Illustrations By Stuart Goldenberg
The Potty-Mouth-in-Chief
In mid-2016, then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump adamantly opposed paying for transition staff, believing this siphoned-off money would otherwise go to him, reports Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short) in his new book, The Fifth Risk. When told by top campaign executive Steve Bannon and transition team head Chris Christie that this expenditure was required by law, Trump exploded: “Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money.”
Love, Look at the Two of Them
President Donald Trump, at a campaign rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, on his meeting with murderous North Korean despot Kim Jong-un: “We would go back and forth, and then we fell in love, OK? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”
Melting Pot, Smelting Pot
Tucker Carlson has met the enemy of the American people and it is . . . diversity. “How, precisely, is diversity our strength?” the Fox News host recently pondered on air. “Can you think, for example, of other institutions, such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are? Do you get along better with your neighbors, your coworkers if you can’t understand each other or share no common values?”
Painful Life Lessons
A police officer in Cincinnati, Ohio, used his Taser to subdue an eleven-year-old girl suspected of shoplifting $53 worth of merchandise from a grocery store. Body cam video shows officer Kevin Brown, who is black, telling the girl, who is also black, “You know, sweetheart, this is why there aren’t any grocery stores in the black community.”
How Tweet It Is
In response to a recent New York Times report that he regularly defies security warnings by using an unsecured cell phone that can be readily intercepted by foreign spies, President Trump tweeted that this was “fake news” because “I rarely use a cell phone.” He sent this tweet, along with seventy-five others that same week, from his personal cell phone
Hell No, You Can’t Know
The Republican-dominated Texas school board has voted to “streamline” the curriculum, deeming it “not necessary” for students to learn about Hillary Clinton, Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Betty Friedan, and ending a lesson plan for fourth graders about “holding public officials to their word,” which the board felt was not “appropriate.”