The portable Trump

Chin Wong

THE book collector found the quaint secondhand bookstore on East Main Street in Charlottesville, many years after the 2025 "Blood and Soil" riots. Back then, white supremacists wearing armbands and brandishing torches tried to "take their country back" after their racist and psychotic candidate received a drubbing at the polls — and again insisted, as he did in 2020, that he had been cheated.

Only this time, nobody was buying. The nationwide crackdown that followed was swift and forceful, as it should have been right after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The instigators of the riots were arrested, charged and convicted, and their inbred MAGA enablers were discredited and kicked out of office. Conservatives tried to rebuild the Republican Party from the shambles left by the lunatic fringe that had taken it over. The man who instigated the madness, Donald Trump, was convicted of various crimes, including insurrection and treason. The racists and the idiots who blindly supported him and the "Christian" fundamentalists slunk back into the woodwork of American society, ready to reemerge when the time was ripe.

For now, however, all that was history — and history, as they say, is written by the victors, and Trump was the big loser. It was hard to imagine that this was a person who had become the president of the United States — and ran again for president despite his many crimes and failing mental health. He was now consigned to the dustbin of history.

Which is why the book collector let out a gasp when he saw a well-worn version of "The Portable Trump: Our Leader in His Own Words" — with its bright red and white MAGA cover — tucked away among the secondhand books. He flipped through the pages, and the madness from years gone by came rushing back to him.

* * *

Word salad

Joe, Joe Biden is forming, granting mass thinking he's going to formally grant.

Reap be dupe

We are a nation that recently heard that Saudi Arabia and Russia would reap be dupe aughhh...

The simple life

My life could have been so simple. I could have had 200 lawyers less. My life could have been. That's 200 fewer lawyers. Please, please. I would have had a beautiful life. But this is a beautiful life. This is far more beautiful. I mean, what's better being with you right now? Look at that beautiful lake. Beautiful, right? What's better? This or sitting on the Pacific or the Atlantic, which has sharks, right? You don't have sharks. So that's a big advantage. I'll take the one without the sharks.

They don't speak the language

You have people that come in illegally that don't speak the language. We don't even know the country... that these are countries. Well, we have nobody in our country that even understands the language.

Parable of the shark and the battery

I went to a boat company in South Carolina. The boat, I said, how is it? He said it's a problem, sir. They want us to make all electric boats. So I said, let me ask you a question, and he said nobody ever asked me this question ... I say, what would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you're in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater, and there's a shark that's approximately 10 yards over there.

If the boat is sinking ... do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted? Or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you he didn't know the answer. He said you know, nobody's ever asked me that question. I said I think it's a good question. I think there's a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I would do if there were a shark? Or you get electrocuted? I'll take electrocution every single time. I'm not getting near the shark.

Waterworks

Do you ever go into a new home where the shower where the water doesn't come out of the shower head? They put a restrictor on, I took all the restrictor off, I took them off. I've had the experience I take a shower, I want that beautiful head of hair to be nice and wet, lathered, I want it to be lathered beautifully, and I get the best stuff money can buy, and I dump it all over, and I turn on the water, and the damn water drips out, I can't get the stuff out of my hair, it's a horrible thing. No, it's terrible.

So we can't let these people destroy our country like this. They're going crazy. Today you read where they don't want any water in your dishwasher, so your dishwasher won't work, and they think that's good.

* * *

The book collector took the slim volume and walked over to the cash register, where an amiable man named Al wrapped it in a plain brown paper bag. "Might be better if you're not seen with it," he said with a smile. "People don't take kindly to that kind of crap these days."