Well, Donald Trump is tilting at windmills again.
Out of the clear blue sky, the President tweeted this on Friday:
As usual, it’s worth taking a minute to appreciate the amount of absurdity crammed into that. He put “probably” in all caps presumably in an effort to simultaneously convey that he’s the odds-on favorite but also hedge his bets in case things turn out differently which you can bet they will now. He put “person” in there in a half-hearted effort to avoid being called a chauvinist, and he included “like last year” to make sure you didn’t forget.
But what’s pretty clear from that tweet is that he realizes he is not in fact going to “win” this year. So he’s trying to get out ahead of it by claiming he turned it down.
Now for one thing, no one but Donald Trump cares about this. Nobody gives a shit about TIME magazine and being their “person of the year” is certainly not a requirement for being President of the United States.
But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about and over time, he has demonstrated a veritable obsession with TIME. Here’s what I mean:
Don’t let the ridiculousness be lost on you there. In May of 2012 he called TIME “disgusting” for showing breast feeding, five months later he said they “lost all credibility” because they didn’t include him in their top 100 list, a month after that he was mad about Abraham Lincoln, in April of the following year he was mad about that top 100 list again calling TIME a “soon-to-be dead joke,” a month after that he called it “a free handout in a parking lot,” and six months after that he called it a “sad skimpy” thing.
Fast forward to 2015 and he changed his tune after he landed on the cover, calling it “a great honor.” Then in December of 2015 came the infamous “person ruining Germany” tweet. The very next month he called a story in TIME “one of the best stories I’ve ever had” before sending out a second tweet that says “Remember, get TIME magazine!” When he finally did get person of the year, he was back to the “great honor” line and now, what just a year ago was “a great honor” is something he claims he doesn’t want because it involves a photo shoot.
And see, I am not going to let you forget for a moment how fucking stupid this man is. You cannot read those tweets and claim that they are anything but moronic and it pleases me greatly to be able to present them to the Trump fans out there as hard evidence of abject buffoonery.
Ok, well as it turns out, TIME immediately called him a liar for his Friday tweet. To wit:
You have to think he knew that was coming, which means the only possible explanation for his tweet is that in his childlike mind, not being chosen for the cover is such a grievous blow that he would rather risk being called a liar by TIME if it means convincing at least some people that he turned them down.
Again, only Donald Trump would do something like that, because he actually thinks he should be “person of the year” every year, and so every year that he’s not, he feels like he needs to explain it to people by either deriding TIME as a piece of failing shit or else by claiming that he actually turned down a photo shoot.
And that was hardly the end of it. Trump was mercilessly lampooned on social media all night long for this boondoggle, but the best counter punch of all came from former TIME managing editor Richard Stengel, who tweeted this:
Did you catch the reference there? If not that’s ok, because we’ll be happy to tell you that story again by reprinting our previous post documenting the time (no pun intended) Trump had a fake TIME cover printed and hung it up at his golf clubs. Enjoy…
************************
Donald Trump is a man who despises “fake news.”
Wait, that’s not a very Trump-ish way to put it. Let me try again.
Donald Trump is a man who thinks the dishonest media is “trying to cover for a huge election loss by printing #FAKENEWS, but despite it all, covfefe. #MAGA.”
There we go. That’s a little more “presidential.”
Given how worried Trump is about the “fake news” phenomenon, one would think that the last thing he would do is hang up framed copies of a fake TIME magazine cover featuring himself in his clubs and resorts.
But that’s exactly what he’s done, because according to TIME spokeswoman Kerri Chyka “this is not a real TIME cover”:
And yet here it hangs:
Here’s WaPo:
The framed copy of Time Magazine was hung up in at least four of President Trump’s golf clubs, from South Florida to Scotland. Filling the entire cover was a photo of Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” the big headline said. Above the Time nameplate, there was another headline in all caps: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!”
This cover – dated March 1, 2009 – looks like an impressive memento from Trump’s pre-presidential career. To club members eating lunch, or golfers waiting for a pro-shop purchase, it seemed to be a signal that Trump had always been a man who mattered. Even when he was just a reality-TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in Time.
But that wasn’t true.
The Time cover is a fake.
There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time Magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.
“So how did Trump – who spent an entire campaign and much of his presidency accusing the mainstream media of producing ‘fake news’ – wind up decorating his properties with a literal piece of phony journalism?” WaPo goes on to ask.
Well, no one really knows.
Asked to comment, this is what Sarah Huckabee Sanders came up with:
We couldn’t comment on the decor at Trump Golf clubs one way or another.
Covfefe.
LOL thanks for the great reminder of his former fake cover that hangs in more than one location — I believe it also hangs at his Mar-shit-hole in Florida. My thought on his early a.m. lie yesterday — I bet someone said to him “Donald, you’ll probably be Time’s Man of The Year this year for all you have done!” clearly by someone who knows how to kiss his ass to get a favor. So in his mind it is perfectly ok to repeat that as Time called to tell him yada yada yada. Kinda like when an unknown someone called and told him what good job he did at the Boy Scouts of America event — and when he bragged about it, he repeated it as “the Boy Scouts called to tell me that was the best speech ever given at their event” bullshit.
Well, you know, everybody is saying so, people are talking.
Apparently, the gravitational pull on feces is always downhill – except in the mind of Donald Trump – where his shit ends up any where he thinks that it is.