I’ve already seen naked pictures of Pres. Donald Trump’s wife, so why won’t he let me see his taxes? Pardon me. I was educated by nuns. In the 1960s. Their laser focus on sin never left me, not even when I was sinning.
For me, a child of a repressed, orderly age, the idea that you might value the sight of your tax return more than you value the sight of your wife’s naked body remains oddly disgraceful, but not surprising.
This is why, even though all the songs on the radio are about love, all anybody ever talks about is money.
It’s also why I always liked working for unionized newspapers. Except for the bosses, everyone’s salary was plainly visible in the union contract. The bosses, of course, carefully guarded the amount of their salaries, though the cars they drove indicated they weren’t doing much better than those of us who did the actual writing.
So, Pres. Donald Trump, the shameless grabber of women, the guy who is unruffled by his wife’s nakes being all over the internet, the guy who feels not the smallest prickle of conscience at people knowing how he squeezed out of military service, that guy, he turns all giggling virgin when someone wants to lift the skirt of confidentiality and peek at the naked organs of profit and loss.
We have finally found the sticking point, the place where you can touch Donald Trump, and his body twitches away in embarrassment.
He tells us most recently that claiming huge losses was “sport,” which, oddly enough, was the same way he felt about Stormy Daniels. Every degradation is sport.
The future president-for-life may think that the full and complete release of all his tax returns might be a political liability, but I don’t think that’s the only source of his reluctance.
I think Trump has found that one thing he wants to keep private, as I said, the one thing that makes him flinch.
And, after all, don’t you sometimes overstate your salary or the worth of your house when you’re talking to someone you’ve just met? Don’t you lie a little, and say you got your car for a thousand or so less than you really paid?
When I tended bar in graduate school, there were some guys who would always put a $100 bill on the bar, even if it represented a third of their weekly salary. It didn’t really bother me that some of them did it to impress women. It bothered me that some of them very obnoxiously did it to impress me, the lowly tobacco, beer and urinal cake-scented bartender. Why me? Why grin at me, and slap a $100 bill on the bar? What could I do for you?
Trump’s been dropping C-notes on the bar for so long that he can’t afford to admit that there are no other big bills in his pocket, not even in front of the lowly workers who propelled him into office in part because he is a “businessman.”
Wifey’s nakes are all over the internet. The Koreans are shooting off missiles like fireworks. The Mexicans refused to pay for the wall, and they made it stick. The economy is good, but it was good during the Clinton years, too, when some of the mutual funds I owned made 20 percent a year. I wondered then if the good times would last forever.
They did not, but they came again, and they’ll go away again, too.
And Pres. Donald Trump, whose red ties and bluster have brought him safe through every possible embarrassment, now fears financial nakedness.
He is embarrassed, by God, and although I don’t like him, this is the most I’ve ever liked him.
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