April 23, 2011

Transcript of The Donald's First Presidential Press Conference


You've probably heard about this mysterious capacity of the iPhone to track your every movement, record the data, store it and then upload it into your computer whenever you "sync up" through iTunes or whatever. Presumably then the data, reflecting the GPS coordinates of everywhere you've been, can piggy-back through file-sharing and wind up on the hard drives of millions of complete strangers who will then have, as Major Strasser said to Rick Blaine in "Casablanca," a complete dossier on you. Only in this instance, you will not receive the Major's smarmy reassurance, "Don't worry, we're not going to broadcast it," because in the age of Facebook and Twitter you can guarantee the data will be everywhere faster than you can say Kim Kardashian.

Once I read about this, I stopped taking my iPhone everywhere. Who needs to pack a snitch where your cell phone should be? "Hey, aren't you forgetting something?" the iPhone says in simulated electronic speech as I head out the door. "Oh, just going to the store," I say (wink wink).

It turns out another app running in background can also record events from the future and download them onto your iPhone. Either that, or I'm making this whole thing up as a premise for a blog post. My iPhone, for example, in a very timely move given what I've been writing about lately, just provided me with the transcript of President Donald Trump's first press conference held in January, 2013, the day after his Inauguration. Here it is:

President The Donald (PTD):

Hello journalists. As the warm-up man just told you during his opening routine, I expect this to be a good show and the kickoff for a major presidency. I expect your cooperation in making this happen. Everything I've done in my life has been top-shelf and a very major, successful enterprise, and I expect this presidency to be no different. I won't tolerate mediocrity or anybody giving it less than one hundred percent. You've been warned. So let's start the questions with a major journalist, no second bananas. Where's that Gregory guy, who gets a lot of network time?

David Gregory: President Trump, and let me say how good it sounds to say that...

PTD: No brown nosing, Gregory.

Gregory: Right. How are things proceeding on your cabinet selections?

PTD: Right now we're looking at onyx for the White House kitchen, with gold door pulls...

Gregory: No, I mean State, Defense, Attorney General, like that.

PTD: Sure. Well, for one thing, you can bet that each appointment will be a major figure, someone who's absolute tops in their field. I won't tolerate someone who doesn't have what it takes to really excel. I want tens, major, major successess. I would think of it in the same way as my dating years, when the women were absolutely gorgeous, tens everyone of them, no eights or even nines, just knock-outs and major lookers. I'm looking for the same type of quality in my cabinet appointments, not so much the looks part but the major excellence part. This is going to be a major presidency and fall in line with everything I've ever done, which is top-shelf. The American people deserve no less. Who's next? Chris Matthews? Go ahead.

Matthews: Wow, I'm getting that tingle up my leg again just thinking about a celebrity of your stature actually in the Oval Office. This is huge.

PTD: Thanks, Chris. It feels good to be here, to get this show moving. I want another hit. Every show I've been involved with has hit big and this presidency will be no different. It will be a major success. My businesses are all doing fantastically, I'm really, really rich and a tremendously successful human being. I'm a major player.

Matthews: One slight criticism that I'm hearing is that some people feel you're making the office of the Presidency a little too much about you. Do you think that's fair?

PTD: I don't and I'll tell you why. During the transition period, when I unveiled my plan to redo the Capitol dome in onyx and gold, to match the Trump Plaza and Trump Tower, I heard a lot of this kind of sniping. The onyx design is part of who I am, I really like onyx and I want onyx for the American people. It isn't just about me, unless you think that only an extremely rich, very successful, top player such as myself deserves to use tremendous amounts of onyx in designing buildings and not the American people. And that's not who I am, and those aren't my values.

Thank you very much. I've got to break now. I've got some very major meetings with some top individuals about some huge matters. Keep up the good work and I'll convene another meeting soon to go over some other stuff I want you to be working on.

(End of transcript.)

April 21, 2011

If it quacks like a Duck, it's The Donald


As a man who strives to believe in the essential goodness of people, I take it as an article of faith that President Obama's decision to disturb the slumber of his Attorney General, Eric Place Holder, and to pursue those "speculators" who are driving our gasoline prices to the moon, is completely unrelated to The Donald's movement of this issue to a position front and center in his presidential non-campaign. Meaning, Mr. Obama has been very concerned about this problem all along but he just didn't want to say anything that would upset our burnoosed friends any more than he absolutely had to.

You know. It's the way the O-Man rolls. But gasoline prices really are a problem, not like they're a problem in Europe, of course, but a problem for a grotesquely spoiled populace such as ours which demands its inalienable right to occupy vehicles at the rate of one person per unit and to define a "High Occupancy Vehicle" as one in which there is one person more in the car than the minimum number physically necessary to drive the damn thing. Thus enters The Donald, the magnificently-tonsured almost-candidate who is aching to declare but can't quite yet (not till May 22, when the last episode of "Celebrity Apprentice" airs), because a candidate cannot have his own hit show because of the "equal time" laws that are never enforced.

But he's going to declare, you know that, and the delicacy of his equivocation is not only The Donald's natural probity at work, but a chance to pump the show for a month while people wait, breathlessly, for Duck Man to make if official. I can barely wait myself, because frankly I just can't blog anymore about the Fed-hallucinated economy. Like boring, man. But a magnificent blowhard like The Donald actually running for office - I think we need this. A lot of other people do too - among Republicans, for example, The Donald has higher name recognition (bigger Buzz Quotient) than Romney, Huckabee and Palin -- combined. You read that right. The Donald clocks in at 39%, while the other three losers add up to 19%.

The man with the High-Tensile Hair-do is on a roll. His campaign strategy is borrowed directly from Germany, 1933. America is teetering on the brink of mediocrity, we're getting pushed around by the Saudis and the Chinese. The Chinese, in particular, manipulate their currency, defy all intellectual property laws, cheat like hell on everything. A country groveling in the dirt loves to hear this kind of stuff -- it's not our fault, dammit! Our jobs were "stolen" (by American companies relocating to Asia, but don't get picky - we're trying to make a point here). The Donald is going to slap a 25% tariff on Chinese imports until they allow their currency to appreciate in line with reality (we reserve the right, however, to keep debasing ours through profligate money printing).

So, no blaming the Jews this time around, which was a dumb call by the Nazis anyway. (The German Jews were leaders of German society in medicine, physics, the arts, the professions. Hitler lost before he got started by kicking the props out from underneath his own society.) No, this time around we've got billions of enemies. No more bowing to them when they come to town, no more deference, no more making nice. And think about it - with his penchant for boorish, self-indulgent, grandiose behavior, who can possibly be better at abrasiveness than The Donald? He's more likely to head slap King Abdullah than to bow and kiss his ring.

I think Barack is beginning to hear footsteps at this point, and thus the rude call to Holder in the middle of the afternoon when Eric normally likes to knock off early and catch a nap before tuning in the NBA playoffs in the evening. We'd better start doing something that looks like protecting ordinary Americans, because this wild-haired maniac is catching the Big Mo'! And he'll say anything! And he can finance his own campaign! He doesn't even have to cut backroom deals with Goldman Sachs and medical insurance companies in order to finance himself. This guy's going to play in Peoria! It's a nightmare. I Hope we can come up with some Change in our approach!

Like I say, The Donald introduces the element of fun so sorely missing in our national political scene. Mark your calendar. May 22: The Day of the Duck.