Workers of firm involved with the discredited and Fake Dossier take the 5th. Who paid for it, Russia, the FBI or the Dems (or all)?
— Donald J. Trump via Twitter, 19 October 2017, 7:56am
Sometimes I talk to the president of the United States in my head. It’s weird, but I have to.
Dude, I say (I can hyperlink words when I talk to the president in my head). Dude, what? Really? It always begins this way. We’ve covered some serious ground, the president and I, over the 40 miles of bad road that has been the last two years of American politics. His attacks on Muslims and Mexicans, his marauding misogyny, the border wall, penis measuring during a nationally-televised debate, the bag of hammers he chose for his Cabinet, Russia Russia Russia, Puerto Rico, North Korea, his embrace of Nazis and Klansmen, the NFL, the families of fallen soldiers, meeting the president of the Virgin Islands, Comey, Clinton, Mueller, Obama and all his favorite people — there isn’t much we haven’t discussed. It always starts the same way.
Work doesn’t make money anymore. Money makes money. Money made by money made you.
Dude. Let me get this straight. You accused Russia, the Democratic Party and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of conspiring to confabulate a dossier filled with damaging information about you. These three entities, you claimed, came together in secret to undo you by creating a package of reports that include detailed descriptions of deep ties between you, your campaign and Russia … because Russia would enter into a plot that would expose their own clandestine operations, just to burn you? That’s so them.
The FBI part is even more odd. You’re comfortable accusing the law enforcement arm of the Justice Department of a vendetta against you? Of falsifying information to foment political change — against you? The bureau has a sordid history, to be sure, but the targets of its sordidness are not powerful, wealthy, white men.
As for the Democrats, whatever dude. The scary freakin’ Democrats did it. We’re talking about the same party, right? The one that lost to you? You! They lost to you, Donald fa-chrissakes Trump. The Atlanta Falcons ain’t got nothing on the Democratic Party when it comes to stalled momentum, chump mistakes and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The Democrats are having trouble conspiring to put in a lunch order these days. Coming up with something this spectacularly hilarious isn’t really in their wheelhouse.
It’s all of a piece with you, isn’t it. All that stuff about Obama bugging your tower was pretty spiffy but this one is special. This is you changing reality into unreality with your mighty foghorn of nonsense. The world says, “Wha? Huh? How can he say …?” and you smile, because they’re talking about you again, and that’s what matters.
You are certainly a man of the times, The Man, avatar of all that ails us. You are, among other things, the end product of a decades-debunked economic model that consigns a vast majority of Americans to poverty and stasis while lavishing trillions on the wealthy. This we call “trickle down,” and we’ve waited half a century now for the rain that never comes.
Work doesn’t make money anymore. Money makes money. Money made by money made you. From what I hear, the last person you trickled down on got a page in that famous dossier. The economic model has failed dramatically, but you couldn’t care less. It did well by you, and that’s the dot at the end of the line.
Reality TV star, right? Perfect. Just exactly right. Television, Edward Murrow’s wires and lights in a box, will prove in time to be one of the greatest derangers of civilizations in the history of the planet. A spigot of fiction, fear, calamity, greed and deception flows daily from every screen, unmaking reality stitch by stitch. Many see themselves now not as who and what they truly are, but as how they are depicted in the box. That’s where you came from, that land of bombast and lies, and it makes seamless sense. “Reality” TV, indeed.
You are made of everything that lays us low, and the sooner we dismantle all that, the sooner we dismantle you.
Not that you give a damn, but a lot of people are genuinely terrified right now. Pursuing your catastrophic brand of foreign policy with unstable nuclear nations is only slightly less smart than jumping into a shark tank with a pork chop tied around your neck. I know the folklore of noble American militarism by heart, too. Taking on the flag, the anthem and the football players was you rewriting reality, again, by swaddling yourself in that folklore. John Kelly helped tuck you in. It’s the safest place there is in politics, and it only cost tens of trillions of dollars to make it happen. Meanwhile, the country you claim to lead is hiding under the bed.
And since we’re on the topic of conspiracies, what about “Climate change is a Chinese hoax”? This past hurricane season must have put at least a small dent in your denialism, not that it’s doing Puerto Rico any good. This is the stuff that is going to get us all killed. You have to know that, right? Of course you do. You’re the guy who wanted to use his money, which was made by money, to build a wall around his golf course in Scotland to protect it from the rising seas.
You are the distilled essence of the age, a blurred orange watercolor that looks different every time the light changes. There is no substance to you, only menace and the same confused fiction that seeks to define and control this nation. Too many ignore or dismiss you as some sort of terrible mistake, a wrong turn down a blind driveway we can back out of, but that is not the truth of it. You were inevitable, a product of unreality many years in the making. If you didn’t exist, someone would have made you up.
Tomorrow, you will wake up and tell another obvious lie, threaten someone else, let fly with that mighty foghorn of nonsense, but I’ve got the measure of you. You are made of everything that lays us low, and the sooner we dismantle all that, the sooner we dismantle you. You’re exactly as strong as the lies that sustain you. There’s an answer for that, too.