Trump Bares His Soul
“Kissing my ass.”
That’s Trump-speak for making a deal. The equivalence was neatly expressed in the colloquial, some would say vulgar, eloquence coming from the lips of savvy U.S. President Donald J. Trump as he addressed an NRCC1 dinner April 9.
“These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal. Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir!”
The distinguished crowd tittered. The more the merrier.
Trump obviously relished the prospect of baring his butt to a line of puckered strangers despite still being a trifle surprised that his tariffs had gotten so many heads of state — and their lips — into position so fast. They were all ready to make a deal.
The world knows by now that in order to make a deal with Trump you have to kiss his ass. Making a deal with Trump is kissing his ass: You must first permit him to abuse you in some way advantageous to him in exchange for his flabby promise to point his flamethrower at someone else for a while. That is the deal. Americans are aware that Trump made a deal with them to make America wealthy again. That didn’t pan out. His tariffs nearly wrecked the economy. So what about the other deals he made to get himself elected a second time?
What about his deal to make America healthy again? He certainly introduced some novel approaches there. Moving on from advising citizens to ingest bleach to combat Covid-19, he found himself a secretary of health and human services who is urging kids to take cod liver oil to beat measles. Thanks RFK Jr.! Strapped hospitals are now encumbered with an overload of children exhibiting excessive levels of Vitamin A.
Staying Healthy in America Tip 2: Don’t get pregnant. Infant and maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are climbing, in part due to criminal restrictions imposed on medical providers who dare to offer care or advice to people experiencing problem pregnancies. The best course for those humans who might get pregnant is — don’t. Since contraceptives are also under heavy scrutiny as nefarious means to cause an abortion before conception, anyone who might get pregnant should spend more time at the local library improving their minds. This is, though, becoming more difficult since Trump defunded libraries, part of making America something again that Trump has not yet specified.
Staying Healthy in America Tip 3: Trump advises you not to get diabetes, heart disease, or fat. Besides marked by shorter life expectancies than their wealthy compatriots, America’s poor are also more likely to succumb to those diseases. Consequently, Trump has targeted major cuts to Medicaid, which has ministered to the less advantaged for nearly 60 years. That means that if you are poor and do get sick, you’ll die sooner, causing the proportion of healthy living Americans to jump, thus fulfilling Trump’s promise of making America healthy again one soul at a time. (Healthy dead Americans don’t count.)
Another very reasonable tip from Trump camp to keep America healthy: Don’t get any new or complicated disease. With medical research defunded, no one’s going to know what to do with you if you get something tricky.
How much safer can a country get? Just one caveat for Americans traveling abroad: Leave your MAGA hat at home.
How about making us safe again? Our busy president has done everything imaginable to keep that part of the deal. Declare the southern border an emergency? Done. Transform a strip of land along the Mexican border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico into a military installation to quash illegal crossing? It’s in the works. Hike the military budget to $1 trillion a year? Check. Increase investment in immigration detention facilities six fold to $45 billion over the next two years? He’s working on it. Defend Israel against antisemitism throughout the country? Jawohl. Disappear terrorists to Louisiana? You bet. Disappear everyone else to El Salvador? A cinch. Expose the nasty European allies who have been ripping America off since World War II? Done. Coax major law firms into providing $1 billion in free legal work to fight off Trump’s critics in court? Mission accomplished. How much safer can a country get? Just one caveat for Americans traveling abroad: Leave your MAGA hat at home.
Has Trump made America strong again? A teeny-weeny flaw creeps in on this particular point. Some august heads and some coarser heads, too, are getting scratched all over the world. Strength? Trump quickly exposed how weak the American political structure is. Within two weeks of his inauguration, impelled solely by his own febrile initiative, he upended America’s centuries-old core values. Peace, good will, and staunch support for fellow democracies? Wrecked. Huddled masses welcomed, trusted, appreciated? Scratch that. Free speech and freedom of assembly to mingle contrary views with Trump’s right-wing demagoguery? Nope. Pursuit of happiness through personal choice of one’s lifestyle? Not here. Access to legal professionals to defend underdogs against government and corporate overreach? Nixed. Federal agencies with peerless teams of experts to minister life-critical social services to the needy? No way. Scientific and educational institutions dedicated to cutting-edge research and academia? Not necessary. Commitment to abate global warming? Hogwash. Support for the world’s distressed? Rescinded. Trump’s cessation of hostilities in Ukraine within 24 hours of his inauguration? Not so important. Ceasefire in Gaza by the sheer force of Trump’s formidable self stepping into the presidency? Didn’t work out. The price of eggs? Who really cares?
So what to do with all the money saved by gutting all that crap? Return it to the wealthy where it belongs. We should never have taken it from them in the first place.
Harry Truman’s famous buck travels on to stop — with us.
What about making us great again? How about that? This is the saddest part of the whole report, for it must be said: The American people have been diminished by Trump’s visionary rampage. You see, Trump’s legitimacy to disrupt comes solely through the consent of the governed. That’s us. He performs his autocratic tricks in our name. He has to. Without our approval he has no legitimacy to operate. So naturally he claims he has our approval over and over again. But we don’t approve. We don’t approve at all. We like the Europeans. We like Canada and Mexico and Vietnam. We want to feed undernourished children, help the needy, care for the elderly. We want to support medical research, public and higher education, libraries, museums, and national parks. We want our money to go to us, and people like us, and those less privileged than we are. We like to share. We want to be affluent in an affluent society, where everyone has something to give, something to share, and something to cherish. But it’s not the world Trump wants. Since his inauguration, he’s set in motion a hideous decline of our democracy, our wealth, our health, our confidence, our reputation in the world, and our autonomy as U.S. citizens.
During the first three months we could complain — in surprise — about our curiously indifferent congresspeople condoning his lawless actions. But those months are over. We know now that Congress will abet Trump no matter what he chooses to do and provide sickeningly fluent justifications for it. That means that Harry Truman’s famous buck travels on to stop — with us. If we let Trump continue to invoke our name for his mean, dirty, self-serving, illegal, unconstitutional maneuvers, it is we, the American people, who will be guilty of having indulged him.
To regain our sovereignty — America’s sovereignty resides in us — do we wait for the 2026 elections? By that time, highly motivated persons will have tinkered with voting restrictions just enough to eliminate critical sections of the population inimical to their interests. So, no. We do not wait for elections. Instead, we choose to erupt. April 5 was a good start and is to be repeated April 19. Thereafter, we must hold regular eruptions until the powers that think they are recognize that ours is the agency, ours is the moral authority, and that we are not asking. We are demanding. We must also abandon the “Hands Off” plea. Since when has Trump kept his hands off anything? We must demand civilly, but unequivocally and specifically: “Time for You to Go.”
- National Republican Congressional Committee ↩︎
To quote AJ Fikry, this was written by a Writer ! FYI Jimmy Kimmel has a repeating bit in his monologues where he declares the best ass-kisser and has the event acted out.
BRAVO!