I’m a pretty big fan of competition-based reality television and have watched more seasons of The Apprentice than I would care to admit. As a consequence, I’ve seen Donald Trump flaunt his real estate and business assets (the classiest and most luxurious of their kind, apparently) on his own show dozens of times. Yet until recently, even I remained ignorant of The Donald’s shiniest, most golden and most valuable asset of all: his Twitter account.
Trump’s Twitter is like a fountain of knowledge showering the masses with bits of advice. To Robert Pattinson: “Drop [Kristen Stewart], she cheated on you & will again!” On wind turbines: “They are a disaster for a country or community & are very expensive & unreliable.” And on A-Rod: “He is bad for the chemistry of the Yankees—he must go.” But when it comes to politics, Trump has the most to say, devoting the majority of his daily Twitter activity to advising Americans against voting for Barack Obama in the presidential election. So when the business mogul announced on October 19 that he had a “major announcement on President Obama” to make the following week, what was the country to do but speculate? What did Trump know that the rest of America did not?
Well, as you may have seen, Trump knew nothing. In fact, his “announcement” on October 24 was really just an effort to put his own conspiracy theories about the president to rest in the form of an ultimatum: if President Obama released his college records as well as his passport records and applications by October 31 at 5 PM, Trump promised to immediately write a five million dollar check to any charity of the president’s choice.
The national response to Trump’s offer was varied. Some conservatives supported the ultimatum while various celebrities and television personalities spoke out against it. Perhaps the response that gained the most media attention was that from Stephen Colbert. On his show, The Colbert Report, Colbert parodied the ridiculousness of Trump’s announcement with one of his own: the satirist announced that he would donate one million dollars from his Super PAC fund to any charity of Trump’s choice if Colbert was allowed to “dip [his] balls in [Trump’s] mouth,” also by 5 PM on October 31.
While Colbert’s response to Donald Trump may seem like silly comedy, it actually does appear to illustrate a point. Trump would never grant Colbert that amount of perverse power over him, just as the President of the United States, the man who holds the highest position of authority in the country—and arguably in the world—would never allow his own power to be undermined by a wealthy conspiracy theorist. Donald Trump continues (even now that the ultimatum’s deadline has passed) to see the president’s refusal to acknowledge the bribe as cowardice and as an indication that Obama has something to hide. But really, for Obama to concede that kind of power to Donald Trump would be the ultimate illustration of cowardice, as it would show that the leader of our nation is easily intimidated by money and big business. Plus, if Trump were to back out on his end of the deal by not writing a check, the president would likely still have been the one to receive the harshest criticism.
Furthermore, what is there to be learned from the president’s college transcripts? Historically, there is no link between a president’s academic success and his success as the leader of a nation. It is known that FDR got through Harvard by consistently earning C’s, and Harry Truman never even attended college. And it’s not as though Donald Trump is a man who cares much about past success or failure (never mind Trump’s own business failures in past years.) After all, he is the man responsible for casting Apprentice star Omarosa on the upcoming Celebrity All-Star season, despite her being “fired” mid-season on both of her previous appearances on the show, and her 0-4 track record overall as a “project manager” on Apprentice tasks. Surely any academic ineptitude pales in comparison to that more pragmatic kind of failure in business settings. If Donald Trump can keep faith as a businessperson in someone like Omarosa, surely he can learn to trust the president and his Ivy League education no matter what his grades were.
The fact of the matter is, Donald Trump can never actually overpower the president. His offer, which was basically a public attempt at extortion, was little more than an absurdly wealthy man once again flaunting his extravagance in front of a struggling nation. Continuing to show off that wealth, especially after a hurricane that just destroyed a significant portion of Trump’s beloved New York, was simply insensitive. It is as if he figuratively dipped his balls in the mouths of every struggling citizen of Manhattan by not immediately writing a five million dollar check to go toward some kind of relief effort when the deadline he set came around.
So in the end, it is Donald Trump who looks like the fool in this situation. Not the president and not even the man who said he was willing to pay a million dollars to dip his balls in another man’s mouth. Trump was somehow able to further tarnish his own public image without a mouthful of testicles, which is a pretty impressive feat. Perhaps he should’ve given Stephen Colbert’s offer a little more consideration. Who knows? Maybe a public tea-bagging would have yielded something positive for him. •
