The Ides of Trump, Part I: The President Is A Literal Basilisk
(The Ides of Trump is an ongoing series where I go through my Google Docs folders and upload all the unpublished Donald Trump pieces that I really should’ve put up when they were relevant. That’s pretty much it.)
A Literal Basilisk!
So we’ve officially reached the point in the Trump Presidency where Donald Trump finally got everything he ever wanted: Coronavirus.
There is not a person alive who put more effort into catching COVID-19 than Trump. It’s the hardest he’s ever worked towards anything in his entire life. The past six months have been a surreal tug-of-war between Trump using all the powers of the Presidency to protect himself from COVID and using all the powers of the Presidency to let as many random hillbillies sneeze in his mouth as possible.
Nobody knows why. He just started doing it. At first, we wrote it off as him being his usual little prick self. Doctors told him to do something, and Trump’s natural “you’re not my mom” instinct kicked in, as it always does when an intelligent person tells him not to do something. At least no one’s told him not to fuck a power outlet.
Yet.
I think Trump was making three calculations:
- That if he just uses enough badass flames on Twitter and calls Coronavirus a gay nerd that pees in its own nose, the crisis will resolve itself, so there is no need to adapt.
- Being the Man Of The People he is, Trump decided that the exact moment the vast majority of Americans accepted facemasks as the new normal and support for front-line workers was at an all-time high would also be a great time to say people who wear masks look stupid.
- Just…Jesus, let that sink in a sec. When Trump got elected, you knew he was going to be horribly racist and bigoted, right? But did you ever, in your most crazed Radical Left nightmares, imagine Trump inventing a new kind of discrimination aimed at doctors that are risking their lives and practicing good hygiene? Did you even know that kind of weird-ass racism could even exist?
- Trump is so cripplingly neurotic that he’s terrified of showing any kind of vulnerability whatsoever, even if it’s a basic display of caution and personal responsibility that conveys respect to the heroes that are risking their lives and, again, let me stress, are overwhelmingly popular at the moment.
So at first, we wrote it off as a gradient: After a week or two, when he can pretend it was his idea and not Fauci’s, we’ll gradually start seeing him in a mask now and then in obviously dangerous environments or as a show of respect to victims of Coronavirus. He won’t do it as often as he should, because he’s a moron that thinks he has a sexy mouth, but eventually he will.
I mean, there’s no way he’s gonna inexplicably latch on to “people who wear masks are Marxist spies”. Come on guys. Let’s get serious here. He’s going to ignore and downplay it, but he’ll never —
Smash cut to this week.
Trump’s supporters took the news exactly as you’d imagine: By instantly dropping all the bullshit they’d been repeating for years about Trump’s Alpha Male physique and magical immune system. They didn’t even bother halfheartedly informing us that “lmao it’s just the flu” or “lmao you wish you were as fuckable as my Hot Daddy Trump”. They knew that a man of his age, physique, and love of witchcraft was daring God to pull the trigger.
So instead, they defaulted to their usual cocktail of self-pity and projection, accusing The Libtards of getting off to this. Which we totally were. Everything about this is hilarious and satisfying. Trump’s comic timing this week has been on par with Golden Age Simpsons. As much as I wanted Trump to pull through, part of me loved the possibility that he could die exactly like Frank Grimes. (“What’s this? Extremely high mortality rate among obese seniors? Well I don’t need to wear a mask, because I’M HOMER SIMP”)
Roughly 18 minutes after being forced to go to Walter Reed for observation, Trump plotted his escape. Brad Parscale, who was committed to a psychiatric ward on the next floor, would tear a drinking fountain out of its foundations with his berserker strength and use it to smash a hole in the wall while Trump rappelled down to freedom using a rope he fashioned from the printouts of favorable Breitbart articles Eric delivers him every morning.
Ass cheeks flapping in the wind, Trump jogged a half block before running out of breath for reasons totally unrelated to Coronavirus and called an Uber to the White House. After tipping his driver with “Just so you know, I haven’t been able to wipe today, so I can’t vouch for the condition of your seat”, Trump found Mike Pence holding a press conference in the Rose Garden, where he was downplaying the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment to reporters.
Playing it cool as always, Trump, still in his hospital gown and roaring with roid rage, shoved Pence away from the microphone and reassured a troubled………….hold on, need to………………okay…………okay……….reassure a troubled nation that……………just one sec…………….alright. To assure a troubled nation that he’s fine and everything’s okay. Unlike the other 210,000 Americans that died from COVID-19, our President assured us, Trump’s not a total pussy.
Having once again amazed and delighted the world with his masculinity, he then decided to get back to work. Nothing really needed to change, aside from everything. He’d just camp out in an empty conference room — look, he brought a little tent and some s’mores Pop Tarts — while everyone else can wear HAZMAT suits and scrub down every surface they touch with rubbing alcohol.
Sensing a drop in morale, Trump then decided to brighten the mood by getting into the Halloween spirit and turning the White House turned into a low-budget indie horror game. The rules are simple: complete a 9-hour shift in the West Wing without getting spotted by your boss, who is a walking bioweapon that can murder you with his breath, much like a Basilisk. (Exactly like a Basilisk.) He roams the halls aimlessly, looking for someone to impress, and if you’re spotted, he’ll chase you down and spit directly in your mouth just to prove a point to God or something. His motivations are really weird and confusing and I hate him.
So basically Trump, world’s greatest showman and political genius, managed to, in one fell swoop:
1) Deliberately contract a fatal, incurable disease for no goddamn reason so close to an election that his death would almost definitely trigger an unprecedented Constitutional crisis.
2) Gut the Executive Branch by giving nearly three dozen high-level officials said fatal, incurable disease, and forcing the remaining employees to completely upend their personal and professional lives by leaving them in the dark about basic, relevant facts about the President’s health.
3) Refocus the national debate on his single most glaring weakness, the one thing he desperately does not want to talk about, just as it was starting to recede from the campaign.
4) Blow any chance of turning his illness to his advantage by projecting an ounce of humanity or vulnerability.
(Sidebar: Right now, in a parallel universe, Donald Trump stayed in Walter Reed for two weeks, delivering the occasional address from his hospital bed as he recovered, giving America a drowsy smile and a wan thumbs up. Even liberals that hated him but didn’t wish for his death found it a little charming that he’s still got his trademark optimism. Some independents watch this and wonder if his critics on the Left aren’t going a little overboard by calling him “barely human.”
As he recovers, Trump tells us that this experience has been a real epiphany, and taught him a valuable lesson about how vulnerable the American people must feel. He stays in bed, recovers like a big boy, and vows that the moment his strength returns, he will fight harder than any man on the planet to protect Americans from Coronavirus, even if he’s not reelected.
He still loses, but only by 2–3 points, and is able to blame his loss on concerns about his physical health and not, I dunno, having so little control over his own government it’s able to freely plot against him while he’s helpless to do anything but whine impotently.)
4) Insulted seniors, the one group besides jort enthusiasts you’d think Trump would have in the bag, by refusing to even admit he’s one of them and implying that since his body fought off the disease by force of will alone, all the old people it’s killed must not have wanted to live that much.
5) Insulted seniors AGAIN by weirdly distancing himself from them, referring to the elderly as some group that he definitely doesn’t belong to because aging is for Losers. I think he eventually admitted that time affects his body the same way it does everyone else’s, but it was with the same level of enthusiasm you’d get if you asked him who should’ve won World War II.
6) Insulted seniors a third time by resuming his foolproof campaign strategy of bullying Joe Biden for his age despite being like two months older than Trump.
7) Virtually guarantee that there would be major unforeseen complications for the second debate, which he desperately needed to redeem his cataclysmically bad first debate. Which is exactly what happened.
Biden, quite understandably, did not want to be physically present in a room with a renowned crazy person that has everything to gain by approaching Biden onstage to “shake his hand as a show of respect like I always do”, pretending he forgot about social distancing, and crossing his fingers. Because, hypothetically, if that totally innocent mistake caused Joe Biden to contract Coronavirus and die, well, I didn’t break any laws, and I’m still President, so think whatever you like.
Of course, Biden provided an easy solution to this non-problem by wanting to just have virtual debates (Wow! VIRTUAL DEBATES?? Am I living in Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe’s War?), but Trump still ran and hid anyway, reminding us once again that he’s the Charlie Zelenoff of politics.
It was not a very good idea! Nope! No siree Bob!
Then, after a string of typically apolitical organizations and people that rarely, if ever, involve themselves in Presidential politics endorse Biden because Trump’s reelection would literally be the end of the world, Trump finally got a much-needed endorsement.
From the Taliban.
One month to go.
