Literary Corner: Area Man Bites Reality

Willem De Kooning, Inerchange, 1955, via Wikipedia.

In the press availability with the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on Thursday morning, our poet branched into a strange and dark new territory in which reality really begins to dissolve:

Songs of Zero Tolerance

by Donald J. Trump

I. Are Your Immigration Policies Cruel?

No, I don’t think they’re cruel,
I think they’re the opposite of cruel.
They become cruel because they’re so
ridiculous and it hurts people. It actually

does the reverse of what they’re supposed
to be doing. But no, they’re actually meant
to be the opposite. And they’re hurting people,
they’re really hurting people. A lot of people.

II. Is It Hurting Your Reputation?

I think we're doing an incredible job.
We’re apprehending record numbers of people.
But if we had border security and we had
the wall, if we had a proper wall, which we’re 

building now as we speak, and we’re getting
a lot more funding for it, as you know,
with what we’re talking about with the
vote today, whether it’s positive or not, 

I’m vetoing it, unless I don’t have to veto,
I think that’s unlikely, I’ll do a veto, it’s not
going to be overturned. But we have done
a great job at the border through apprehension.

I think the quivering indeterminacy of the first eight lines, describing the simultaneous cruelty and non-cruelty, ridiculousness and harmfulness, of jailing asylum seekers to force their children into detention facilities, and its simultaneous intentionality and non-intentionality, projects itself onto the following matter, to make his estimate of his own success equally double or Schrödingerian.

He did veto the emergency resolution, of course, as expected (along with a nonbinding resolution demanding an end to US participation in Saudi Arabian attempts to destroy Yemen, making the first two vetos of his presidency—the fact that the two bills reached his desk is a sign that Mitch McConnell is really losing his control over the Senate). I hope it's clarifying to the judges that will be evaluating the case to see Trump proving, with this veto, that the "emergency" he is fighting is the unwillingness of Congress to appropriate the funds he wants—because in arguing with them he and his writers made no serious attempt to prove that any other emergency exists, only that he believes he has the power to do it if he wants, and spend money Congress has refused him more than once:

“Today, I am vetoing this resolution,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, and I have the duty to veto it.” The president called the resolution “dangerous,” “reckless” and a “vote against reality.”

Mr. Trump was flanked by Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William P. Barr and Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary. Mr. Barr said the president’s emergency order was “clearly authorized under the law” and “solidly grounded in law.”

"Against reality" indeed! You're the against reality! The emergency is that the Constitution makes demands he finds inconvenient. This situation has been going on for 240 years! It must be stopped immediately!

Right after the meeting with Varadkar, he sent out a tweet suggesting he hasn't yet learned that Ireland has achieved independence from Britain: