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| Some of Davos from the Snow Train. Check that out, it's a video! |
Mr. Bret Stephens ("Davos Man Meets America First", a grammatically peculiar headline) trots out the old Bill Safire device of speaking for the leader in what he hopes sounds like an impression of the leader's voice, with what's introduced as a leaked text of the keynote address Trumpy's going to give to the World Economic Forum in Davos, only with a complex Trumpian wrinkle, not in the strangled cadence in which Stephen Miller has (I presume) written it, but at he imagines Trump might have written a speech himself, with all the "like"s and "believe me"s written in in advance, and the cheery tone of one of his rally speeches instead of Miller's characteristic paranoid gloom. But Stephens makes a ponderous clown, and he mucks up the parody something terrible, with polysyllables and elaborately if not elegantly structured sentences studded with parentheses:
Fellow plutocrats!
I know you’re as glad to see me as I am to see you. No, really. Like, I know you voted for Trump. Or maybe you didn’t vote for me, because your wives, if you had voted for me, they’d withhold sex. But, when I won, in your hearts, you were very happy. And now you’re all so much richer, and your wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever — I’m a very tolerant person — they aren’t withholding, probably.
Am I right? I’m right.
And the idea of Trump publicly acknowledging that women hate him so much they'd go on a sex strike to stop him being elected! That will never happen, though Stephens's hypothesis that a sex strike took place could be true, for all I know. Though it's certainly realistic to picture him assuming everybody in the audience is a man and a US citizen/voter (there won't be anybody from the shithole countries, because they've all decided to walk out, and good for them), and that everybody's getting lots of sex out of the ongoing equities bubble, but then maybe that's Stephens as well.
