On Wednesday we had a Presidential Alert test. Did you hear it? Your cellphone probably started beeping madly. It was just a run-through to make sure you’d get the warning if some terrible disaster were headed your way.
You mean like Donald Trump?
No, no, no. We’re talking about hurricanes. Or maybe missiles.
Are you sure? Because I was watching him at a couple of events over the last week and he seemed pretty darned excitable.
No, I swear this isn’t a problem. The president doesn’t really send the alerts. It’s the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
If Trump did have control of the Emergency Alert System, do you think he might just make something up?
To be charitable, there does seem to be a reality-connection problem there. We get a little nervous every time he tells a rally that his presidential win in 2016 was “the greatest election victory in the history of our country,” which does seem to overlook certain details like the loss of the popular vote.
So if, for instance, a goose landed in his swimming pool, what are the chances he’d think it was an enemy attack?
I’d say 50-50.
But Trump being delusional matters! Look at all the things he’s been saying about the Kavanaugh hearing.
Yeah, after a few days of unnerving self-control, Trump made it clear that he identifies with his Supreme Court nominee and, I guess, every other well-to-do white man who’s ever been accused of sexual assault.
“I’ve been accused. And I was accused by – I believe it was four women,” said Trump at a news conference last week. Actually, it was more like 22 if you include unwelcome kissing and walking uninvited into dressing rooms while they were changing.
He said that it was a “very scary time for young men in America” but that women were doing “great.” Isn’t the president supposed to help keep things balanced when there are so many attacks on the whole #MeToo movement?
Yeah, and we might have seen this coming when we elected a guy who said back in the 1990s that the secret to handling women was to “treat ’em like s–.” And bragged to Howard Stern that he could have done Lady Di. Who said in 2008, when he was approaching his political career, that women couldn’t resist him: “They’ll walk up and they’ll flip their top and they’ll flip their panties.”
This week Donald Jr. said exactly the same thing – about how he worried more for his sons than his daughters “when I see what’s going on right now.”
Junior never loses his capacity to be awful, but remember that during much of his formative teenage years, his father was begging the tabloids to run headlines about how he was giving great sex to a woman who was not Donald Jr.’s mother.
Was that after Trump became a real estate baron or before?
Good news – this is not a distinction you really need to make anymore. We now know that thanks to his dad, young Donald was earning the equivalent of $200,000 a year when he was 3 and was a millionaire by 8.
So really, when you follow the saga through, what we have here is a rich kid who went into the family business and wasn’t actually all that good at it. We now live in a country that’s being run like a Trump casino. Except that nobody in our family is going to waltz in and buy $3.35 million in chips to bail us out.
We have a guy in the White House who can’t do anything!
There’s self-promotion. Basically we’re being governed by a somewhat more combustible version of Kim Kardashian.
With his finger on the emergency alert!
Breathe deep. Remember, elections in five weeks.
The New York Times