Garden party
Trump talks statues
[A meeting in the White House Cabinet Room. TRUMP, in golf clothes, is at the head of the long table fiddling with his phone. Seated before him are conservative gadfly/felon DINESH D'SOUZA; White House Chief of Staff MARK MEADOWS; Presidential Advisor/Nazi STEPHEN MILLER; and National Review propagandist/classics scholar VICTOR DAVIS HANSON. Finally TRUMP tosses his phone aside.]
TRUMP: Okay, round two on this Garden of American Heroes. I got a problem with the names. That Something Something Chamberlain, I thought he was surefire, but Steve, I don’t know if you knew this, that picture Gettysburg? Not such great box office. Also Christa McAuliffe, very sad what happened to her but what’s the statue gonna be? Her screaming and on fire? That’s what I see when I think of her, and so do most people. So you smart guys throw me some names. Dinesh, you owe me one.
D’SOUZA: Well, for starters, I think Ann Coulter would be a good choice.
TRUMP: This is a serious meeting, Dinesh.
D’SOUZA: Well, of course, your former attorney Roy Cohn would offer a great opportunity to educate the snowflake SJWs —
TRUMP: Dinesh, number one, Cohn was never my attorney. Number two, every movie you see about Cohn, you learn two things: One, he was gay, and two, he had AIDS. We thought about Ryan White because he had AIDS but you could feel sorry for him, but like I said, what’s the statue, him covered with sores? I hate to think the statue they’d make out of Roy!
D’SOUZA: Then let me propose, sir, Calvin Coolidge. For many Americans he is a hero of small government.
TRUMP: For many Americans he is a guy with a funny name. Also, no more presidents.
[To HANSON.]
Hanson, I hear you’re good at history, maybe you have some ideas for us.
HANSON: Well, first, Mr. President, I would suggest we go back before the founding of the United States and commemorate America’s intellectual forebears, such as the great Roman orators and scholars — for example, Tacitus and Cicero.
TRUMP: [Squints] Who?
HANSON: Romans.
TRUMP: Romans?
HANSON: Yes. The roots of American democracy —
TRUMP: You ever go to the movies, Professor?
HANSON: I worked on 300, sir.
TRUMP: Didn’t see it. But your average American, he sees those gladiator pictures on TV and who are the Romans? They’re English, for one thing, with those snotty accents, and they’re the shittiest people, always whipping slaves and feeding the lions.
HANSON: Well, in reality, Mr. President, it’s more complex than that. You see —
TRUMP: Hey. Einstein. We’re not here to educate people, we’re here to make them feel good. Maybe we can have a Garden of Assholes for the Romans and put Karl Marx in there too, and Obama, and some other guys I can name, but not for this. Now what about those bears you were talking about?
HANSON: Bears?
TRUMP: Yeah. The four bears. You said we had four bears.
HANSON: Oh, forebears. I was talking about the Romans, sir.
TRUMP: Again with the Romans. I thought maybe there were some famous bears, like the ones they have at Disney.
HANSON: No, sir.
TRUMP: Okay, anybody else? Steve, remember I already told you, no Charlie Lindbergh and no Father Coughlin.
MILLER: Then I have nothing to add.
TRUMP: Okay, so that ends your part, Professor, and Dinesh, so you can head out to the lobby, they got refreshments and autographed pictures, been a pleasure see you next time.
[D'SOUZA and HANSON leave. When the door closes:]
This is no good, this thing with the eggheads. I remember when fans used to send in box tops or something to vote for who plays in the All-Star Game. Why don’t we do something like that?
MEADOWS: Sir, this is a park of statues, which are constructed at great expense and supposed to be permanent. What if people vote for Howard Stern?
TRUMP: Then we tell ‘em he didn't win. We just take the most popular ones that we like.
MEADOWS: Will we be expanding the lists of names, sir?
TRUMP: Well, I tell you one thing, we’re taking some out of the blacks. That Fred Douglass you tried to sneak in? Someone told me about that Slave Fourth of July thing. Turns out the guy didn’t love America at all, he was just trying to play a lot of games to make us look bad. So he’s out. Harriet Tubman, I forgot Obama wanted her on the twenty. So she’s out. Jackie Robinson and Satchmo can stay, and I guess we gotta keep Martin Luther King, but for the rest we gotta have happy black people, like — like Rochester, or the guy on the Cream of Wheat box.
[To MEADOWS.]
They still have the guy on the Cream of Wheat box, right?
MEADOWS: I’ll check, sir.
TRUMP: Because we’re losing so many of our breakfast mascots, it’s disgusting. OK, one last thing, then we go out the side door: Mark, talk to Kellyanne because she has this great idea where the Garden isn’t just statues, we have like rides and they're named after some of the guys, right, like the Davy Crockett Log Flume Slide. Get some people on it.
[TRUMP gets up; MILLER, MEADOWS follow suit. They head out a side door; TRUMP taps MILLER on the shoulder.]
I know you feel let down, so tell you what — I’ll have one of the statues do a white power sign.
[TRUMP flashes the OK sign; MILLER nods. They all go out. CURTAIN.]
I am, quite frankly, very surprised that Trump did not include any of the Confederate heroes in his Garden of Delights. I figured he would have at least tried to sneak in Bobby Lee if not Nathan Bedford Forrest.
But failing those kinds of statues, why didn't he include Henry Ford? Trump could have spackled over Ford's intense racism and antisemitism (and devotion to the Nazis) by just blithering about how Ford made American industry the greatest in the world.
OK, “four bears” finished me, LOL.
When I think about this ridiculous National Garden idea I picture it as a perverse version of Disney’s Hall of Presidents. Maybe the statues should be animatronic, they can recite a lot of Lost Cause gibberish and flash the white power sign at visitors.