Deteriornation
The Old Man Down The Road
[Shortly in the future. Roosevelt Room, White House. TRUMP at a lectern, dressed as usual but with more pronounced facial droop. Behind him on the right is CMS administrator MEHMET OZ, grinning broadly, wearing a checkered suit like Robert Preston in The Music Man; and on the left, what looks like a weathered forty-ish drifter with scars on both temples and his chin who’s been cleaned up and put into a blue suit; this man occasionally swipes at his own head as if bothered by flies.]
TRUMP: So everybody has trouble with cancer, from time to time. Not me, because I have good genes, my genes, the best. Some people, bad genes, genetic, they get cancer. Makes ‘em sick, then it’s death, which is a shame. Anyway we have this amazing, they call it a cure, I don’t know. I haven’t seen anyone cured yet. I’d like to. I thought they’d bring a little cripple kid out here and throw down his crutches and walk around, which would be fantastic, but I understand it’s not that kind of cancer.
DRIFTER: Tara Bubba eat, Tara Bubba sheet. [Swats imaginary flies]
TRUMP: [vaguely gestures toward DRIFTER] New head of Healthy Human Service, forget his name. After the tragedy, RFK, so tragic, two RFKs, can you believe it. They say he did it to himself, can you believe that, I don’t believe it, personally. We’re gonna have a funeral, memorial, like the thing we had for the kid looked like Eddie Haskell, maybe if there’s time. Anyway the cure is in a little bottle, very convenient, and Doctor Oz here, he owns the company that makes it, so wow! He’s gonna clean up.
OZ: [Leans forward] Just want to say I divested of that company, I have no connection with —
TRUMP: Hey, hey, I’m talking, alright? OK. Where was I? Yeah, he’s gonna make a mint and we don’t even know if it works. Amazing. Wow!
[CUT TO TRUMP in evening wear, like what he wore at Windsor Castle, addressing what appears to be the College of Cardinals at the Vatican.]
No but I wanted to be Pope and I think I had the votes, maybe not with this crowd but who they had back when I was interested. Not so interested now. Which is why not. They made a movie about it. You got a good Pope now but he’s a little bit woke, right. The Woke Pope. They call him. Not a good thing for a Pope to be. You want a tough Pope, a Pope who can take a guy out. This one’s from Chicago, so you think, he’s gotta be tough, but he smiles too much, always smiling, what’s with the smiling? What’s there to smile? Because you got all these little boys, altar boys, they’re suing now and no offense, they say it’s a hoax, to be fair, believe me they tried that on me but it was a bum rap so it went nowhere. But you need good lawyers and that’s Protestants and maybe some Jews, so what are you gonna do. [Enunciates into the silence.] Woke. Pope.
[CUT TO TRUMP in what looks like the Galactic Senate in Star Wars movies. He is wearing a flowing robe with a big red tie.]
It’s crazy, there’s every kind of person here, and non-persons, animals maybe, vegetables, minerals, stalactites, that’s the word that I won the spelling bee with, maybe you saw that, my first big break. But I think we all know that though we all have our little disk thing we stand on, and it looks tremendous, like a rock concert, which personally I never go. But the United States gotta be the disk of all disks. The top disk like in checkers. It’s just gotta be because I mean you people, or non-people, what have you got, ray guns? We have fifty trillion nuclear warheads. Could wipe out this whole rock concert and Death Star and everything. I’m like what you call the Chancery. The guy Palpitate. I don’t know if they can hear me in the back there but you better or soon you’re not even gonna have a universe anymore.
[CUT TO two guys in shirtsleeves at a console, looking through a window at TRUMP in a bed in a fancy room like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey; he is wearing something like a CPAP mask and something like EKG leads on his forehead. Faintly through speakers we hear his Galactic Senate speech.]
GUY 1: [Yawning] We don’t have to listen, right?
GUY 2: [Laughing] OK. If he gets agitated I’ll put it back on.
[He flicks a switch and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild” plays.]
OT, but hoping tomorrow's REBID will cover Escalatorgate, which is shaping up to be bigger than the Charlie Kirk shooting. Because Tubby himself was affected.
If they'd only thought of Virtual Reality sooner! Maybe we'd still have a democracy.
Because I enjoy absurdist humor, one of my very favorite things is when several of Trump's minions, who are evil but sane, answer questions with "of COURSE the President would never do (insert horrible thing), that was never even on the table as an option."
Then within hours/days Trump makes a speech or goes on Truth Social to say "I am doing (insert horrible thing) because I can and who's gonna stop me? I'll make a load of money and you people suck and deserve it."