Donald Trump

Trump touts himself as a self-made man, which is more than one can say about his coiffure.

“What an appealing surname for a life in public affairs.”
~ Oscar Wilde on Donald Trump

Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is a self-made all-American businessman, television personality, political pundit, possessor of one of the worst/greatest combovers in history, and the 45th President of the United States from 2017 to 2021. He is chairman of The Trump Organization, the principal holding company for the Trump Tower, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Taco Bowls, Trump Nation, and various other Trump-tastic business ventures.

In 2011, Trump caused a media buzz when he predicted that America would face a new revolution if it re-elected Barack Hussein Obama. Bankers and casino owners would rise up, he claimed, and overwhelm the masses. Trump ran in the 2016 presidential election as a Republican candidate, campaigning on the slogan to "Make America Great Again™", implemented on the platform of making Mexico ungreat by having them pay for a brand-new border wall. Against all odds and the concentrated fire of the media, he actually managed to win the presidency, and for three years all went well enough for him. However, the Chinavirus pandemic and ensuing recession threw a curveball into The Donald's presidency, previously-tremendous economy, and even himself, making the 2020 election even more contentious than 2016. Unexpectedly, he lost the 2020 election to Sleepy Joe Biden, though he unsuccessfully attempted to legally challenge its results.

In his spare time, when he's not bossing Pence around, calling him a pussy, and having rioters grab Pence by the Pence, Trump writes storybooks for the children of capitalists. His most notable work is Seal the Deal, about a marine mammal that invests in expensive marinas and opens undersea golf courses in Scotland.

Early life

The Donald's parents were The Fred and The Ethel.

Trump claims he was born in New York in 1946, and has copies of his birth certificates available for scrutiny on his Samsung Galaxy. There is a possibility he was also dropped on his head; this could explain the stringy, nearly natural-looking textile that now grows out of the top of it.

Trump was the son of wealthy real-estate magnate Fred Trump and his wife Ethel Trump (née Mertz). He joined the family property-management business, Fred and Ethel and a Few Skyscrapers, Inc., which became notorious because of celebrity tenant Lucille Ball, and in 1971 renamed it Donald Trump, Inc.

Investments

Trump routinely settles public disputes by purchasing all the related real estate:

When Muslims sought to build a mosque close to the site of the 9/11 attacks, Trump offered to buy the site for $5 million, a move that several imams condemned as "a publicity stunt," as though building a mosque there weren't.
Trump is an avid golfer who claims to have a very low handicap. He has bought a golf course in Mamaroneck, N.Y. and has adopted its golf pro. However, President Obama has offered millions of dollars if Trump will disclose his scorecards for the last five years.
Trump is on his third wife, a practice at odds with Catholic doctrine. However, Trump has submitted a purchase-and-sale offer for the New York diocese.

Television productions

The Apprentice

For those without comedic tastes, the self-proclaimed experts at Wikipedia have an article very remotely related to Donald Trump.

From 2004 to 2015, Trump was the star and executive producer (and, coincidentally, majority owner) of a reality show on NBC called The Apprentice, whose episodes feature a dozen businesspeople competing to be hired for a one-year contract to manage either one of Trump's un-reality real-estate companies or his fantasy football team in the defunct U.S. Football League. Each show ends with Trump uttering his signature phrase, "You're fired," to one of the competitors, who of course had not yet been hired.

Camera crews follow the competitors as they wait in line to get building permits, insult the slum-dwellers who will be displaced by the proposed luxury condominiums, and bark orders to construction crews. In the final segments of the episode, viewers see into the board room and get an imitation glimpse of the skullduggery with which real corporations make their most important personnel decisions. Losers have to sleep in tents pitched out behind Trump's Servants' Residence. During the seventh season only, losers had to clean Trump's toilet with a toothbrush, which they often had to go on to employ in its more typical use.

Spin-offs

It is a tenet of American business to slap the name of any good product onto several other products of lower quality. Thus, in 2005, Trump created the spin-off series The Apprentice: Martha Stewart. He hired self-made billionaire and self-made jailbird Stewart to interview "candidates" who would assist her in everything from laundering intimate apparel to laundering money. Trump and Stewart had a falling-out during the year, based on Nielsen ratings and on Stewart's notorious arrest and trial, in which clips from the spin-off were key pieces of evidence, and the show was not renewed. Stewart, however, has undergone the most spectacular rehabilitation of any person outside Communist China and has returned to chair Omnimedia, a wiki that directly competes with Uncyclopedia, Inc.

In 2007, the series was renewed for a seventh season, but retitled The Celebrity Apprentice. Instead of competent individuals vying for a job in a nonexistent organization, stage actors competed to win money for charity. This was the key to the rise in influence in America of Piers Morgan, who won the initial series by tapping his competitors' cell phones. Morgan distinguished himself as the most competent in a competition where no competence was necessary, and was thus a lock to go on to anchor the CBS Evening News.

In 2010, a spin-off entitled Donald J. Trump Presents The Ultimate Merger gave "candidates" the chance to become Trump's newest trophy wife. Following in the path of industry giants Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who have jumped at the chance for broadcasting outlets with potentially higher audiences than the gigantic U.S. television networks, Trump aired the new spin-off on a nascent webcast outlet called The Spunk Channel. Thankfully, the individual "competitions" are shown outside the "family viewing hour."

Faux 2012 campaign

Trump's latest attempt to stake a claim to fame was pre-empted by Obama himself with news on the demise of bin-Laden.

Although ever-anxious for greater public exposure than he could achieve through the backwater of network television, Trump at first never evidenced interest in government, outside a few retail campaign contributions in cash; nor had he mounted a serious campaign for political office. However, he had mounted several things that resembled campaigns, due to virtuoso use of crass stunts and personal attacks. Astute observers noticed that these "campaigns" did not follow the election schedule but "sweeps week" in the Nielsen ratings.

In 2011, Michelle Bachmann mentioned Trump as a running mate for Vice President. She built on remarks of her counterpart intellectual giant, Sarah Palin, who praised the "midnight run of Paul Revere." Bachmann provided the additional heft of praising the citizens of Concord, New Hampshire, rather than a similarly named town fifty miles downriver that was not conducting midwinter primaries. She would go on to have one actual brainstorm: just disappear from public life. Despite her best efforts to get nothing right, Trump was never associated with her.

2012 primaries

At a debate in Nashua in 2011, Trump had little to say on public policy, but uttered the memorable line, "Excuse me, but I paid for this microphone."

“You're fired!”
~ 2012 Republican primary voters on Donald Trump

Trump made it on stage with the "Seven Dwarfs" contesting the Presidency in 2012 at the notorious quadrennial "Politics and Eggs" breakfast symposium, though neither were thrown. While the other seven presented some sort of platform for the management of the U.S. government, Trump's entire thesis was that Obama was not a "natural-born citizen." Finally, Obama released a Photoshop file from 1959 that disproved this charge. Trump declared that this act effectively made him the winner and wound up his campaign, months before the election.

Give us more, please

On the eve of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, Trump decided more documentation was needed, and offered to pay Mr. Obama $5,000,000 for the latter's college transcripts (or donate it to Mr. Obama's favorite charity, though the Black Panthers were unusually busy that month).

Trump recently upped the ante to $10,000,000 for a more thorough disclosure: "Rent-versus-buy is a common business dilemma. We decided it would be more cost-effective to pay Obama to disclose the information and convert it into a scandal himself, than if he merely disclosed it and my people had to turn it into a scandal."

2016 presidential campaign

In June 2015, Trump again declared himself to be a candidate for the Republican nomination for President — while declaring Mexican immigrants to be rapists. NBC, for its part, declared to Trump "You're fired!" from The Apprentice, which otherwise would have turned into a weekly full-length campaign infomercial.

Primary campaign

In the 2016 campaign, there were a full "Seventeen Dwarfs" — senators, governors, a businesswoman, and whatever Jeb Bush was supposed to be. The Republican Party forced them all to sign a mutual pledge to support whomever was nominated. The losers would all renege on it, and no one knows what the winner would do if he had been a loser, though it is spelled Third-Party Candidacy.

Trump won primary contests around the nation, picking up 50 convention delegates at a time before jetting back to the Trump Towers, which is the only place he likes to sleep. Unfortunately, Ted Cruz stayed in the campaign states and began to influence who the actual 50 appointees were, which led Trump to bellow that the system was "rigged."

Florida Senator Marco Rubio remained in the race until a debate in New Hampshire, a state that prides itself on being influential, though its major influence is making Republicans act stupid. Rubio, accused of repeating his stock clichés like a robot, made a point to do exactly that for the entire remainder of the debate. Voters said, "You're fired!" That left Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whom Trump masterfully summarized as "Lyin' Ted," not that Trump had ever told a Little White One. Republicans had brief hope for some vintage convention treachery until Cruz conceded, was given time to give a speech at the convention, and gave Trump his clear endorsement, saying, "Y'all do what you gotta do. It is what it is."

To this point, Trump had brought the networks such yuge audiences that they had allowed him to conduct himself with amazing crudeness, including opening a debate by describing the size of his penis. No Republican strategist worried that this power over the media was a gift of the media itself, and all were astonished when the givers took it back the day after Trump clinched the nomination.

General election campaign

The Democratic Party nominated Hillary Clinton, a political veteran who knew that you cannot tell Americans what to believe, but you can sure as Hell control what they are talking about. Consequently, an astonishing array of women stepped forward to accuse Trump — roughly one per daily news cycle. They said he groped them decades ago and ruined their lives, though they did not think so at the time, and none of them remembered it during the entire primary.

Sure enough, argument at America's dinner tables turned to whether Trump was a serial abuser or whether we had proof beyond a reasonable doubt he was not. The last straw was an eleven-year-old video. A left-wing reporter assured Trump that "the microphone is off" and Trump confided that he was so famous that he could grab women by the pussy, something every male voter secretly longs to do. Voters decided it would be too weird if Trump bragged about it but had not done it. The only rebuttal was that Trump had also quipped that he was popular enough to shoot civilians in Manhattan and get away with it, and no victims of that stepped forward. It seemed that "Pussygate" would wrap itself around the Trump candidacy.

Unfortunately, Hillary's operation of the entire U.S. State Department from private non-secure email servers in the bathroom of her mansion at Chappaqua, New York came back to haunt her. The FBI investigated why you couldn't read them with an order under the Freedom Of Information Act unless you were Vladimir Putin. Fortunately, Hillary henchman John Podesta did not have a private server but a Gmail account whose password was cankles. His diary, stolen by Wikileaks and released daily, did not change the agenda but merely provided the transcript. The FBI for some reason gave Congress daily updates on its investigation. Again, this did not change what anyone believed but got everyone talking about the same thing.

Hillary tried to turn the debate back to the abuse of women. There were only two problems with this, and both were on stage with her:

Bill Clinton, still wiping his lips on his sleeve whenever a female got up to speak, and
Jay-Z, doing his platinum raps, such as "I Just Wanna Pimp U" and "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe".

On November 8, polls conducted by the same impartial networks that had snuck Hillary advance copies of the debate questions, concluded that America was seeing a Hillary landslide. Unfortunately, someone began counting the actual votes. While pundits debated the few remaining "paths to victory" among the "battleground states," states like Michigan and Pennsylvania suddenly became battleground states. Experts were astonished that Trump's promise to revive the car factories, and Hillary's to finish wrecking the coal mines, were now factors. Paid television commentators called it the most stunning upset in recent memory — to them, at least.

In fact, the only votes Trump did not get is the votes of Washington Republican leaders, who washed their hands of him after Pussygate. Liberals got right back to work, writing editorials that these were who Trump should put in charge of the White House. Liberals who did not run newspapers had their own role to play, throwing bottles at policemen and stealing HDTVs from Walmart.

President of the United States

All of the above would make Trump — God help us — the U.S. President. However, controversy continued to dog him like a dog. When Trump named Vladimir Putin to run his transition team, opportunistic Democrats started claiming that Russian influence was the only way Trump won the election. Hillary pressed her RESET button, to reset the reset, until it broke. Barack Obama, living in a retirement home two miles from the White House, said it was provocative for a foreign leader to try to throw an election (unless it was a handsome, dark-skinned foreign leader wheedling Brits to remain in the European Union); the man who scolded Mitt Romney that the Cold War had been over since the 1980s felt a sudden chill in the air.

The cabinet

Human Services	Secretary of State	National Security	~~Labor~~	Economic Advisor	Defense	I forgot
Ben Carson	Rex Tillerson	John Bolton	Andrew Puzder	Larry Kudlow	Mad Dog Mattis	Rick Perry

Trump got most of his selections into the Cabinet. The only casualty was fast-food executive Andrew Puzder. Allegations of spousal abuse swirled around the candidate for Secretary of Labor, and it did not help that they were made by Mrs. Puzder, and carried live on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Senators looked at one another and decided it was unwise to "go there," but it came out that Puzder had also hired foreign maids, under the table. Puzder protested that the only reason they were under the table is that that is where the dust-bunnies tend to accumulate, but by then it was too late, and Trump would have to look for a nominee with a name anyone could pronounce.

After an initial rebuff, John Bolton was hired as National Security Advisor late in the Administration, as Trump overcame his inability to avert his gaze from that mutant albino caterpillar that had taken up residence on Bolton's upper lip. The relationship ended quickly after Bolton initiated two minor bush wars and twelve episodes of palace intrigue, and scoffed at riding in the Secretary of State's motorcade.

Immediate results

Trump Presidency in the News:

The real harbinger of doom was the "First 100 Days." This is each President's "honeymoon" — before the inevitable arguments about the toilet seat and eventual cheating and divorce — in other words, that wink-of-an-eye in which the President can get things done before everyone starts running for re-election.

But with Trump, Congressional leaders began charting out the "First 250 Days" or even "First 1000 Days." This at least was better than Obama saying what might happen in his tenth year, but Republicans had just spent six years explaining that they could not repeal Obama-care for the following reasons:

We do not control the Senate.
We do not control the Presidency.

After voters solved these problems in 2014 and 2016, respectively, Republicans began explaining that they could not repeal Obama-care for the following brand new reasons:

"Repeal" really means "repeal-and-replace," and during those six years we never thought about what we might like to replace it with.
Designing a replacement will be part of a three-year process, which will not be complete until after you re-elect us.
Obama-care put 20 million poor people on welfare, and our solution must not take any of them off it.
We are starting to like the idea of guaranteed insurance even if you wait to buy it until the day before your surgery.

Republicans were relying on a new MSNBC poll that Obama-care had suddenly become wildly popular. The poll used airtight methodology, although not polling anyone outside the MSNBC newsroom.

Thus, Congress turned to lawsuits, filibusters, final votes on legislation that were cancelled at the last minute, and a bushel of finger-pointing.

Bringing back the '70s

Trump had acquired a BFF up on Capitol Hill.

Trump's opposition engaged in continual street protests as though it were the 1970s, a decade in which the Attorney General's wife would telephone celebrities and media members at all hours of the night. This time, though, it was Trump himself, and he used Twitter.

Trump enthused the nation with superlatives and promises, each limited to 140 characters. (The most significant consequence of the Trump Presidency was increasing the message limit to 280.) Trump railed about "fake news," the first President to include the New York Times in the Axis of Evil, also including fake opinions handed down from the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch for the vacant Scalia seat. Avoiding the last-minute rush, Sen. Schumer came out against the nomination one day before Trump made it. Unfortunately, his predecessor Harry Reid had changed the rules to cut the minority out of the debate on nominations. The tables turned and Mitch McConnell fatefully cut the minority out of even Supreme Court nominations.

However, the President who had said, "We are going to do so much winning, you'll get tired of it" drew a loser in the House. Speaker Ryan insisted that House Rules would not let Trump do what he had been elected to do. Along with attaching repeal of Obama-care to "replacement," he began to attach a nosegay of new taxes and welfare programs, as though his Members didn't have to run for re-election in 2018. The firefighters had begun to bicker about the best route to the burning house, and even Americans who were ready for a W.C. Fields as President were shocked that his lieutenants were the Keystone Kops.

Thus, the First 100 Days saw a flurry of new laws — virtually all of them renaming Post Offices.

Big big tax cut

Senate Democrats were united and still had the filibuster to bottle up all other legislation. Happily, Republicans had trickery. The filibuster does not extend to instructions on negotiating the annual budget with the House — obviously, else they couldn't spend money, and that's what this is about. In 2017, the instructions included putting the entire U.S. tax code in the shredder. This took aim at corporations keeping trillions in foreign countries to avoid tax. They would be assessed a token tax for bringing their stashes home, coupled with a massive tax cut every year thereafter until, like, forever. Individuals in every tax bracket got a token benefit too. Except New Yorkers. Best of all, Trump the reality-TV star was mindful of the need for a sequel, so the entire thing was set to auto-repeal in six years, a time bomb still ticking inside the U.S. Code.

The trickery worked so well that the reconciliation instructions for the 2018 budget, allowing Republicans to single-handedly reform laws while claiming merely to move money, were...well, there weren't any.

Coupled with the tax cut, Trump decreed to his Cabinet that, for every new administrative regulation, two must be repealed. The chief effect of this was an instant doubling of the length of administrative regulations.

With this Reagan-esque reform, two things took off:

The national economy, and
The Republican majority in the House.

Loyal opposition

Remarkably, Democrats never accepted Trump's election. They immediately countered his debate claim about the size of his organ by demonstrating the size of theirs on their headgear. Elizabeth Warren broke the rules of the Senate and when McConnell chided her that "still she persisted," Warren made that her tagline, and dropped the bit about being a Cherokee.

Presently, however, childish protests turned to mature treachery.

General Flynn got a courtesy call from FBI lawyers who had transcripts of his phone calls. He would plead guilty to perjury in a lawsuit that lasted four years, including two years after the charges were dropped.
The Bureau got wind of Russian collusion with Trump in the 2016 election (indirectly from Hillary). The American people perked up, as it involved incontinent prostitutes.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, informed that his preference for Russian dressing was a conflict of interest, agreed that investigation should be done instead by his Democrat subordinates whom Trump hadn't gotten around to replacing.
Democrats rejected all Trump's initiatives because "he's under investigation." Or climate change.

Protests reached a fever pitch when centrist Justice Anthony Kennedy resigned and Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh. This would swing the Supreme Court hard to the right, except for the imponderable swing of Chief Justice Roberts to the hard left. Claims arose that Kavanaugh's management skills extended to a rape room while in high school. The claims were made by an upperclasswoman from a different city who was abused each of the dozen times she attended Kav's parties; also by Christine Blasey Ford, a mousey, forgetful professor at a California college about to stumble onto a huge book deal. Kav "squirted" (as they say in the newsroom: burst into tears at the hearing), he got his seat, and several of the Senators lost theirs. The House, however, was untainted and passed into the hands of the opposition.

Investigation and impeachment

The House was now in enemy hands (charitably assuming that Republicans are your "friends") and a biennium of "divided government" began. Americans loathe this, but slightly less than they loathe everything government does when it is unified. The investigation of Trump continued, now with Robert Mueller in charge. This FBI veteran had never successfully imprisoned anyone for a crime he didn't commit — the most he had done in the Boston office was bottle up new evidence that would have set them free — so he had a lot of catching up to do. He and his 14 star Democrat lawyers were assigned offices in a star chamber which, $45 million later, issued a two-volume report. A memorable passage from its Conclusion was—

“

Thus, we cannot find proof of any of the assertions in the Steele dossier. However, the following section gives tips you might use if you want to impeach the bastard anyway.

”

Once the report was ready, Congress scheduled a week of hearings, with full network coverage. Tragically, Mueller failed his screen test. He showed no awareness of anything in the report and even glanced furtively around the hearing room when legislators addressed him by name. Like Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's vault, there was nothing there but air: the worst ratings nightmare of Trump's media career.

The next step was astonishing: Congress impeached Trump anyway. See, the day after the hearings, Trump phoned Ukraine, whose new Prime Minister hoped to root out corruption under the previous guy. Trump fatefully said, "Good idea!" as 20 aides listened in and a few took notes, mostly Obama appointees that Trump hadn't gotten around to replacing. There, that's foreign collusion right there. That was one of the Articles of Impeachment; the other was "Obstruction of Congress," as Trump had not cooperated fully with the Mueller gambit. An astonishing number of Congressmen signaled their readiness to vote to impeach before the phone call took place.

Even more astonishing was that, instead of sending the Bill of Impeachment to the Senate for trial, Pelosi wadded it up and stuck it in her brassiere for a full month, as she issued demands as to how the Senate would conduct the trial. That didn't work, and compared to the Bill Clinton trial over something stupid, this trial over nothing went just as fast. All the Democrats voted to remove Trump, and all the Republicans voted not to; except that Mitt Romney crossed over for one of the two Articles, letting him say, à la John Kerry in 2004, "I actually did vote for impeachment...before I voted against it!" Be that as it may, the result prompted a tedious new period of Trump bragging that he "beat them."

Coronavirus

Coronavirus (on top), among friends

He may have beat them, but he beat them by being on defense for an entire month — the month that the Coronavirus was boarding a flight from ~~Wuhan, China~~ unknown parts but certainly not ours, its swarthy RNA coating drawing a bead on America.

Trump acted early, banning flights from China, for which he would later catch Hell; also failed to act early, so as not to spook the stock market, for which he would also catch Hell. He was guided by two computer models showing COVID would kill 2.2 million Americans (for simplicity, Trump would round this up to 3 million) and corpses would start piling up on Main Street. Democrat CNN and Democrat health guru Anthony Fauci convinced the President that the only option was to direct all Americans to put their lives on hold for "just 15 days" to help our institutions prepare for the onslaught. Trump, always the Constitutional scholar, insisted he had no such power, but Fauci helpfully replied that the state governors do, and it was off to the races, because more than a scholar, Trump was a germophobe; and more than governors, state governors are tyrant wanna-bes. As the 15 days entered their ninth month, the urgency was the same; only the goal had changed.

Re-election campaign

The resulting voluntary economic depression neatly wiped out the entire Trump boom, and went on to wipe out Trump. Fauci won the Democratic Party's coveted Punks of Hope award. The Democrats nominated Joe Biden — a candidate even older than Trump who, like I, Claudius, did not have enough brain cells left to really threaten anyone. Trump held five rallies a day, basking in adulation and promising to reprise his first term (the first three years, probably; not the current one), while Biden campaigned from his basement in Wilmington, Delaware by trying to read a Teleprompter through a Coronavirus mask over streaming video. He promised to put everyone in Pennsylvania out of work while getting back on good terms with Iran.

One final gift fell into Trump's lap: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the "Notorious R.B.G.," went R.I.P., so Trump would have the chance to name his third Supreme Court Justice and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee — including Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris — would have a final pre-election chance to make damn-fools of themselves. Trump chose Amy Coney "I'm saving her for Ginsburg" Barrett off the Koch Brothers' list. She had already been confirmed to federal court and no one claimed she ran a rape train in high school, though Sen. Hirono did get to ask whether she was on any sex-offender registries. When Republicans held together, it became obvious there would be no drama, or at least that it would not work. Even Mitt Romney could say, "Actually, after voting not to advance the nomination, I did vote for Barrett!"

Trump had not only gotten 250 conservative judges through the Senate — making even the Ninth Circus a fair fight — but now had nailed the Supreme Court to the right wall. Conservatives should have been delirious (despite being expected to quarantine for 14 days if they ducked across the state line to buy cigarettes). So it astonished everyone in the country, including both candidates, that Americans voted not to send the Trump Presidency into reruns.

Recount until you get it right

Trump's lead lawyer Giuliani adapted to late payment by unwisely opting to do his own hair.

L. Linseed "Lin" Wood, Jr. (left) insists that Trump (right) won at least 700 electoral votes.

Sidney Powell (shown here just after "releasing the kraken") was released herself after espousing fact-ores even too absurd for the others.

Vanna Ellis called Trump an "idiot" in 2016. But she brought other assets to the team, such as being under 70.

But the margins were razor-thin, and a basic American tenet is that, in a tie game that has gone into extra innings, you start working on the umpires. Trump had improved his vote count among African-Americans and Hispanics, while white women still swooned at his rallies. There was no one who voted for an unknown Trump in 2016 who was not voting for the well-known Trump of 2020. Well, maybe the businesspeople in tourism and hospitality whom state governors had put out of business. But Biden was less appealing than Hillary Clinton on all counts (except corruption and failing health, where they were tied). So Trump must have won.

To make the facts fit this obvious conclusion, Trump assembled a crack legal team — and, when they were shamed and boycotted into quitting, assembled a crackpot legal team. This second string — Rudy Giuliani, L. Linseed "Lin" Wood, Jr., Sidney Powell, and Vanna Ellis — put forth the following claims:

Voting machines in 28 states (all the swing states, and a few of the foxtrot ones) were manufactured by Dominion, a subsidiary of the Venezuelan Communist Party. It can be set to multiply Biden votes by 1.25 and Trump votes by 0.75. They did this nationwide because it would be suspicious if done in just one state. That Georgia hand-counted all the ballots and saw no such thing is the exception that proves the rule.
We have sworn affidavits that hundreds of poll workers saw things that didn't seem right, until it was explained to them. We may put them into the Witness Protection Program.
Totals on the TV screen, where Trump was ahead, instantly changed to totals where Biden was ahead. Everyone saw it. There is no rational explanation for this, apart from the fact that Democrats voted by mail and Republicans went to the polls.
Republican poll-watchers were allowed in the room, but weren't seated so they could actually watch anything. Thus, our poll-watchers could not have seen the millions of manufactured Biden votes stuffed into the boxes from suitcases hidden under the tables, and we shouldn't have to prove it happened.
There were hundreds of thousands of votes for Biden where the voter cast no vote for any other office, and only hundreds of Trump-only ballots, and we have a Ph.D. in statistics ready to testify that this is impossible, who has not heard us insist for years that Democratic voters are uninformed.

While Powell advanced these theories, Linseed Wood's job was to propose remedies — turning a deaf ear to distractions like a rare double runoff in Georgia that would decide the Senate — including urging Republicans to boycott that vote, Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, send the National Guard to seize voting machines, armed resistance, perhaps a quickie Convention of States, and any uncooperative Republican including Mike Pence shot for treason. That is simply going to bat for your client.

The Republican position on Trump's lawsuits was the same as it had been on the border wall, the tax cut, the judges, and Obamacare: Please just fold, and maybe people won't hate us. The Democrats' position was that Biden deserved to start the transition without having to wait for certification, and in fact should probably not have to wait to be sworn in. The Courts' position was: "Laches" says you can't sue just because you lost; you should have sued before you lost. Democratic governors tightened the screws with new coronavirus Temporary Guidance. Santa Claus at the department store wore a surgical mask and Junior was bawling. If you want your holidays, tell your guy to concede.

The Electoral College voted Biden the President with no surprises — except that Republican electors mailed their own votes to the Capitol. But the new Congress held that the states say whom they would like to be President, and not vice versa. Trump's last hope of triggering yet another favor-the-small-states gimmick in the Constitution failed, as Republicans had neither a majority nor a death wish. But they did have an armed mob just outside the House chamber. Democrats did have a death wish; they parlayed the mob into a historic second attempt to remove Trump from office just when the calendar was doing exactly that.

But Venezuelan Communists? The Trump Presidency began with fake international intrigue, and that is how it ended.

The lost years

The once-and-future President took up official residence at MAGA-Lago in Florida, with an ex-President's usual staff of letter-openers on the federal payroll. He remained active in politics, with a forward-looking approach in several key areas:

Insisting that he had been robbed in 2020.
Kibitzing in various states to sabotage every Republican who had voted for either of the impeachments.
Griping that Biden was dismantling such of Trump's achievements that Trump didn't dismantle himself in 2020.
Advising Bette Midler to just shut her yap, though her career is already in tatters and nobody comes to her shows.
In March 2022, filing a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton et al. et al. et al. over misconduct all the way back in the 2016 election, even though it was not so serious as to keep Trump from winning it.

Trump teased about being the first President since Grover Cleveland to regain the White House with a gap in the middle. This presumed that voters, having elected a very old and weird man, then replacing him with an older and weirder man, would vote for a man eight years older than when they started, and still every bit as weird. To the good, Rep. Maxine Waters, who is getting up there herself, would have trouble adjusting her signature chant, "Impeach 45" once Trump became #47.

Trump was all smiles and handshakes with his adopted state's governor, Ron DeSantis, who adequately steered Florida through dual crises (Trump and Biden) and was the most likely Republican alternative to Trump in 2024. And remarkably normal. Among other potential primary opponents, Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dropped 100 pounds, said all the right things, and was building an impressive following for a Presidential campaign, only not outside the banquet halls. And defense advisor John Bolton still had that goofy mustache. Liz Cheney hinted that she might make that rare jump from House to Presidency, even after being disowned by her home state of Wyoming, and build a campaign and a Presidency around being against Trump, though the nation now had a President who had done just that.

Idiosyncracies

Trump is often referred to as "The Donald" or simply "The Don", which owes to Trump's ex-wife, the Ivana, and her woefully poor facility with the English. Her replacement (bar one), the Slovene Melania Trump, is equally baffling in her adopted language, but can always crib from others to get along.

Trump is said to be averse to handshakes, though he claims he shook "a couple of hands" while campaigning in New Hampshire in 2011, "and you know how grimy they get." Trump, apart from claiming to grab women by the pussies, is a profoundly religious man, whose favorite part of the Bible is "2 Corinthians." This is presumably the same chapter that soldiers read on the battlefield during the 2 World War.