Chris Christie has no mouth, but he must scream.
March 2, 2016
Waiting for Pivot: A GOP Tragicomedy
THAT YEAR WAS A TIME when people thought Donald Trump might “pivot” to a “more presidential” tone. It was a time of much waiting.
Vladimir Ryan and Estragon Priebus, members of the GOP establishment, sit glumly in rags beneath a small leafless tree, next to a slowly decomposing elephant carcass. They wear matching flag pins. Estragon struggles mightily to remove his “Jeb 2016” button. At last it comes off with a pop.
ESTRAGON: Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR: I’m beginning to come around to that opinion.
ESTRAGON: Let’s go.
VLADIMIR: We can’t.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for pivot.
ESTRAGON: For pivot?
VLADIMIR: The Trump pivot. To the general.
ESTRAGON: He pivots?
VLADIMIR: They say he pivots. He promised. He’s going to be presidential.
ESTRAGON: Presidential Trump.
VLADIMIR: Exactly so.
ESTRAGON: I’ll believe it when I see it.
VLADIMIR: We’ll see it. (less confident) Just wait.
They wait. The sun sets. The moon rises. The elephant carcass does not stir. On TV, Donald Trump denounces Mexican judges and doubles down on his ban on Muslim immigrants.
ESTRAGON: Didi?
VLADIMIR: Yes, Gopgop?
ESTRAGON: How long?
VLADIMIR: What?
ESTRAGON: How long are we to wait here until he pivots?
VLADIMIR: He’ll pivot. You’ll see.
ESTRAGON: I’m frightened.
Vladimir fumbles in his pocket and finds a carrot.
VLADIMIR: Eat this.
ESTRAGON: What good will an old carrot do if I’m frightened?
VLADIMIR: (philosophical) It will accustom you to stomaching unpleasant old things that are orange in color.
Estragon begins to weep.
VLADIMIR: Gopgop, don’t cry.
ESTRAGON: How can I help it? Have you read his quotes? Have you read his poll numbers?
VLADIMIR: No.
ESTRAGON: Will there be anything left of us?
Long silence. In the audience, a protester is beaten up and dragged away.
ESTRAGON: Do you think he’s going to pivot soon?
VLADIMIR: I thought he would pivot after May.
ESTRAGON: May?
VLADIMIR: I thought he would pivot after Orlando.
ESTRAGON: Orlando?
VLADIMIR: It was in the news.
Estragon looks at him blankly.
VLADIMIR: It was in the news. He responded to it by saying awful things.
ESTRAGON: That sounds just like everything else.
He munches the carrot forlornly.
ESTRAGON: I will try to remember.
Frustrated, he removes his flag pin, then puts it back on.
ESTRAGON: No, I can’t, I can’t.
VLADIMIR: We mustn’t lose hope.
ESTRAGON: What day is it?
VLADIMIR: Super Tuesday. (He removes his pin and examines it.) But not super. Or even, perhaps, Tuesday.
ESTRAGON: Have we always been here, waiting?
VLADIMIR: Surely not.
ESTRAGON: How long have we been here?
VLADIMIR: Days.
ESTRAGON: Weeks.
VLADIMIR: Months?
ESTRAGON: Years?
VLADIMIR: You’re sure it was here we were to wait?
ESTRAGON: This is Cleveland, isn’t it?
VLADIMIR: I don’t know. Every place looks the same.
ESTRAGON: Didn’t we have a party, once?
VLADIMIR: I don’t remember.
ESTRAGON: Everything was red. There were balloons.
VLADIMIR: I can’t remember.
ESTRAGON: He said he’d pivot. He promised.
VLADIMIR: He didn’t promise. Paul Manafort promised.
ESTRAGON: Who?
VLADIMIR: Paul Manafort comes every day and promises he’ll pivot.
ESTRAGON: How do we know he can be presidential?
VLADIMIR: Eat your carrot.
ESTRAGON: What does Presidential Trump look like?
VLADIMIR: I don’t know. I’ve never seen him.
ESTRAGON: (uncertainly) We would know him if we saw him.
VLADIMIR: Certainly we would.
ESTRAGON: What can we do in the meantime?
VLADIMIR: Speak generally.
ESTRAGON: Generally.
VLADIMIR: Speak of the nominee.
ESTRAGON: Hedge.
VLADIMIR: Obfuscate.
ESTRAGON: Find another one?
VLADIMIR: Another one? What other? There is no one else!
ESTRAGON: But all the same.
VLADIMIR: Who did we used to be? Do you remember? Didn’t we used to have ideas?
ESTRAGON: I don’t know.
VLADIMIR: Didn’t we used to have values?
ESTRAGON: You fed me a carrot once. That’s a value.
VLADIMIR: True.
ESTRAGON: Didi, I’m scared.
VLADIMIR: Shhh. It’ll be all right.
ESTRAGON: Yesterday he beat me. He kicked me and took my phone. He grabbed it and tweeted, “Reports of discord are pure fiction. Rs will win in Nov!”
VLADIMIR: I wouldn’t have let him.
ESTRAGON: You couldn’t have stopped him.
VLADIMIR: I would have stopped you from doing whatever it was you did before he began to beat you.
ESTRAGON: Perhaps.
He unpins his flag pin and pins it on Vladimir. After some deliberation, Vladimir unpins his pin and pins it on Estragon. They pass the pins back and forth.
ESTRAGON: What do we do now?
VLADIMIR: We could start all over again, perhaps.
ESTRAGON: You can start from anything. From Romney.
VLADIMIR: Yes, but you have to have the delegates. Sleep.
ESTRAGON: I can’t.
Vladimir goes over to Estragon and begins to sing soothingly.
VLADIMIR: Reagan Reagan Reagan Reagan Reagan Reagan
Enter Paul Manafort.
PAUL MANAFORT: Mister?
VLADIMIR: You have a message from Mr. Trump?
PAUL MANAFORT: Yes.
PAUL MANAFORT: Mr. Trump told me to tell you that he won’t pivot today but surely tomorrow.
VLADIMIR: Is that all?
PAUL MANAFORT: Yes sir.
He makes to exit.
VLADIMIR: Paul?
PAUL MANAFORT: Yes sir.
VLADIMIR: What does it look like, this pivot to the general?
PAUL MANAFORT: Presidential.
VLADIMIR: Presidential how?
PAUL MANAFORT: So presidential that you will not believe it. So presidential you will be bored to tears.
VLADIMIR: God help us.
PAUL MANAFORT: What am I to tell Mr. Trump?
VLADIMIR: Tell him—tell him you saw me.
Paul Manafort makes to go.
VLADIMIR: Tell him you—you saw me. And it was a productive conversation. About values. Tell him you saw us and we’re waiting here. Don’t come back the same way tomorrow!
Paul Manafort exits. One of the bones of the elephant carcass twitches, then shatters.
Estragon suddenly sits bolt upright.
ESTRAGON: NO!
VLADIMIR: What’s wrong with you?
ESTRAGON: Nothing. Let’s go. Let’s vote for Hillary. Let’s run a third party. Let’s denounce him. Let’s do anything!
VLADIMIR: We can’t.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We’re waiting.
ESTRAGON: What for?
VLADIMIR: The pivot.
ESTRAGON: He didn’t pivot today?
VLADIMIR: No. He fired Corey Lewandowski. That’s almost a pivot.
ESTRAGON: And now it’s too late.
VLADIMIR: Yes, now it’s night.
ESTRAGON: And if we dropped him? (pause) And if we dropped him?
VLADIMIR: He’d punish us.
ESTRAGON: Worse?
VLADIMIR: I don’t know. (pause) Everything’s dead. Even the elephant.
ESTRAGON: Yes.
VLADIMIR: We could end it all. That might be best.
ESTRAGON: Tomorrow.
VLADIMIR: Unless he pivots.
ESTRAGON: Then we’ll be saved.
VLADIMIR: Perhaps not even then.
ESTRAGON: No.
He takes off his flag pin.
VLADIMIR: Well. Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes. Let’s go.
They do not move.
June 20, 2016
Nasty Women
Such a nasty woman.
—DONALD TRUMP, IN THE COURSE OF A PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, DESCRIBING HILLARY CLINTON. HE COULD NOT HOPE TO GUESS THE TRUTH OF HIS WORDS!
THE NASTY WOMEN GATHER on the heath just after midnight. It is Nasty Women’s Sabbath, Election Eve, and they must make haste.
Their sturdy he-goats and their broomsticks are parked with the valet. Beyond the circle, their familiar owls and toads and pussycats strut back and forth, boasting of being grabbed or not grabbed.
A will-o’-the-wisp zigzags back and forth over the assemblage. (It is bad with directions, like a nasty woman.)
They have much to do and the hour is late.
They must sabotage the career of an upwardly mobile young general named Macbeth.
They must lure an old wizard into a cave and lock him there so that Camelot may fall.
They must finish Ron and Harry’s homework for them (again).
They must turn some people into newts and let some of them get better and let others run for office and go on prime-time cable.
They must transform all of Odysseus’s sailors into swine and then back again, get Sabrina through high school, freeze Narnia permanently, complete all sorts of housework for Samantha Stevens.
They have a good many apples to poison and drug and mermaid voices to steal and little dogs to get, too.
And then they have an election to rig.
They must make haste. The vagenda is quite full.
They gather around the bubbling cauldron as the squirrels scurry off into hiding and the bats fly in.
One particularly nasty woman who has been juggling a lot at home and at work flies in late on her Swiffer and apologizes; she has not even had time to put a wart on her nose or a bat into her hair. Nasty women know that it only looks easy.
The nasty women gather around the cauldron and lean in.
They lean in with the ingredients that they have been gathering for days, for years, to make the potion potent.
Eye of newt. Wool of bat. Woman cards, both tarot and credit. Binders. Lemons. Lemonade. Letters to the editor saying that a woman could not govern at that time of month. (In fact she would be at the height of her power and capable of unleashing the maximum number of moon-sicknesses against our enemies, but the nasty women do not stoop to correct this.)
They toss in pieces of meat and legs with nothing else attached and dolls and sweethearts and sugars and all the other things they were told to be, and like it.
They drop in paradoxes: powerful rings that give you everything and keep you from getting the job, heels that only move forward by moving backward, skirts that are too long and too short at the same time, comic book drawings whose anatomy defies gravity, suits that become pantsuits when a woman slips them on, enchanted shirts and skirts and sweaters that can ask for it, whatever it is, on their own. They take the essence of a million locker rooms wrung out of towels and drop it in, one drip at a time. Then stir.
They sprinkle it with the brains of the people who did not recognize that they were doctors, pepper it with ground-up essays by respected men asking why women aren’t funny, whip in six pounds of pressure and demands for perfection. They drizzle it with the laughter of women in commercials holding salads and the rueful smiles of women in commercials peddling digestive yogurts. They toss in some armpit hair and a wizened old bat, just to be safe. And wine. Plenty of wine. And cold bathwater. Then they leave it to simmer.
And they whisper incantations into it, too. They whisper to it years of shame and blame and what-were-you-wearing and boys-will-be-boys. They tell the formless mass in the cauldron tales of the too many times that they were told they were too much. Too loud. Too emotional. Too bossy. Too . . . insufficiently smiling. They whisper the words shouted at them as they walked down the streets. The words typed at them when their minds traveled through the Internet. They repeat every concession they were told to make so that they took up less space. Every time they were too mean or too nice or shaped wrong. Every time they were told they were different, other, objects, the princess at the end of the quest, the grab-bag prize for the end of the party.
They pour them all into a terrible and bitter brew and stir to taste.
It tastes nasty. It is the taste of why we cannot have nice things, and they are used to that.
Perhaps if the potion works, they will not have to be.
The nasty women have a great deal to do before the moon sinks back beneath the horizon.
But that is all right. They know how to get things done.
October 20, 2016
Donald Trump and His Sons Will Never Talk Business Again
Donald Trump has been blessed with two tall and healthy adult sons who have slain numerous wild beasts using only sticks that spit fire. They are married to human women, and their hair is sleek and glossy like the back of a marmot. They possess the right number of teeth. Donald Trump loves to speak to them and give them his counsel, and the one great tragedy of his presidency was that he was very strictly told he could no longer talk business with them. How could he? They were to manage the Trump Organization in trust, and he had vowed not to know anything about its deals and doings until he read about it in the newspaper—or, to be realistic, saw it on TV. Taking him at his word, here is a look at that first year without talk of business.
WINTER:
Donald Trump, Eric, and Don Jr. sit around the dinner table. “So,” Trump says. “How are things?”
Eric glances nervously at his brother. “Things?”
“Not business things, obviously,” Trump corrects, glancing down the table at the ethics adviser who has been following them around since this began. “You things.”
“Good,” Eric says. “They’re good.”
A long silence ensues.
“Just good?” Trump asks.
“Great,” Eric corrects. His lower lip quivers. “Always great, Pop.”
“That’s good,” Trump says. “I like to hear that.”
SPRING:
“What did you do today?” Trump asks.
“Well, Pop, I did a lot of things,” Eric says.
“You know we can’t talk about them,” Don Jr. says.
“I ate a healthy breakfast,” Eric adds, quickly. “Fruit.”
“Huh,” Donald says. “Fruit.”
Don Jr.’s fork clicks on his plate. “I had a waffle.”
“Good for you, Don,” Trump says. “I like waffles.”
“I’m just trying to watch my health,” Eric says, a little defensively.
“Well,” Donald says, “that’s important, too.”
Silence falls again. Don Jr.’s fork clinks.
SUMMER:
“So things are good?” Donald asks.
“Yes,” Eric says.
“Good.” Donald eats a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “You do anything else? Read a book?”
Don shakes his head.
“No,” Trump says. “I didn’t figure you would have. Probably don’t have time, what with all the—”
Eric touches his arm and shakes his head gently.
AUTUMN:
“I can’t believe they won’t let me talk to my sons!” Trump says. “Unbelievable!”
The ethics adviser shakes his head. “No,” he say
s. “You can talk to them as much as you want. Just not about business.”
“What else is there to talk about?”
“Well,” the adviser suggests, “your feelings—or—your thoughts, or memories you had together, or—things like that.”
A long silence ensues.
“I never felt my father loved me,” Donald Trump says, suddenly. “I never felt my father knew me. He seemed to see me as an extension of himself that he could mold and do with as he pleased. I never felt he saw me there at all.”
“But, Pop,” Eric says. His voice cracks.
“I’m almost afraid to ask whether the two of you felt the same way.”
“I didn’t,” Don Jr. says.
“A memory—” Trump says. “I remember when I held you for the first time, at the hospital, before I gave you back to the people who changed you and fed you and cleaned you and loved you until you were old enough to talk to like a reasonable man—and I always wished I’d held on longer. When I saw you again, you were a little stranger in a little suit.” Trump sighs. “But it’s no good, regretting things. It makes you soft.”
“I never thought you were soft, Pop,” Eric says.
“I wish I’d changed your diapers,” Donald Trump says. “Even once. Is that too weird to say?”
“Yes,” Don Jr. says.
“Pop,” Eric asks earnestly, “what do you do when you get lonely?
“Good potatoes,” Don Jr. says. “Really good.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I will be saved,” Trump says. “I have such dreams—I could not begin to tell you. I wake up and I cry out for my mother and then for your mother and then I remember that the woman who would answer is a stranger, and I have nothing to say to her. What can I say to her?”
Eric nervously reaches out to touch his shoulder. They sit there a moment.
“There are so many things about myself—so many things!—and in me they look strong, and good, but when I see them in you, my heart breaks a little.”
“Pop—” Eric says. His voice cracks. “Do you love me?”
“Of course,” Trump says. “Do you doubt it?”
“Never once, ever in my life, have I felt truly secure that I was loved,” Eric says. “Not since you sent my nanny back to London.”
“I didn’t know we’d sent her,” Donald says.
“I know,” Eric says. “That was what hurt the most.”
“I’m sorry. Group hug?” Trump asks.
He glances down the table at the ethics adviser.
Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why Page 2
