event the socialists win in 2020, my last words of advice:

Check the silverware as the First Family goes out the White House door.

THIS JUST IN . . . By CNN’s official score card, as of December 31, 2019, the president had spent one of every five days in 2019 at one of his golf clubs or a Trump property.

EPILOGUE

1. And Furthermore

Another theory gaining favor among top political scientists is that the Age of Trump proves our nation is not ready for self-government.

The Revolution of 1776 was premature (see The Making of the Prefident 1789 for an interesting discussion of this point). Only one third of the people favored the rebellion, while one third supported the king, and one third didn’t know or care.

And we still aren’t ready: Look how we have gone from electing a Washington, two Adamses, a Jefferson, and a Madison to a Nixon, a Ford, a Clinton, two Bushes, and a Trump who is already telling his followers at campaign rallies he is ready to serve eight, fourteen, twenty-four years, or however long it takes to make America great again.

IMO, we ought to petition the Colonial Office to open negotiations for our return to the Mother Country. With a great dealmaker like Donald Trump, and the empire’s Brexit problems seemingly over, our boy could offer them a deal they couldn’t refuse: to buy them with Continental dollars and make the empire the fifty-second state.

My spies tell me that such an offer would be welcomed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who’s been having a helluva time making Brexit actually work. Instead, he could readmit the USA into what’s left of the British Empire.

Trump would welcome the deal. He already owns a golf course or two in Blighty. Once the two countries have merged, he would have a much easier time opening more courses, so he would be eager for such a deal. Indeed, he could become the Right Honorable Minister of Golf representing his own personal rotten borough.

If this be treason—wanna make something of it?

Marvin Kitman

Pundit in residence

Somewhere in Northern New Jersey

January 2020

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my publisher and editor, Dan Simon, for having the courage to commission this book, at the risk of not being invited to play golf at Bedminster or attend the next big donor supper at Mar-a-Lago.

My agent, Tom Wallace, and his associate Jeff Gerecke have performed a major public service by putting my work in the care of Dan Simon and co-editor Lauren Hooker, who gets an eleven out of a possible ten for needing to reread all the great Trump Twitter words since 2016.

The unsung hero in this work is Richard Lingeman. Robert (Bo) Orloff made me seem like a social media genius. A champion of cutting wordiness and the unfunniest bits, Lingeman has been improving my work since my salad days at Monocle, the “leisurely quarterly of political satire.” He served as my brain trust in the 1964 Republican presidential campaign. With his help, I managed to rise from a political unknown to a political nonentity. I thank him for performing his usual magic in these pages.

Ted Faraone, one of the better public relations counselors in the TV biz, vetted the manuscript for accuracy. He didn’t want the base to fault the work for a wrong fact or two.

Dennis Ainsworth, a leading economist, served as my consultant on baffling economic matters, like the tax cut for the middle class.

Andrew Fisher IV, a scholar at the New Jersey Institute of Scientific Irreproducible Results, helped on building walls.

Dr. Frank D. Livelli, my internist, not only kept me alive long enough to write these thank yous, but coined the word Trumponicles.

Dr. Erika Freeman of Vienna was in charge of my mental health, always at risk as I tried to make sense out of the sheer insanity of life in Trump’s USA (United States Asylum).

A number of other public-minded citizens contributed to these pages: Tony Insolia, Russell Burkett, Ed Friedman, Gloria Levitas, Bill Moyers, Larry Arnstein, Mike Winship, Henry Chernin, Alan Alda, Bill Blank, Gene Ginsberg, Bob Cenedella, N. Baat-Canaan, Victor Navasky, John Cleese, Mike and Thel Kandel, Nick Taylor, Levon Soorikian, Simon Jones, Herb Meyers, Mel Di Giacamo, Mort Gerberg, Malachy McCourt, Arline Lederman, Nick Johnson, Barbara Nevins Taylor, Rick MacArthur, Alan Zweibel, and the Borscht Club, led by Kate d-c Decker.

I am very disappointed that despite the logic of my arguments not a single one of my grandchildren—Milo Finn Kitman, Ellie Beatrice Kitman, and Ike Clemente Kitman—are planning to vote for Trump in 2020.

My heirs Jamie Lincoln Kitman, Suzy Kitman, and Andrea Jordanna Knight are not in the Trump base, either.

My saddest failure is not even being able to get my wife, Carol Kitman, to watch my favorite reality TV show, what I call “the news.” She has two problems with the content. It’s always about Donald Trump. Both his face and his voice make her sick.

She doesn’t just deserve credit or a diamond from Tiffany for putting up with me and my passion as a news junky, but a medal.

In conclusion, I duly swear that all of the opinions expressed in these pages are my own. Right or wrong, they have not been altered to make the author sound even more prescient. If there are any that are wrong, in the words of the patron saint of punditry, Emily Litella, never mind.

About the Author

Humorist and author MARVIN KITMAN is a former columnist at New York Newsday and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the author of, among others, The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly and The Making of the Prefident 1789.

Table of Contents

Preface

I. THE TRUMPONICLES 2015–2016

1. The Mouth That Roared (Time Man of the Year)

2. A Star Is Born

3. The Great Panic of 2016

II. THE TRUMPONICLES 2016–2017

1. Election Mourning

2. So How Did It Happen?

3. The Enemies of Which People?

4. Fool’s Gold

5. The Battle of the Mall

6. George Orwell Lives

7. The First Twenty-nine Days

8. The Chicken Dancers

III. THE TRUMPONICLES 2017

1. The First-Year Report Card

2. To Russia, with Love

3. Russiagate

4. Day 61 Amerika Held Hostage

5. The Dopey Awards

6. A Summer Vacation

7. The Gang That Couldn’t Loot Straight

8. Collusion Defined

9. So-Called Presidents’ Day

10. Obesity Crisis

IV. THE TRUMPONICLES 2018

1. The Sophomore Jinx Strikes

2. The Most Famous Swede of All

3. Patriot or Traitor?

4. The Afghan War

5. Dotard Controversy

6. Playing the Trump Card

7. Nobel Prize

8. Hurricane Donald

9. James Comey

10. Second-Year Report Card

V. THE TRUMPONICLES 2018–2019

1. The Evil Twin Theory

2. The Hondurans Are Coming

3. Here Comes the Judge

4. The Great Debate

5. Wharton v. Wharton

6. Mussolini v. Hitler

7. Helsinki Summit

8. Kavanaughgate, Part I

9. Kavanaughgate, Part II

10. Kavanaughgate, Part III

11. Kavanaughgate, Part IV

12. Armistice Cemetery Non-Visit

13. Parade Deprivation

14. Xmas Greetings

VI. THE TRUMPONICLES 2019

1. The State of the Union

2. National Coulter Emergency

3. Is He a Communist—or Just a Dupe Taking Orders from the Kremlin?

4. A Patriot Talks to His President

5. Third-Year Report Card

6. Artificial Stupidity

VII. THE ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT

Article I: Why Are We Impeaching the President?

Article II: Yet Another Case of Presidential Harassment

Article III: Nyet Quo Pro Quid

Article IV: Charge of the Right Brigade

Article V: The New, Improved, Fairer-to-Me Constitution

Article VI. Mr. President, Take the 25th

Article VII: How to Watch Four More Years of SOTUS—And Live to Fight Another Day

VIII. THE TRUMPONICLES 2020

1. There Is an 80 Percent Chance There Will Be an Election in 2020

2. Go Fourth!

3. How Will It All End?

EPILOGUE

1. And Furthermore

Acknowledgments

About the Author