Check and mate, right?
Well, not if you’re Donald Trump. (And if by chance you are Donald Trump, well, fuck you.)
The big news in the multiverse today is that the FBI seized a tape from Michael Cohen’s office in which Donald Trump is heard discussing a payoff to Playboy model Karen McDougal, with whom Trump allegedly had an affair.
Ouch.
But if you think Trump will now curtsy before his lowly subjects and eructate a river of mea maxima culpas, well, you don’t know Donald Trump.
Nothing is ever his fault. Ever.
And stuff he did that was shameful or wrong or too embarrassing to acknowledge? He didn’t do those things.
Heck, just last week he “fake newsed” an interview that a Rupert Murdoch-owned British newspaper had backed up with a recording.
So this dude is crazy. And I’m not talking any garden-variety Roseanne, Dennis Rodman, Gary Busey kind of crazy. I mean King George III crazy. Caligula crazy. The guy is in his own little world, and apparently you have to suck about 10 hallucinogenic frogs down to their ruddy skeletons to figure out what the fuck is happening there.
But if you think it’s too farfetched to expect Trump to insist it’s not his voice on the newly discovered tape — again, you don’t know Donald Trump.
Because, you know, he’s done it at least twice before.
One of the weirdest revelations to emerge from the 2016 presidential campaign was that Trump had on numerous occasions posed as his own publicist under the aliases John Barron and John Miller.
He did so to brag about himself — including to fluff up his burgeoning reputation as a Lothario.
From The Washington Post:
A recording obtained by The Washington Post captures what New York reporters and editors who covered Trump’s early career experienced in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: calls from Trump’s Manhattan office that resulted in conversations with “John Miller” or “John Barron” — public-relations men who sound precisely like Trump himself — who indeed are Trump, masquerading as an unusually helpful and boastful advocate for himself, according to the journalists and several of Trump’s top aides.
In 1991, Sue Carswell, a reporter at People magazine, called Trump’s office seeking an interview with the developer. She had just been assigned to cover the soap opera surrounding the end of Trump’s 12-year marriage to Ivana, his budding relationship with the model Marla Maples and his rumored affairs with any number of celebrities who regularly appeared on the gossip pages of the New York newspapers.
Within five minutes, Carswell got a return call from Trump’s publicist, a man named John Miller, who immediately jumped into a startlingly frank and detailed explanation of why Trump dumped Maples for the Italian model Carla Bruni. “He really didn’t want to make a commitment,” Miller said. “He’s coming out of a marriage, and he’s starting to do tremendously well financially.”
Of course, in true Trumpian fashion, Trump gaslit the world, denying what everyone could clearly hear for themselves on tape:
In a phone call to NBC’s “Today” program Friday morning after this article appeared online, Trump denied that he was John Miller. “No, I don’t think it — I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time and it doesn’t sound like my voice at all,” he said. “I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice and then you can imagine that, and this sounds like one of the scams, one of the many scams — doesn’t sound like me.” Later, he was more definitive: “It was not me on the phone. And it doesn’t sound like me on the phone, I will tell you that, and it was not me on the phone. And when was this? Twenty-five years ago?”
Then, Friday afternoon, Washington Post reporters who were 44 minutes into a phone interview with Trump about his finances asked him a question about Miller: “Did you ever employ someone named John Miller as a spokesperson?”
The phone went silent, then dead. When the reporters called back and reached Trump’s secretary, she said, “I heard you got disconnected. He can’t take the call now. I don’t know what happened.”
Of course, Trump had earlier acknowledged — most notably during a 1990 court case — that he’d used the aliases “John Miller” and “John Barron.”
And remember the Access Hollywood tape? Of course you do.
While Trump acknowledged the impropriety of his arrant “locker room talk” shortly after the tape came out, he later tried to claim it somehow wasn’t his voice on the recording.
From The New York Times:
But something deeper has been consuming Mr. Trump. He sees the calls for [Roy] Moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia, and the flood of groping accusations against him that followed soon after. He suggested to a senator earlier this year that it was not authentic, and repeated that claim to an adviser more recently. (In the hours after it was revealed in October 2016, Mr. Trump acknowledged that the voice was his, and he apologized.)
So there you have it. Do you think something as trivial as his voice on a tape recording is really going to cow someone so plainly infallible as Donald J. Trump?
Well, then you don’t know Donald Trump.
***
Yo! Dear F*cking Lunatic: 101 Obscenely Rude Letters to Donald Trump by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing is now available at Amazon! Buy there (or at one of the other fine online retailers carrying it), or be square.