The Pentagon and the Secret Service are about to start paying rent–like, you know, taxpayer money–to the US President. The President’s son goes on a business trip to Uruguay, eager to cash in on his new found fame and glory–he needs, besides expensive hotels, an expensive security detail, naturally. (Who wouldn’t want to, even if only as a public, humanitarian, service, try to wipe that odd, leering rictus, the one anticipating untold wealth, off his face?) The President’s daughter’s brand of cheap knockoffs has been displaced from malls and departmental stores nationwide, thus depriving young American women of the chance to dress up like a gaudy. overladen Christmas tree; in response, the President, in a remarkable act of parent-child role swapping, holds his breath till he turns a bright shade of Twitter-bird blue, throwing a fit, and wailing, “Me wanna Nordstorm be nice! Now!” The President’s adviser tells Americans to go out and buy the President’s daughter’s baubles, thus getting an early jump on the Christmas shopping season, forgetting only to list a toll-free number and a website at the bottom of the television screen. The President’s wife is upset she can’t milk the country’s advertisement agencies for the eight years she is going to live in Trump Tower, safely ensconced in the Penthouse, throwing down bits of cake at the peasants gathered below.
Back in the good ‘ol days, palefaces brought trinkets to trade with the Native Americans and sold them snake-oil instead; the Indians knew the White House, home of the The Great Father, was Snake Oil Central. The Trumps are Making America Great Again, returning us to our roots, to the frontier days, when wheeling and dealing and thuggery and plain ‘ol self-aggrandizement pushed the national dream onward and forward. The grubby, commercial heart of the republic, of its legislative politics and foreign policy, has never been too artfully hidden; we, as citizens, know all about it. Yet, like guests at a Borat dinner party, we’ve agreed to be discreet, to make believe that nothing too sordid was underway, that gentility still emerged at the top of the pile of crass hand-in-the-till dipping. Those illusions are gone; carpetbagging season is well and truly upon us. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the Best Little Whitehouse in ‘Murica.
Trump and his family are remarkably honest. Let us not accuse them of disingenousness; they are frank and straightforward; they tell it like it is. To paraphrase Nasser Ali’s memorable line from My Beautiful Laundrette, “My dear boy, I’m not a professional American, I’m a professional businessman!” Think of Nasser Ali, living in the White House, squeezing ‘the tits of the system,’ and you have some idea of what the Trump family is up to. The budgets are bigger; a bright political future awaits Ivanka, beginning first with the speeches that she will deliver on the Conservative Ladies’ Club dinner party circuit; this milch cow has a lot to give, and she’ll be kept in the shed for a while. Before being sent off to the slaughterhouse.
