Garrison Keillor: What Every New Yorker Knows About Donald Trump
I know, it seems outrageous,
But it’s getting a lot of attention
On some very respectable Web pages —
Which mainstream media won’t mention:
Donald Trump was not born in Queens,
He was born in the Philippines,
In a hotel in downtown Manila.
Where his hair turned bright vanilla|
Due to vitamin deficiencies.
His mom and dad were Celanese
And left him with Franciscan nuns
At the age of 14 months.
Adopted on the third of June
By a real estate tycoon
Who took the little boy away
To a mansion in the USA
Bestowing on him great largesse
And naturalized him more or less.
The record of his nativity
Is kept under lock and key
With his tax returns, the MRIs
Showing what’s behind his eyes
Including, according to rumor,
A diverticulated tumor.
I hope it isn’t true, although
It comes from folks who ought to know.
A week ago, a panhandler in Times Square sat holding a sign reading, “Give me a dollar or I’ll vote for Trump,” and people laughed and reached into their pockets. His bucket overflowed. He stuffed the bills into his jacket, and other panhandlers looked at him with admiration. The man could’ve sold franchises and retired to Palm Beach.
The panhandler knows what every New Yorker knows, which is that the biggest con job since the Trojan horse is taking place in our midst. Millions of Americans are planning to cast their votes for a man who has lived his life contrary to all of their most cherished values. They are respectful, honest, generous, loyal, modest, church-going people with no Mafia connections and good credit records who try not to spout off about things they know nothing about.
His followers out on the prairie were brought up to be wary of slick-talking New Yorkers but here they are, falling right into line behind the biggest braggart ever to hit the sawdust trail. It’s going to be an education for them, watching him cut taxes while expanding the military and building a wall and deporting 11 million people. In America, you can’t send gendarmes through the streets to round up people in trucks and load them on boxcars and ship them away. There is a judicial process. Lawyers are involved. People have certain rights.
His boast after the Manhattan pressure-cooker bombing Saturday night was revelatory. “I called it!” he cried on Fox News, as he had after the Orlando nightclub shooting. It would’ve been classier for him to have congratulated New York’s Finest but instead he took it as a personal coup.
What the bombing showed was the courage and smarts of the NYPD, arriving on the scene in time to defuse a second bomb, identify a suspect and track him down Monday morning. “We’ve got to be very, very tough,” cried the candidate out in Colorado, but back in New York, the work was being done by people who know how to do it.
Ah, chutzpah! There was once a mayor of New York who overruled the NYPD and the Secret Service and put the city’s Emergency Command Center on the 23rd floor of the World Trade Center, and whose emergency plan for the towers led to massive confusion and miscommunication, with some desperate people directed to climb up and others told to stay put, as the mayor stood in the streets below and urged residents to be calm, and thereby became a national hero and started his own security consulting company. This is like the captain of the Titanic, had he survived, writing a book called “The Art of Navigation.” The mayor is now a close Trump adviser.
Trump is a man whom few Republicans would care to invite into their homes. So what’s going on here? An epidemic of hippocampus poisoning from bad enzymes in cheap beers? The man is a fraud, a compulsive liar and a clueless playboy whose presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the country. If you would make us the laughingstock of the world just to irk your liberal sister-in-law, you are someone who should not be allowed to come within 500 yards of an elementary school.
The success of Trump would show our children the exact value of education, which is: not that much. It would mean that fact-based journalism had very little bearing in America and a Manila-born Celanese child could aspire to the highest office in the land. So here’s a dollar in the beggar’s bucket. Good luck to democracy. Hang in there.
Garrison Keillor is known as creator of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion, which he hosted from 1974 to 2016 (Wikipedia).