Now and again, as if oblivious to the futility, or perhaps imbued with a spirit of affectless fatalism, I write a column describing a particularly florid example of just how gloriously stupid Donald Trump really is. Now, The Donald does something garden-variety stupid 200 times a day, but like everybody else I’m generally numb to the quotidian, chopper-talk word salad and Tweety imbecilities that form the bulk of Trump’s daily discourse. He can do dumb at that level in his sleep. When he cranks out that kind of stupid, it’s like watching an Indy Car idling before they wave the green flag. Like just this morning, Trump called for Mitt Romney, who has lately grown one and a half vertebrae towards what may one day become a real backbone, to be impeached.
So OK, in a lot of ways this is peak Trump. It starts off with one of his patented “people are saying” assertions, concludes by accusing the Democrats, who have passed something like 150 substantive bills since the mid-terms only to watch them all murdered by McConnell’s Senate, of being the “do-nothings”, and exhorts the Great State of Utah, or perhaps the Senate itself, to take up a remedy that doesn’t exist. Senators can’t be impeached. That would be fun, sure, but nope, no such thing. Some States have laws providing for recall elections, but Mittens is from Utah, and Utah isn’t one of them. So that’s a fair number of lies/dum-dum mistakes, and by my count he manages all this with just 41 words and a hashtag, which objectively would be pretty amazing for anybody else. From Donald, though? Doesn’t even register. The only reason I’d write about such a routine Trumpy brain turd is to hold it out as an example of something I couldn’t be bothered to write about.
I can’t stay quiet, though, even though I probably should, when he really lives up to his potential. Like the time he characterized North Korean ballistic missile tests as Kim “firing his cannons into the ocean”. Or the way he actually believes that the stealthy F-35, which somebody must have told him (wrongly) is “invisible to radar”, is actually invisible.
At least, that sort of thing used to get me all worked up. Yet it turns out that was nothing. He was just getting warmed up. We learned this week that Trump can combine far, far higher doses of stupidity with the sort of cruelty that would have made Stalin wonder why he never thought of that; you see, Donald wants a moat. Along the entire US border with Mexico. Filled with alligators.
See, now you’re thinking, not unreasonably, that I must have swallowed a load of internet crapola, it was likely click-bait in one of those chum-boxes that populate the bottoms of your more disreputable web pages, and I fell for it, but unh-uhhhh. It’s true! It came out in a book that’s just been published, written by a couple of journalists from the NY Times, and you can read all about it in the Economist:
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/10/05/an-absurd-reckoning-of-donald-trumps-border-moat
They actually cost out the proposal (it is the Economist, after all). They figure 30 billion, and yes, it turns out that America actually has the Alligator farms needed to supply enough armoured reptiles to fill the order – they breed them for belts and wallets and stuff – and you could buy them in bulk on the cheap, though it might be a bit extra to put them all in proper-fitting Customs and Border Patrol uniforms. And MAGA hats, which I guess would need to be special order with chin straps.
Nobody’s saying all this would be easy. They aren’t saying that. It’s a long border, and folks, that’s a lot of moat, no doubt, plus there will be other challenges. Just to throw out a few examples, standing water in open moats tends to just evaporate, especially in the desert, so there’d be the cost of continually topping it up, and likely some sort of aquarium-style cleaning needed too, and of course if the deterrent effect starts to kick in as planned then somebody’s going to have to find something beside asylum-seekers to feed the gators. To which end, I’m not making this up either:
That’s right. That’s Purina Alligator Chow. And you thought the logistics would be impossible.
Donald also suggested water snakes, if that worked, and also flesh-tearing spikes, electric fences, and soldiers posted every few hundred yards with standing orders to kneecap approaching women and children with automatic weapons fire, which, he understands, slows them down a hell of a lot. It all starts to add up, making me wonder whether the Economist has really figured all the angles, but on the other hand, as Fat Donny was doubtless amazed and delighted to learn, half of the 2,000 mile border is already a moat all by itself, called the Rio Grande, and for that stretch you could just drive the critters up in dump trucks and pour ’em right in, no extra digging required. So that’ll save some dough.
Let me stress again: I’m not making this up.
Do you suppose this could be my last Donald is so stupid that… column? Can he possibly do anything, after this, to wind me up?
What do you think?
the needlefish 