First Trump said nobody knew health care could be so complicated. It’s incredibly complex, he says now. Then he found out that our problems with North Korea can’t be fixed by China. “It’s not so easy,” he said, after China’s Xi Jinping gave Trump what quite possibly was his first, and so far his only, history lesson. It turns out North Korea is a whole different country from China!
Now Trump is saying he thought being president would be easier. He’s surprised at how hard presidenting is. Would you believe it? They have checks and balances. You can’t sign a bill into law until it’s passed. There are already other laws that have been signed by other guys and now those other laws are in the way. Judges won’t do anything you tell them to do. There’s more to the Constitution than that “We the People” bit. Who has time to read that other stuff?
I really wish the Secret Service had given him the keys to that semi he was playing with and let him learn how hard driving a semi is. Give him a semi and let him have his phone and encourage him to hop on the nearest interstate highway and Tweet about all the fun of it.
Trump could be an action movie stunt man. How hard can that be? It’s all make-believe and special effects.
Is it too late for Trump to learn how hard it is to be a rodeo clown?
So many things like that pop into mind. He could try his hand at lion taming. How hard is that? You just get in there and yell at the cat to jump through the flaming hoop, and when the cat doesn’t do it … what am I saying? Of course the cat will jump through the hoop. He’s not going to disobey Trump.
He could go into pyrotechnics. It’s nothing but lighting fuses. People love seeing stuff blow up. He’d be very popular.
Now we have a new tax proposal that strives to simplify the tax system. I see what is happening here. This isn’t about simplifying the tax code for the sake of the country and its economy. This is about making the tax code comprehensible to Trump himself.
Trump wants a tax code for dummies so he can understand how the taxes we have work. Even if the dummied version doesn’t work and destroys the economy, he’ll be happy because he will know the whole of it.
Trump doesn’t want a wall between us and Mexico because that would solve our immigration problems. He wants the wall because he thinks it will simplify our immigration problems. Once the wall is built, he thinks, the immigration problem will be on the other side of it, right?
There’s an old math joke. A mathematician is kidnapped and held for ransom in a locked cell. (It’s not a realistic joke.) He wants to escape so his university doesn’t have to pay the ransom. He thinks, “If I had the key I could use it to unlock the cell and escape.” Having come to that understanding he says, “Therefore, let us assume I have the key,” and his problem was solved.
Trump doesn’t want to fund basic scientific research, because he doesn’t understand it. It complicates his reality with pesky contingencies and potentialities. It’s all about “maybe this” and “possibly that.” If he doesn’t fund it, all those contingencies go entirely away, and his reality is vastly simpler. And that is what’s important. His reality, not ours.
He doesn’t want to fund social services for the same reason. Human potentials are messy, complicated, tricky. Bridges are easy. One end goes here, the other end goes there, there’s a middle and you make it so you can drive over it.
He doesn’t understand climate science. He has called global warming a Chinese hoax. I don’t think he believes that anymore, I think he just genuinely is frightened by the complexity of the issue and the arguments pro and con and wants it just to go away. He doesn’t want the next headline to be, “Trump says climate science is harder than he ever thought it could be.”
He’d rather it read: “Delaware is half underwater; Trump expresses relief, blames Obama.”
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor and three times homeless. He has been involved with Real Change since he supplied the art for the first cover in November of 1994. This is his regular humor column, Adventures in Irony.