A reader in the West Country has trumped me in the Bitters department. He sent this picture of two specimens that have eluded my collection. This reminds me that he alerted me to a lovely conspiracy theory that was doing the rounds among the in-crowd in the United States late last year.
Before we get onto that it is worth reading the back label on his bottle of the Hudson Standard Bitters.
The conspiracy theory seems to have originated with Jeb Bush and has been widely written about in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, CBS, etc. My West Country reader came up with a fresh angle which amused me. Let’s approach obliquely.
At first sight the similarity between Roberta (Bobbie) Wickham and President Trump may seem elusive. However, a study of their psychology provides the answer. She may not be a blonde but as a fiery and impetuous redhead (“a carrot-topped Jezebel”) their characters are similar. When she needed to endear Reginald (Kipper) Herring to her mother she softened her up by putting her engagement to Bertie in The Times. Lady Wickham was gratifyingly appalled, referring to Bertie as a gaby, a guffin and a nincompoop.
Trump, last year, was faced with the problem that his friends the Clintons are so detested that almost any Republican candidate would have had a good chance of defeating Hillary. So, to soften up the American electorate he decided that there would have to be an even more unpopular candidate to stand against her – namely himself. His campaign was so outlandish that Hillary would have to win the Presidency and bestow some political favours on her Blonde Knight.
Bobbie’s stratagem (in Jeeves in the Offing) was a pippin but her alter-ego’s schemes, as some poet once said, gang aft agley. Hardly surprising as Trump does not have Jeeves’s assistance. If he had he would never have got himself into this mess although he would have had to pay a price – relinquishing his red baseball cap.
I think the person most surprised and amazed by his “winning the Presidency” was The Donald himself. Let’s not forget that although he received more votes in the Electoral College than his Democratic rival, he actually lost to Hillary by almost three million votes when the final tally among all the states was added up. His ego is so glaringly fragile that he continues to adhere to the obviously false claims that he attracted the largest Inauguration audience ever and that he has accomplished more than any other President at this point in their terms of office, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
One could postulate that he entered the presidential race with the sole purpose of decimating and reversing the Obama legacy. Remember: Trump only reluctantly admitted that Barack Obama was born in the US after years of insisting that the President was born in Kenya. In typical Trump fashion, he then shifted course and fallaciously argued that his opponent Clinton was really the original person promoting the Birther conspiracy theory. By the time last year’s campaign had ended, Trump had achieved a great deal of damage by also tearing down Hillary’s legacy with his immature name calling of her as “Crooked Hillary.”
But the truth is we’re all mesmerized by the Trump train wreck which is taking place right before our very eyes. Only this week, we’ve seen Trump a) denigrate and demean his choice of Attorney General by stating that he never would have picked Jeff Sessions if he had known that he would recuse himself from the Russian/Trump campaign investigation; b) cause Sean Spicer to resign after hiring Anthony Scaramucci (“The Mooch”) to head the White House’s Office of Communication; and, c) repeatedly try to delegitimize Special Investigator Robert Mueller’s staff because they’re now probing too deeply into Trump’s Russian financial connections.
While Trump’s red cap may have won Stanford University’s 2016 Symbol of the Year Award, Trump’s behavior this year may earn him the Bertie Wooster Award for being America’s most outstanding gaby and biggest nincompoop of 2017.
S-A-D !!!
We are all curiously gripped and yet possibly sick to the back teeth of reading about the Orange Charlatan’s latest exploits and his positively psychotic take on post-truth reality but this piece about his family is worth a read.
The man is truly venal.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n04/sidney-blumenthal/a-short-history-of-the-trump-family