fp | As you drive in through Queens, where LaGuardia Airport and the
World’s Fair grounds once stood, you see emerging amid the cranes and
the scaffolding the outlines of the Trump Presidential Resort and
Casino. Gambling has been legal across America since shortly after his
election, providing most of the funding for many of the new president’s
signature major projects, from the gilding of customs halls to extending
health insurance coverage to include free Hair Club for Men
and most forms of plastic surgery for women (or as the new president
called it, his “Be Kind to Dogs Act”) to ensuring that every public high
school in America has the “Trump bare essentials,” including a
heliport, cafeteria cocktail waitresses, and laser teeth whitening for
disadvantaged students.
Through all the glitz, however, you notice that the city is starting
to take on many of the other grimmer hallmarks of past Trump development
projects. Like Atlantic City, it seems full of busloads of the elderly
being led past assorted hookers, small-time hoods, and Elvis
impersonators. Yakov Smirnoff
is the toast of Broadway. And, of course, the city has embraced one of
Trump’s favorite financing techniques — bankruptcy. (Just “taking
advantage” of the country’s laws, as he likes to put it. Or as he
memorably put it in his first inaugural, “Only a schmuck wouldn’t use
those laws to cancel the nation’s debt. Serves those Chinese investors
who bought U.S. Treasurys right. Am I the nation’s best deal-maker, or
what?”)
It is not very luxe on the southern border either. There, a
30-foot-high wall dressed up with the finest gilded barbed wire on top
(“I have the biggest heart. The biggest.”) extends from the Gulf of
Mexico to the Pacific. There is just one small door situated between
Juárez and El Paso. Over it a sign reads “Servant’s Entrance.” Next to
it is a small stand with copies of what has become known as the Trump
Constitution, available in “English and Mexican.” One notable alteration
is that the 14th Amendment has been deleted. (“Some top legal minds
think you can fix the whole problem with white-out. So, that’s what I
did. If someone wants to sue, they can sue. Good luck winning now that I
can print my own money. Am I the world’s best problem solver, or
what?”)
The place where the shine has really come to America, however, is
clearly in the White House. Everybody in the country remembers the
hourlong television special that featured first lady Melania Knauss-Trump taking Americans on a Jackie Kennedy-like tour
of the renovated grounds and “world class” executive mansion. With
fountains like those at Las Vegas’s Bellagio (“only classier, much, much
classier”), the actual Hall of Mirrors from Versailles (“I made
Hollande an offer he couldn’t refuse”), and monitors/screens in every
room that stream an around-the-clock live broadcast of a presidential
reality show that now is showing on every C-SPAN channel (“And the
ratings are killer! I am crushing Dancing with the Stars.), it
is not the first Trump Palace, but is now certainly the biggest.
(Admittedly, it nearly burned down during Trump’s first state dinner
when well-known hothead turned Secretary of State John Bolton actually
spontaneously combusted, setting Chinese President Xi Jinping on fire
while he was eating the “double” Big Mac the president had promised him.
But as the president said, “Fire, what fire? Next question.”)
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