The 1998 deal between businessman Donald J. Trump — and weren’t those the days when he was just a sleazy, unscrupulous, self-promoting charlatan and not a Viktor Mihály Orbán wannabe — and Merv Griffin, former television host, was a complicated one that involved classes of stocks, buybacks, swaps, and other financial mumbo-jumbo the rest of us don’t understand. But ultimately, it was a casino swap. Griffin would get the Paradise Island Bahamas resort, then called Resorts International, and Trump would get the unfinished Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. After the deal was hammered out, an investor said of Trump, “People of his ilk, they deal and they wheel. A public company is not a good place for it.”
Like a country.
Which brings me to standup comedy.
A few weeks back I was performing at Jokers Wild at the Atlantis Hotel and Casino, which grew out of Resorts International. I have been doing this club for more than 30 years, so have worked for the current owners, Brookfield Asset Management LLC., which is operated by Marriott International’s Autograph Collection Hotels; Sol Kerzner, the former South African luxury hotel developer, anti-apartheid friend of Nelson Mandela, and boxing middleweight, who built the Atlantis into the behemoth it is today; Griffin; and, yes, I worked for Trump. I wouldn’t even bring him up — if the Atlantis were an elephant, Trump would be a historical and anecdotal gnat on the pachyderm’s ass — but the comedian with whom I worked was selling a bumper sticker that lumped Trump’s political rot in with all other political rot; so, he was on my mind.
Love the Team
Can’t Stand the Coach
For the love of Bob Marley, who was Jamaican, it was enough to make me want to put my fist through a conch shell.
Bothsiderism has come to comedy club merchandise.
In his set, the comedian characterized both political parties as two ends of the same dildo — as The Progressive Populist is a family publication, I will leave the joke there— and recent American presidents as interchangeably compromised.
I had dinner with Ned (not his real name) the following night over overpriced pizza — there is no other kind at the Atlantis — and I asked whether he really believed Trump and the other “coaches,” Obama, Clinton, and both Bushes, were part of the same decay. He said that while he hated Trump, thought he was dangerous, unqualified, and had ended friendships with those who claimed fealty to MAGA and QAnon, he believed that Biden was old and doddering, had embellished his academic record, plagiarized speeches, and therefore was also bad for the country.
The price of the pizza wasn’t the only thing that affected my appetite.
Donald Trump is an insurrectionist and an anti-semite who has gouged the Secret Service on hotel bills, stole government documents, lied to lenders and insurers, violated the Hatch Act and Emoluments Clause, fraudulently overvalued assets, dissed disabled veterans and disabled reporters, called black women dogs, agreed to pay $25 million to students he defrauded when he ran Trump University, slept with a porn star while his third wife was pregnant with his fifth child and then had his lawyer cut the porn star a check so she wouldn’t tell anyone, used $2 million in charitable funds for his own political gain, tried to shake down allies, and has been accused of 27 cases of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. If placed on a teeter-totter, the weight of Trump’s infractions would hurl the combined sins of Biden’s, Obama’s, Clinton’s and both Bushes’ sins halfway to Jupiter.
All coaches are not the same.
On the morning of Jan. 6th, as a mob was still applying face paint, donning animal costumes, and suiting up for battle, my very own Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) was, at that very moment, announcing his support of those legislators who wanted to decertify the results of the 2020 election. Only after that mob had been cleared from the Rotunda did Lankford have a change of heart — if you can call it that.
“The violent actions of these rioters severely damages efforts to restore confidence in our elections. We will continue our calls to examine election integrity through all legal and peaceful means.”
The porters hadn’t even finished cleaning debris from the chamber, yet Lankford was already legitimizing the Trump-inspired chazerai. And then — and only then — did the senator vote to certify the election.
Profiles in gelatin.
Donald Trump (not to mention those who overturned the senator’s desk and wouldn’t have known Lankford from Sherrod Brown if they had decided to take hostages), wanted to engineer a coup, and if that meant hanging a vice president on Constitution Avenue, que sera sera. They and Trump were not channeling the voices of millions of Americans who had lost confidence in our elections — they had manufactured the crisis and wanted to trash the whole damn thing.
To pay the Democrats back for holding hearings on Trump, Republicans, if they take control of the House, promise to investigate Hunter Biden and impeach his father. To pay America back for imprisoning his thugs, Trump has promised, if he takes back the White House, to issue full pardons and government apologies to those who answered his call on that early afternoon in January 2021.
Bothsiderism is a lazy, cheap construct. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander only applies if both are waterfowl species — and Trumpism is leukemia.
One can only imagine the bumper stickers available if he and his ilk regain power.
Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. In addition to “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Road Comic,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me,” his first novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages,” a book about the worst love story ever, was published by Balkan Press in February. See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2022
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