SCENE: A boardroom in Trump Towers. Present is Donald Trump pacing the floor, and three senior executives sitting at the desk (Mr. A, Mr. B, and Mr. C). Also sitting is one wet-behind-the-ears junior executive, Mr. Z. Trump is on his cell phone.
TRUMP: Tell him to go fuck himself! No, tweet this: “Chris Matthews is STUPID! And capitalize the word STUPID!”
[pause]
Right. Three exclamation points — same as usual! No, make it FOUR!”
[The three senior executives murmur quietly “Ooooooh, four”]
[TRUMP hits the off button on his phone]
TRUMP: I love Chris. Smartest journalist on the left. [Gets an idea. Hits intercom button.] Savannah, call Chris and Kathy. Set up a time when they can come for dinner. Cafe Des Artistes. [Sits and addresses men at table] Gentlemen, the immigration experiment has run its course. I think we’ve found the xenophobic sweet spot of the base of the Republican party. You fuckin’ nay-sayers thought the people would revolt and throw me out of the party. Well, once again, I was right and you were wrong. So apologize.
MR A: Sorry, The Donald
MR B: Sorry, The Donald.
MR C: Sorry, The Donald.
[All look at Mr. Z]
MR Z: I… Hi…. Um…. I wasn’t at that meeting. I guess. Sorry. I just… I just was hired last week.
[All look at TRUMP, who is frowning. Then, a smile]
TRUMP: Kid’s got brass balls. [Laughter from the senior executives] I like that. Hey, kid, you know why they’re called “brass balls”?
MR Z: Uh… No. I don’t know. W-why do they call them “brass balls”?
[Long pause]
TRUMP: [Stands, hits intercom button]: Savannah, find out if there’s a joke about “brass balls” and why they’re called that. Check the Joan Rivers archives. If it ain’t there, call Gilbert Gottfried and ask him. [to execs] Funniest fucker that ever lived. [Sits] Okay, gentlemen. So what’s next for the campaign? Any ideas? Nothing too crazy for an idea. In fact, the crazier the better. I got fuckin’ 70% of the party in my hand. Now what?
MR Z: [clears throat] Actually, Mr Trummm — The Donald — they told me to come to this meeting prepared with some ideas. Now, I don’t claim to know everything about economics and I wouldn’t presume to know your views, but it seems to me —
TRUMP: Whooooooa…… Mr. Brass Balls trying to make a name for himself. I like that. It seems to you what, Mr. Brass Balls?
MR Z: Thank you, sir. It seems to me that you’ve got the base in the palm of my hand, as you say —
TRUMP: — Eatin’ it from right there. Right from the palm of my hand. I can pick up a doughy load of monkey poop and they would eat it right up.
MR Z: Yyyyes, sir. The base is eating poop outta your hand —
TRUMP: [correcting him] Monkey poop. Keep going.
MR Z: Right. Uh, so I was thinking we do something unexpected. A shift. But a surprise still. To keep your name in the headlines. Something nobody would expect.
TRUMP: Like a shift? But a surprise? Like a shift surprise, you’re saying. It will keep my name in the headlines.
MR Z: Right.
TRUMP: I don’t know what you’re saying.
MR Z: Hear me out, sir. A five point economic plan to address income equality. Or a six point plan. Or how-many-ever points you want. But the point is to come out with a serious economic policy proposal. And call it the, whatever, five-point plan to… I don’t know…. to return Dollars To The People. Something like that. Something serious. And people will go, “Whoa. We just thought he, you know, was a firebrand.” Which is a good thing to be. But now we surprise ’em, see, with something serious. And they all go, “Whoa that guy is a firebrand AND a serious thinker and a statesman.”
TRUMP: Something serious….
MR Z: Yes, sir.
[Pause]
TRUMP: Da fuck?
MR A: What I think our young associate here is trying to say is —
TRUMP: I know what he is saying. He’s saying let’s kiss the asses of the Harvard fuckin’ Yale elites.
MR A: Well, it’s —
TRUMP: I didn’t get to the top of the polls by kisses the asses of the bluebloods. Get the fuck out of here, kid.
MR Z: Sir, if you would allow me to explain —
TRUMP: Get the fuck outta here. And tell Savannah to forget Gottfried. I’m revoking your brass balls, and giving you STUPID balls.
MR Z: Am I fired?
TRUMP: Did I say — (fuckin kids these days!) — Did I say “You’re fired?” No. I did not. Get the fuck outta here. To your desk or cube or whatever. [MR Z leaves] Did I or did I not just explain about monkey poop?
MR B: You did sir. I was here.
TRUMP: You were here. Was he here?
MR C: Apparently not.
TRUMP: Apparently not. [Pause — laughs very loudly and for a long time] “Apparently not.” That’s great. That’s great! I like that! [laughs more, chokes a little] “Apparently not” he says. [wipes tears from eyes with a very expensive monogrammed handkerchief] “Apparently not” [Types something into on his cellphone, presumably “apparently not”. All wait patiently until he’s done] Okay, gentlemen. Here’s the problem. It’s no surprise that my poll numbers are through the fuckin’ roof and you and everybody else is wrong about me. BUT, I don’t want to do this fuckin’ debate and they say that if I’m in the top ten, I gotta debate. And of course, I’m in the top one? Right?
EXECS: Right, of course, you bet, etc.
TRUMP: So I gotta start working now to bring my poll numbers down cuz I don’t wanna debate. I mean, guys, I did this for a lark. To get my name in the papers. Grease the skids of a few deals I’m working on. Stuff that needs regulatory approval. Nothing like having 70% of the base on your side to get the assholes in D.C. behind you, am I right? “Mr. Chairman, to whom I give generous contributions to, did you know that 59 percent of the people in your district think I am the shit? And while you contemplate that, could you tell your dickless friends at the FTC to approve my fucking merger already?”
[All laugh]
TRUMP: So what is it, boys? Let’s brainstorm. How can I still be outrageous and make headlines, and still be the darling of some of the base, but get lower in the polls?
[After a pause]
MR B: Kick an aborted fetus through the goal posts at the Meadowlands?
MR A: Jee-zus, Stan.
MR B: Too much?
MR A: He has a bad back!
TRUMP [at the same time as Mr A]: I have a bad back!
MR B: Oh, right.
TRUMP: [Under his breath….] Meadowlands. [Then, in normal voice] No. I need to say something. Something really offensive. It’s my mouth. My golden mouth. That’s my strength.
MR C: But sir. You’ve insulted an entire race of people and an entire country, an ally sir. How can you top that?
TRUMP: Fuck. That was easy. I took the base where it already wanted to go. It’s not like I attacked any Americ–
[His face goes solid with surprise. An idea!]
TRUMP: I need to attack America.
MR A: Like how the liberals attack America?
TRUMP [slapping A]: No, not like how the liberals attack America. I need to attack a sacred American cow of the right wing.
MR A: Wall Street!
MR B: Reagan!
MR C: Fox News!
TRUMP: Can’t be Fox News. I need them to cover my outrageous attack.
MR A: How about attacking drill baby drill?
MR B: Or Sarah Palin?
MR C: Our troops?
TRUMP: Hmmmm, Sarah Palin. Eeeh. Our troops…… wait, wait, wait.
[Trump thinks harder. Then the penny drops. Yes! The expression copies itself to Mr. A. Yes! Then to Mr. B. Of course!]
MR C: What? What?!? What is it??!?
Aaaaaand scene. I guess that was a little long.
But sure enough, Donald Trump went there. Here it is:
Yes, this is particularly abhorrent. Let’s go back to 1968. Here’s McCain and Trump.
Trump was 21 years in 1968. Vietnam? Not for Donald. He avoided the Vietnam War draft by getting repeated student deferments. Opposed to the war, Trump was on his way to earning an Ivy League degree. And he had a job in his father’s real estate company.
When he graduated from college, Trump had a net worth of $200,000 ($1.4 million in today’s dollar). Meanwhile, John McCain was in a small North Vietnamese prison cell. His body was busted up from a plane crash — injuries that were only made worse by torture. How did he get there?
On Oct. 25, 1967, McCain had destroyed two enemy MiG fighter planes parked on a runway outside Hanoi. He begged to go out the next day, too.
But as he flew into Hanoi again on Oct. 26, his jet’s warning lights began to flash.
“I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up — the sky was full of them — and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber,” he wrote in a 1973 account of his ordeal. “It went into an inverted, almost straight-down spin. I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection.”
McCain regained consciousness when his parachute landed him in a lake. The explosion had shattered both arms and one of his legs. With 50 pounds of gear on him and one good limb, he struggled to swim to the surface.
North Vietnamese dragged him to shore. Then stripped him to his underwear and began “hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me.”
“One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly,” he wrote. “Another stuck a bayonet in my foot. The mob was really getting up-tight.”
He was interrogated for four days, losing consciousness as his captors tried to beat information out of him. But he refused.
He shot enemy planes. That’s a hero. He survived a plane crash, beating and torture, and never talked. That’s a hero.
And that is saying nothing of the horrendous and valiant survival at the Hanoi Hilton and his long painful road to recovery.
A lot of people, myself included, believe that the Vietnam War was a mistake. But people who haven’t been in war, in my view, are not in a position to question the valor of people who have. This holds true for Trump.
Many people have already identified what Trump is doing — he is swiftboating — the very thing done to John Kerry in 2004 by the dirty trickster, Karl Rove. I think all the Republicans who say they are outraged at Trump’s comments need to step up and apologize to John Kerry if they didn’t, as McCain did, defend him from the swiftboaters. But I don’t expect it to happen.
UPDATE: Hey, remember this….
This lovely one from Ann Coulter:
“Max Cleland should stop allowing Democrats to portray him as a war hero who lost his limbs taking enemy fire on the battlefields of Vietnam,” she writes, claiming that he “lost three limbs in an accident during a routine non-combat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman …. Luckily for Cleland’s political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.”
Cleland won the silver star for the battle of Khe Sanh.
Funny, I don’t remember any Republicans taking either Chambliss or Coulter to task for that one.
THIS IS INTERESTING UPDATE #2:
This was the entire announcement from the people at Huffington Post. Lets look at it:
[Huff Post Politics] A Note About Our Coverage Of Donald Trump’s ‘Campaign’Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post
Danny Shea, Editorial Director, The Huffington PostAfter watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of The Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.
Yup. Like Pat Paulsen for President (1968) or Stephen Colbert for President (2008). This is entertainment.