President Trump’s staff fastened a digital sign to Trump’s lapel whenever Trump has been set to speak to the media, to stop reporters from having to flail about, guessing whether the president is lying.
“It started because I got annoyed watching the TV news,” said the staffer. “The anchors and pundits kept asking why Trump was saying that the sky is green, that two and two are five, or that his inauguration crowd was the biggest of all time. They just couldn’t figure out what Trump was up to—as if no politician had ever lied before! Or as if no legit psychopath had ever held high office!
“I just got sick of watching these fools on TV dancing around the issue, too timid to reckon with reality, just asking tedious questions like, ‘Why would the President say this when he must know it’s demonstrably false?’ or using euphemisms like Hilary Clinton’s gem, ‘Trump lacks the temperament to be president’—because it’s more polite to speak of ‘temperament’ than about Trump being literally a predator like a shark or the Terminator killing machine, a bona fide psychotic narcissist and, of course, a compulsive liar.”
To spare viewers from “having their time wasted by these clueless or cowardly news folks” and to “hold the baby journalists’ hands and steer them to the truth about Trump,” the staffer began affixing a battery-powered sign to Trump’s lapel. The staffer would listen to Trump speak in an interview, speech, or press conference, and editorialize by remote control.
For example, when Trump told ABC news that he’ll launch an investigation into massive voter fraud in the U.S., the sign on Trump’s lapel lit up with a message that scrolled across the small screen even as Trump himself was speaking. The message read, “Mother of all whoppers! The psycho Trump fears that a woman, Hillary C., beat him by three million in the popular vote—coincidentally the same number he says are voting illegally.”
And in his speech at CIA headquarters, when Trump accused the media of lying about his inauguration crowd size, the lapel sign read in blaring red letters, “Yuge lie! Psycho Trump can’t lose in a dick-measuring contest with a black man like Obama.”
Asked why he or she prefers to be anonymous, when Trump surely knows who is putting the LED sign on his suit, the staffer said, “Of course Trump doesn’t know! If he did, I’d be dead. Trump carries a laser blaster at all times. And if Trump knew, do you really think he’d leave the sign on and continue to lie like a madman?”
The extent of Trump’s obliviousness has flabbergasted the rest of the world. “How can Trump still not know about the sign?” asked a Democratic Congresswoman. “How can no one on his team be telling him that he’s being clowned over and over again, that everyone on earth now has a running breakdown of his every boast, evasion, distortion, slander, and confabulation, of every act of vain posturing or brazen pandering he clumsily undertakes?”
Clarice Foggarty, fellow at the Brookings Institution, theorized that “No one dares tell Trump about the sign for the same reason no Iraqi told Saddam Hussein he had no weapons of mass destruction.” In an authoritarian regime, she said, “the emperor is always wearing clothes even when he’s stark naked and his genitals are visibly flapping in the breeze. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself headless.”
As to why President Trump evidently can’t himself see the infamous sign, one psychotherapist speculated that Trump “effectively lives in the fiction he constantly spins. Trump can’t see beyond the hyperbole, according to which he’s a billionaire because he’s the greatest businessman ever, and he’s president because he’s a Batman-like hero who can do no wrong. Anything that contradicts that preposterous self-image can’t register in Trump’s conscious mind. If Trump suddenly could see himself the way practically everyone else sees him, his head would melt from the epic cognitive dissonance.”