NEW AMERICA, formerly New Mexico (The Daily Whatever Press) — At the end of last month, I published a list of the ten most awful things Donald Trump and his administration did in August, and I believed ten was a responsible number. Ten is how many fingers I have. Ten is a Pearl Jam album. Ten is a huge but at least human-sized container for one month’s worth of atrocities.
September looked at my container and pissed in it.
So here are 13 — yes, thirteen — abso-effing-lutely batshit things Trump and company did this month, in chronological order. I refuse to rank them, because ranking would require me to decide whether lying about 9/11 at a 9/11 event is worse than scheduling a war around an election, and I won’t do that.
Every receipt is linked. Anything I invented, I’ll tell you.
1. His face on a dollar coin, which is gold-colored, mostly copper, and also not supposed to exist (Sept. 2)
The U.S. Mint started selling Trump $1 coins at $61 for a 25-coin roll and $154.50 for a bag of 100. That works out to about $2.44 per dollar, which is the most honest exchange rate this administration has offered anyone. The coins look gold but contain no gold at all; they’re mostly copper plus small amounts of zinc, manganese, and nickel, and that is also my review of the man.
Meanwhile, the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 limits $1 coins to presidents who have died. The administration’s workaround is a 2020 law about the 250th anniversary, because nothing honors 1776 like putting a living ruler’s face on the money.
The real version, the 24-karat gold proof coin, goes on sale Nov. 5 at noon ET with a household limit of one. That’s two days after the midterms. Hold onto that number.
2. Twenty-four posts before “Happy Labor Day” (Sept. 7)
Between 9:50 and 10:45 on Labor Day morning, the president posted 24 times. Seven were about renaming New Mexico “New America,” and one was an old photo of him arm-wrestling the late Hulk Hogan. When he finally reached the workers, he wished a happy holiday to the “Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats” and reminded the nation that its “Favorite President (ME!)” knows how to win.
Then the White House posted its official tribute to American labor: a 38-second clip of an automated factory producing a single White House pen, without one human worker in the frame. That same weekend, regular gas averaged $4.15, the highest Labor Day price AAA has ever recorded. Johnny 5 from Short Circuit got more screen time as a worker than any actual worker did. The robot has since been offered a $45,000 holiday bonus.
(That part’s invented. Number 5 on this list isn’t.)
3. The 9/11 firefighter fan fiction (Sept. 8)
At an event honoring 9/11 first responders, Trump said two firefighters grabbed him and carried him away from the site when the nearby One Liberty Plaza began to creak, adding, “I’m not the smallest guy in the world.” Cute, but patently and provably false; on 9/11 he was miles from the World Trade Center, and no one whisked him out of any building near Ground Zero that day. In his 2016 version, the firefighters helped him “a couple of days” after the attack, and afterward he posted that everything he’d said was “exactly accurate.”
This motherfucker told a hero story starring himself to the families of the actual heroes, at their memorial event.
