The smelly thoughts of Donald Trump bubble up like brown burps in the sort of bombsite pond Chopper bike-riding children were advised to avoid in 1970s public information films. Do they indicate concrete plans, are they designed to provoke, or do they have no meaning, like the gurgles and gasps that can inadvertently escape from a decomposing corpse? My job here is to try to anticipate if anything Trump says or does is likely to be of any lasting significance and to satirise it accordingly, in the small window of time allowed, for money. And it isn’t getting any easier. Yes, Ukraine is suffering, but I am the real victim here.
For example, last Saturday Trump opined: “We were the richest… think of this, from 1870 to 1913… because we collected tariffs… We had so much wealth. Wouldn’t it be nice today? Of course, now, we give it away to transgender this, to transgender that. Everybody gets a transgender operation. It’s wonderful. We give it away to crazy things. But in those days, it was different. It was a different world. It was a different country.”
Would Trump’s notion of the damage caused to long-term American prosperity by transgender this surgery, and also to a lesser extent by transgender that surgery, gain any traction, and thus be deserving of the barbs of my quill, or would it be politely ignored as another crazy corpse bleat?
I’m not a historian, though I do follow Prof Janina Ramirez on social media, but surely part of US prosperity in the period Trump describes was built on the proceeding two and a half centuries’ use of free labour in the form of enslaved people stolen in their millions from Africa, their descendants finally getting the vote in 1965, when the Beatles’ Help! was top of the UK charts; and also on the natural wealth appropriated from the country’s Indigenous people, who were systematically ethnically cleansed and robbed of land and resources for which, conveniently, they hadn’t really developed a notion of ownership as Europeans understood it. Have these beads, this whiskey and these smallpox-infected blankets. Thanks for all the pelts. Enjoy your dancing.
To be fair to Trump, studies of Irish history, for instance, show that though three significant famines between 1740 and 1879 did affect the country economically, the main dent in the nation’s finances was caused by the Roman Catholic church’s liberal attitude to notions of gender, and by its demand that the Irish state fund transgender this surgery, and moreover transgender that surgery, for any Irish citizen requiring it, or for anyone who had even been just a little bit curious. I’m joking of course. Trump’s idiotic Trump Theory of Transgender Economics ™ ® didn’t stick and I wisely elected to ignore it in last week’s column. But Trump continues to be a tough call.
For 13 years, I filed these columns on Thursday mornings, hoping that I’d have anticipated any news developments that might destabilise my so-called “jokes” between the deadline and Sunday’s publication. But last year I asked if I could start filing on Tuesdays, as various special-interest, right-leaning groups kept nibbling at the grey area between actionable exaggeration and exaggeration for comic effect, and I wanted to give the Observer’s legal team time to protect me from imprisonment, having already experienced the spleen-dissolving stress of being co-targeted by Britain’s final, and failed, attempt at a blasphemy prosecution in 2005.
But now I’m back to filing at the last possible moment, 10am on Thursday. It’s 9.15 now and I’m cross-checking the paragraphs that follow this sentence with live news updates to see if, perhaps, last week’s Trump Theory of Transgender Economics ™ ® has suddenly resurfaced in a more vociferous form. Trump has turbocharged the news cycle and I’m a tortoise trying to spray-paint the side of speeding trains with clever satirical caricatures, James Gillray on a folding scooter. Those long wavy lines all along the carriages were supposed to be a drawing of Trump hanging a tea towel marked Ukraine out to dry. Or something.
It’s impossible. On Wednesday afternoon, the world briefly combusted when it appeared Trump’s Truth Social feed had shared an impossibly offensive AI-generated film of his vision for Gaza’s future. An image of a soldier pointing a gun at a Palestinian kid’s head dissolves into liberated children running towards a Dubai-style resort, where Elon Musk eats hummus on a beach, bellydancers bellydance, a toddler tugs at a giant golden balloon of Trump’s head, Trump apparently dances with a semi-naked woman, Musk and some infants dance in falling money, a gaudy Trump casino full of small golden effigies of Trump emerges from the ruins, Musk eats some more hummus but indoors this time, a giant golden statue of Trump bestrides a street scene and, finally, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu drink cocktails by a pool in just their pants as a rapper raps: “Trump Gaza number one!”
Theories erupted. Was Trump trying to bait the world? Or had Israel made the film to goad Hamas into breaking the ceasefire? Had Hamas made it to goad the outraged into attacking the US? But looking closely, it seems Trump is uncomfortably overfamiliar with the woman he is dancing with and the beach bellydancers are in fact men with beards in translucent dresses, in a country where transgender this and transgender that is yet to do the economic damage it has in the US.
Had someone made an all too plausible satire of Trump’s ethics and aesthetics that Trump himself had taken as an endorsement and shared online? Or did Trump know it was a parody and have so little regard for the human suffering in the region, he shared it anyway? It’s impossible to know. All that is certain is that, as Steve Bannon advised, the zone is flooded with shit. And every week, it gets harder to wade through.
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
