Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse Read online

And who do you think they be?

  Harold Bornstein, Tom Price,

  And Rear Admiral Jackson,

  All sharing the title “MD.”

  Doctor Bornstein, for one,

  Is a figure of fun,

  Though he’s cared for the Head of Our Nation.

  He expounded at length

  On the president’s strength

  As he read a verbatim dictation.

  The POTUS’s hair

  Got particular care

  (Orange locks were his signature feature).

  But poor Bornstein was hosed

  When we learned he’d imposed

  A daily regime of Propecia.

  Tom Price was a stealth

  Secretary of Health,

  Sneaking off under cover of night.

  He was bland as vanilla

  But fierce as Attila

  On behalf of the Radical Right.

  Though anti-elitist,

  This ex-orthopedist

  Saw his power and position unravel.

  What caused this curtailment?

  A plutocrat’s ailment:

  An addiction to private air travel.

  Ronny Jackson’s position

  As White House physician

  Gave him access to pills by the ton.

  He would dole them out freely,

  Patrolling genteelly

  The horde while on board Air Force One.

  He was tapped anyway

  To head up the VA.

  No one bothered to heed the Code Red.

  His promotion suspended,

  This admiral ended

  In water way over his head.

  Rub-a-dub-dub,

  Three men in a tub.

  Their professional prospects had fled.

  They practiced no more

  And when reaching the shore,

  Took two aspirins and went straight to bed.

  HAROLD BORNSTEIN served as Donald Trump’s personal physician for thirty-eight years. Trump cut ties with him after the doctor revealed that Trump took a prescription hair-growth medicine .

  TOM PRICE was the secretary of health and human services under Donald Trump from February to September 2017, when he resigned after it was revealed that he had spent over $1 million of government funds for travel on private jets and military planes .

  Former physician to the president RONNY JACKSON was nominated by President Trump as secretary of veterans affairs in March 2018. The next month, Jackson withdrew his name from consideration after allegations spread regarding his handling of prescription drugs, among other things. Trump appointed Jackson as his chief medical advisor in February 2019 .

  THE GENTLEMEN OF THE DEFENSE

  At first, the most promising partnership goin’

  Was Cobb, Dowd, diGenova, Kasowitz & Cohen.

  But rarely have lawyers made such a poor showin’

  As Cobb, Dowd, diGenova, Kasowitz & Cohen.

  Empty threats and deceptions were constantly flowin’

  From Cobb, Dowd, diGenova, Kasowitz & Cohen.

  But few legal experts paid heed to the crowin’

  Of Cobb, Dowd, diGenova, Kasowitz & Cohen.

  In time, the team’s case proved extremely rough goin’

  For Cobb, Dowd, diGenova, Kasowitz & Cohen.

  They sensed, one by one, whence the cold wind was blowin’

  Did Cobb, Dowd, diGenova, Kasowitz & Cohen.

  So, besmirched by the towel each decided to throw in,

  Off went Cobb, Dowd, diGenova, Kasowitz & Cohen.

  And a new gang stepped up, dressed in rumpled Armani:

  Giuliani, Giuliani, Giuliani & Giuliani.

  TY COBB, JOHN DOWD, JOSEPH DIGENOVA, MARC KASOWITZ , and MICHAEL COHEN all served as legal advisors to Donald Trump. In April 2018 , RUDY GIULIANI joined Trump’s personal legal team .

  THE LITTLE MAN WHO’S NOT ALL THERE

  (AFTER WILLIAM HUGHES MEARNS)

  Today, upon a White House stair,

  I met a man who’s not all there.

  A Dumpty aide from opening day,

  I wish, I wish he’d go away.

  With ghostly face and sleepy eyes,

  A hairless dome and furtive guise,

  One thinks of him less as a policy maker

  And more as an unctuous undertaker.

  In public, whenever he’s heard or seen,

  He rants like a manic spin machine.

  So there he sits, as if chained to a pillar,

  His first name is Stephen, his last name is Miller.

  By now his peers have all been canned,

  But Dumpty insists he stay close at hand

  To sate the POTUS’s nativist urges

  And launch his draconian immigrant purges.

  Speechwriting, too, is a muscle he’s flexed

  (Although Dumpty rarely pays heed to the text).

  Ramping up fears and trampling on hope

  Made “American carnage” a Dumptyan trope.

  For Miller, fidelity means blind devotion:

  When Dumpty invents, he seconds the motion.

  Post-election, for instance, he lied in his throat,

  Claiming three million migrants had skewered the vote.

  That pales beside Miller’s most barbarous plan,

  His blatantly racist and rash travel ban.

  Of crazy ideas, the craziest of all:

  The wall! The wall! The beautiful wall!

  But what does he see as his crowning achievement?

  His masterpiece of abuse and bereavement?

  Zero tolerance! Immigrant children abducted,

  In a program that Miller himself had constructed.

  Along with the skipper of our ship of state,

  He holds in his hands our precarious fate.

  Together they sail on the seas of autocracy.

  Heaven watch over our fragile democracy.

  Tomorrow I fear, on that same White House stair,

  The same little man once again will be there.

  Once again he’ll be there on the following day.

  I wish, I wish he’d go away.

  A “White House survivor,” STEPHEN MILLER is a speech-writer and one of the longest-tenured political advisors for Donald Trump, serving since January 2017 .

  REEB-A-DEEP-DEEP

  Reeb-a-deep-deep

  Four men in a jeep.

  No wonder they look so annoyed.

  They’re McMaster and Kelly

  And Mattis and Flynn:

  Four generals, all unemployed.

  Flynn was a snake

  And a man on the take,

  Russia’s unwitting dupe from the start.

  A self-immolator

  And close to a traitor,

  Of the four he was first to depart.

  His stolid successor,

  A soldier-professor,

  Was a champ at averting disaster.

  But inviting our doom,

  Dumpty lowered the boom

  On the stoical H. R. McMaster.

  John Kelly’s arrival

  Betokened survival,

  But he was embattled as well.

  When at last he stepped down,

  He blew Crazytown

  Like a prisoner sprung from his cell.

  The last of the four

  To head out the door

  Was the flinty and fearsome Jim Mattis.

  His tenure a bust,

  Mad Dog left in disgust.

  Heaven help our defense apparatus.

  Reeb-a-deep-deep

  Four men in a jeep,

  Dumped by Dumpty, the worst of his species.

  Their honor is lost

  For they’ve learned at their cost:

  All he touches he turns into feces.

  H. R. MCMASTER is a retired U.S. Army general who served as Donald Trump’s national security advisor from February 2017 to April 2018 .

  JOHN F. KELLY is a retired U.S. Marine Corps general who served as
secretary of homeland security under Donald Trump until he was appointed White House chief of staff in July 2017, a position he left after eighteen months .

  JIM MATTIS is a retired U.S. Marine Corps general who served as the secretary of defense from January 2017 until December 2018, when he retired due to policy differences with Donald Trump .

  TRUMPTY DUMPTY: PART 2

  Trumpty Dumpty wanted a tower

  To showcase his personal glory and power.

  But Putin came up with a devilish plot

  To exploit Dumpty’s dream for covert kompromat .

  Dumpty proceeded with Cohen and Sater,

  Ignoring the possible label of “traitor.”

  When thereafter their dealings were open to all,

  The odds were that Dumpty would have a great fall.

  A business associate of Trump , FELIX SATER is a Russian-American ex-felon who had ties to organized crime. He worked with Michael Cohen on a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow in 2015 and 2016. Cohen later admitted that the licensing deal for Trump Tower Moscow continued after Trump secured the Republican nomination .

  ALL AT SEA

  (AFTER JOHN MASEFIELD)

  I must go down to the seas again,

  To the lonely sea and sun.

  I’ve got a flotilla of ten big yachts

  And I’ll pick my favorite one.

  I’ll lie on the deck all slathered in oil,

  Sipping a frosty libation,

  And think of all of the things I can do

  To privatize education.

  I must go down to the seas again

  (More specifically, down to Lake Erie).

  With a sea captain’s eyes, I’ll boldly devise

  My own educational theory:

  A nationwide network of new charter schools

  Where Calvinist thought is enshrined.

  The children whose parents can’t manage the cost

  Will have to be left behind.

  In my stateroom, afloat on the seas again,

  I’ll dine on exotic cuisines.

  I’ll choose all my cooks from a rarefied group:

  Ex for-profit university deans.

  They’ll counsel me, too, using knowledge they’ve gained

  From running their various schools,

  For example, suggesting that I should roll back

  All Obama’s ridiculous rules.

  When I sail in from the seas again,

  I’ll tend to more pressing affairs,

  Like arming American teachers with guns

  To protect them from grizzly bears.

  I’ll pick some new clothes and accessories

  And back to the seas I’ll go,

  Since all at sea has tended to be

  My usual status quo.

  With no experience as a public school student, teacher, principal, superintendent, or administrator , BETSY DEVOS assumed office as the secretary of education on February 7, 2017 .

  SIC TRANSIT

  Head the EPA?

  He wouldn’t do it.

  Back in Oklahoma

  He’d wanted to screw it.

  Fourteen times

  He opted to sue it.

  But when the new POTUS

  Appointed him to it,

  It was such a juicy bone,

  He decided to chew it.

  The agency’s mission?

  He sought to undo it.

  Fossil-fuel industries

  Were eager to cue it.

  Climate change science?

  He would blithely pooh-pooh it.

  Environmentalist protest?

  He tried to subdue it.

  The new chief executive

  Backed him all through it.

  After six months in office,

  He finally blew it.

  Swampy behavior?

  He didn’t eschew it.

  Donor-funded travel?

  He’d way overdo it.

  A Chick-fil-A suite?

  His wife was into it.

  Cheap housing from a lobbyist?

  He chose to pursue it,

  And a big-ticket phone booth

  To block out the bruit.

  Brazen corruption?

  No matter how he’d skew it,

  There’s no other way to view it,

  And everybody knew it.

  As Ovid might construe it

  (And not a soul will rue it):

  Sic transit Scott Pruitt.

  SCOTT PRUITT served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 until July 2018, when he resigned in the face of fourteen federal investigations .

  Translation: Look at that jerk Pruitt .

  MY LUCKY DAY: AUGUST 21, 2018

  Today is the luckiest day of my life.

  I’ve been charged with corruption, along with my wife.

  You’d think all those counts from a Federal Grand Jury

  Would trigger despondency, panic, or fury.

  But no! A separate shock to the nation

  Has spared me the country’s irate condemnation:

  The president’s fixer and his campaign ex-chief

  Have each been convicted and branded a thief.

  The tale of two crooks at the height of their power

  Eclipsed my indictment in less than an hour.

  Since their verdicts explicitly implicate POTUS,

  My crimes have completely escaped public notice.

  Hence nobody heard of my bank overruns,

  Of the cash that I stole from my own campaign funds,

  Of resorting to bookkeeping falsification

  To pay for my relatives’ Italian vacation,

  For dentistry, golf, for my bed-hopping habit,

  For a ticket in coach for the family rabbit.

  The pundits won’t bother to give me the shaft

  For my fiscal abuses and runaway graft.

  No perp walk in newspaper photos for me!

  No punch line for comics on late-night TV!

  Let Cohen and Manafort go down in history;

  Me and my wife? We’re shrouded in mystery.

  If I tell you our names when you finish this poem,

  I bet that you’ll answer, “Gee, sorry. Don’t know ’em!”

  No infamy, censure, abasement, or strife:

  Today is the luckiest day of my life.

  On August 21, 2018, Congressman DUNCAN D. HUNTER and his wife , MARGARET JANKOWSKI , were indicted on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and violating campaign finance laws. Later that same day, Trump associate Michael Cohen pleaded guilty and Paul Manafort was found guilty in separate court proceedings. Despite the charges against him, Hunter was re-elected in November, 2018 .

  THE OSTRICH’S LAMENT

  The Manafort trial was a terrible shock

  To me and my eastern South African flock.

  For years we’d been bred for our feathers and meat

  In dusty enclosures and god-awful heat.

  Ungainly and ugly, we’d suffered such scorn

  That most of us wished that we’d never been born.

  A species that civilization forgot,

  Contempt and disgust were the ostrich’s lot.

  But when word of Paul Manafort spread through the veldt,

  We gaily discarded the hand we’d been dealt.

  With one lavish purchase, he’d rescued our pride:

  A sport jacket made from an ostrich’s hide !

  “Stupendous!” we crowed. “How dashing! How chic!

  The priciest garb in the Bijan boutique!”

  This high-rolling mogul was bound to ensure

  A glorious future for ostrich couture.

  But abasement, dishonor, and humiliation

  Came close on the heels of our wild jubilation.

  Manafort showed us his fat feet of clay,

  A poster boy proving that crime doesn’t pay.

  Revealed as a monster of fiscal duplicity,

  His sport jack
et spawned catastrophic publicity.

  With a crook as the ostrich’s fashion bellwether,

  Who would buy sportswear that featured our leather?

  Gloom has befallen the old ostrich ranch.

  We’re nursing a wound that no surgeon can stanch.

  Our moment of glory was gone in a flash,

  Betrayed by the laundering of ill-gotten cash.

  The felon’s in prison and we’re in disgrace,

  Cursing the wiles of the vile human race.

  From afar you can picture our unhappy band,

  Each one of us sticking its head in the sand.

  Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman PAUL MANAFORT has been sentenced to seven and a half years in federal prison for financial crimes, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and witness tampering. Manafort is expected to pay restitution of at least $6 million for taxes that he never paid .

  YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILBUR

  (AFTER LEWIS CARROLL)

  “You are old, Father Wilbur,” the young man said.

  “We’re ready to call the embalmers.

  And yet you’ve accepted employment instead

  As the new secretary of commerce.”

  “In my youth,” Wilbur rasped, “it was always my mission

  To buy and sell bankrupted firms.

  I sell access instead in my current position

  On vastly more lucrative terms.”

  “But sir!” cried the lad to the crafty old snake,

  “Aren’t you subject to strict regulations?

  You’ve consistently failed to relinquish your stake

  In the business of shady rogue nations.”

  “A despicable slur!” the old codger inveighed,

  His eyes growing angry and viperous.

  “Everyone gains from the profits I’ve made

  In Moscow, Beijing, and in Cyprus!”

  “And yet,” the youth answered, “from all that I see,

  The older you get, you grow bolder.

  You’ve raided the till of your own LLC

  And cheated both friend and shareholder.”

  “These wild accusations are making me ill!”

  Blurted Wilbur, increasingly nettled.

  “And even if maybe I stole a few mil,

  Each time I was busted, I settled!”

  “According to Forbes ,” the boy said with a taunt,

  “You’re a shockingly petty offender.

  They say that departing a cheap restaurant,

  You pocketed packets of Splenda.”

  “I’m done!” Wilbur shouted, in peevish distress,

  “With your scoffs and contemptuous glares!

  I get quite enough from the liberal press!

  Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!”

  WILBUR ROSS is an investor and the U.S. secretary of commerce .

  KAVANAUGHTY

  Chosen to parse constitutional law,

  He’s Brett Kavanaugh.