12/20/18 Trump Named Man of the Year by ISIS
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Capping an extraordinary 2018, Donald J. Trump announced on Thursday that he had been named Man of the Year by the terrorist organization known as ISIS.
Trump made the announcement after receiving the news from the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom Trump called “a terrific, fabulous guy.”
“I got along great with him, and he said a lot of nice things about me,” Trump said. “He said ISIS didn’t even consider anyone else.”
Trump, who is expecting to receive an official Man of the Year plaque from ISIS in the next few weeks, said that the award “came as a total surprise to me.”
“It’s a particularly impressive honor when you consider ISIS was co-founded by Hillary and Obama,” he said.
12/17/18 Cabinet Warns Trump That Shutting Down Government Would Make It Harder to Steal From
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a tense meeting on Monday, leading Cabinet members warned Donald J. Trump that shutting down the federal government would make it exponentially harder for them to steal from.
Led by his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, the Cabinet members begged Trump to prevent a government showdown that would bring their brazen spree of pillaging the nation’s coffers to a screeching halt.
“Mr. President, with the federal government up and running, I was able to take seven trips on military aircraft at a cost of eight hundred thousand dollars,” Mnuchin said. “I implore you, sir: don’t make me fly coach.”
Trump’s three oldest children, Ivanka, Eric, and Don, Jr., who have piled up impressive taxpayer-funded travel bills of their own, chimed in with an emotional plea to their father. “Daddy, please don’t make us stop plundering government money,” Ivanka said. “Not right before Christmas.”
The normally taciturn Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Ben Carson, also spoke up, warning that a government shutdown would make it impossible for him to accessorize his thirty-one-thousand-dollar dining-room set by purchasing seven-thousand-dollar place mats. “I’d really like those,” he said.
According to Kellyanne Conway, the counsellor to the President, the emotional Cabinet meeting had a profound impact on Trump. “For the first time he saw how a government shutdown would hurt people,” Conway said.
12/11/18 Trump Suddenly Expresses Deep Concern About Conditions in Nation’s Prisons
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a sudden departure from his previous views on incarceration, Donald J. Trump said on Monday that he was “very, very concerned” about conditions in the nation’s prisons.
“These are very, very bad places,” Trump told reporters. “These are not places you would want to be.”
Trump criticized the “total lack of amenities” in the country’s federal penitentiaries, calling those prisons “a disgrace.”
“If you are locked up in one of those places, there is no TV in your cell,” he said. “And good luck getting a Diet Coke. You can yell and yell and no one will go get you one. It’s a very sad, very sick situation.”
In addition to blasting the conditions inside the nation’s prisons, Trump also questioned whether “putting someone in jail for one or two felonies serves any purpose.”
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately,” he said. “Prison solves nothing.”
12/10/18 Trump Names TV Remote New Chief of Staff
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Having been turned down by several previous choices for the job, Donald J. Trump broke with tradition on Monday by picking his television remote to be his new chief of staff.
While some in Washington wondered whether an inanimate object was up to the rigors of working for the mercurial Trump, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, defended the unorthodox selection. “The President and the remote have demonstrated an excellent ability to work together, often for ten or twelve hours a day,” Sanders said.
But even as the White House touted the remote’s qualifications, its tenure as chief of staff appeared to get off to a rocky start on Monday morning.
After the remote got stuck and failed to change the channel when CNN’s Jim Acosta appeared on the television screen, Trump reportedly threw his new chief of staff across the room, narrowly missing Mike Pence’s head.
“I’ll be surprised if the remote makes it through the year,” a White House source said.
12/9/18 John Kelly Departs White House with Nuclear Codes Hidden in Pants (check out photo below)
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The outgoing chief of staff, John Kelly, departed the White House with the nation’s nuclear codes hidden in his pants, General Kelly has confirmed.
Kelly, whose illustrious military career spanned five decades, called his absconding with the nuclear codes “my greatest act of service to my country.”
Speaking to reporters from his home, Kelly said that he had planned the heist of the nation’s nuclear codes with the pinpoint timing of a clandestine military mission.
“I went into the Oval Office on Friday when I knew Trump would be distracted because ‘Fox & Friends’ was on,” he said. “Then, when he started tweeting something that one of the hosts told him to do, I slipped the codes into my pants, as quick as lightning.”
Kelly revealed that, in order to prevent Trump from retrieving the codes, he was keeping them in his pants for safekeeping.
“Let’s see that draft-dodging coward try to get them off me,” he said, his eyes gleaming with malice.
12/7/18 Heather Nauert Says Visit to “It’s a Small World” Ride Qualifies Her For U.N. Job
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Pushing back against criticism of her lack of diplomatic experience, Donald J. Trump’s choice to be the next United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Heather Nauert, said on Friday that a memorable visit to the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World made her eminently qualified for the U.N. post.
“When people look at me, they think Heather Nauert, former Fox News anchor,” Nauert told reporters at the State Department. “What they don’t realize is I’m also Heather Nauert, who went on ‘It’s a Small World’ three times when she was nine.”
Nauert said that, while career diplomats might spend twenty to thirty years learning about only one country, “I learned about twenty-five countries in fifteen minutes.”
Laying out her objectives for her tenure at the United Nations, the prospective Ambassador said, “Right now I’m just looking forward to seeing all of the other Ambassadors wearing their festive costumes and doing their dances. That’s going to be amazing, I think.”
Nauert bristled when a reporter asked about her controversial comment that D Day was evidence of the long-standing bond between Germany and the United States. “At the end of the day, there is just one moon and one golden sun, and a smile means friendship to everyone,” she said.
12/4/18 Iraq Offers to Help Establish Democracy in North Carolina
BAGHDAD (The Borowitz Report)—The government of Iraq announced on Tuesday that it would seek to build an international coalition to establish democracy in the state of North Carolina.
Speaking to reporters in Baghdad, the Iraqi President, Barham Salih, said that Iraq had reached out to regional powers including Canada and Mexico to launch a military invasion of North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District to “protect the North Carolinians’ right to self-determination.”
While many in the international community commended Salih’s desire to bring democracy to North Carolina, some critics warned that the effort could wind up destabilizing other American states.
“If North Carolina gets democracy, it’s only a matter of time before the people of Wisconsin, Georgia, and other failed states demand it as well,” Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi politician and cleric, said. “Iraq could find itself in a quagmire with no exit strategy.”
Brushing aside such concerns, President Salih said that his international coalition could send troops to N.C.-9 as early as next week.
“We will be greeted as liberators,” he predicted.
12/1/18 G-20 Leaders Vote Unanimously Not to Give Trump Asylum
BUENOS AIRES (The Borowitz Report)—In an unusual display of unity by an often fractious organization, the leaders of the G-20 nations voted unanimously on Saturday to deny Donald J. Trump’s urgent request for asylum.
Prior to the vote, Trump had been heard asking colleagues ranging from Angela Merkel to Xi Jinping for safe harbor in their countries, sweetening his request with offers of free luxury penthouses in Trump buildings around the globe.
In the most stunning insult to Trump, his closest allies, Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, responded to his asylum request by laughing uproariously in his face and high-fiving each other.
After the resolution to deny Trump asylum passed by a 19–0 vote, international observers said that they had never seen the G-20 act with such enthusiastic solidarity. “Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron were practically peeing themselves,” one observer said.
After receiving the resounding rebuke from the G-20, Trump grumpily withdrew to his hotel room, where he reportedly placed several calls to Kim Jong Un that went straight to voice mail.
11/26/18 Mueller Offers Cyber Monday Plea Deals
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Robert Mueller’s announcement that he would be offering Cyber Monday plea deals touched off hysteria among disgraced Trump associates desperate for the chance to score a drastically reduced sentence.
Moments after the office of the special counsel went live with its Cyber Monday Web site, Sing4Bob.com, thousands of Trump cronies flooded it with traffic, causing the site to briefly crash.
Harland Dorrinson, the member of Mueller’s team who masterminded the Cyber Monday sale, said that the special counsel was offering a limited number of “prison doorbusters,” with sentences up to seventy-five per cent off.
“I’m not surprised that people are going crazy for these bargains,” Dorrinson said. “Otherwise, you could go to trial and face one of those Obama judges.”
He said that Mueller’s Cyber Monday sale was benefitting from a piece of fortuitous timing, since it was being held on the same day that the former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos was scheduled to report to prison for a two-week sentence.
“Everyone who goes on the site is looking for a Papadopoulos special,” he said. “Those were all gone in the first five minutes.”
11/12/18 Trump Warns That Florida Recount Could Set Dangerous Precedent of Person with Most Votes Winning
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling for an “immediate end” to the recount in Florida, Donald J. Trump warned on Monday that it could set a dangerous precedent of the person with the most votes winning.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump said that those in favor of the recount had a “sick obsession with finding out which candidate got the most votes.”
“Democrats are going on and on about counting every last vote until they find out who got the most,” Trump said. “Since when does getting the most votes mean you win?”
Trump said that, if the recounts are allowed to proceed, “We could be looking at a very bad, very sad situation where to be considered legitimately elected you have to get more votes than the other candidate.”
Having just returned from the Armistice commemoration in Paris, Trump said that Florida’s recount has made America “the laughingstock of the world,” adding, “Putin told me they never do recounts in Russia.”
11/7/18 (9:13 am) Unskilled Wisconsin Man Unable to Keep Job
MADISON, WISCONSIN (The Borowitz Report)—A Wisconsin man with no marketable skills was unable to keep his job on Tuesday night, sources close to the man have confirmed.
The man, Scott Walker, had been an employee of Koch Industries since 2010 until he was unceremoniously dismissed.
“No one likes to lose his job, but, really, Scott has nothing to complain about,” one source said. “When you have no useful skills whatsoever but you manage to hang onto a job for eight years, that’s a pretty good run.”
Although Walker faces a job market that will be daunting for a man with only rudimentary literacy and scant understanding of math, a spokesperson for Wisconsin’s teachers said that they stand “ready and willing” to give him the education he so sorely needs.
“As teachers, we see it as our duty to educate all of Wisconsin’s students, even super challenging ones like Scott Walker,” the spokesperson said.
11/7/18 (2:31 pm) Trump Unable to Stop Caravan of Democratic Women Invading Washington
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump warned on Wednesday that a caravan of Democratic women was heading toward Washington, D.C., with the explicit goal of invading the nation’s capital.
Speaking at a press conference at the White House, Trump acknowledged that he had failed in his bid to stop the caravan, which is on schedule to arrive in Washington on January 3, 2019.
“The Democrats are responsible for sending this caravan, and, frankly, it’s a disgrace,” he said. “They are sending some dangerous women.”
Elaborating on the threat posed by the caravan, Trump said, “Some of these women have fought in wars. They have fired guns. One of them is a mixed-martial-arts specialist. These are women who will kick your ass without hesitating.”
Trump denied that he was irresponsibly stoking fears about the caravan of females. “Every Republican in Washington should be scared shitless of these women,” he said. “I know I am.”
11/6/18 Putin Loses Control of the House
MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it “the biggest disappointment of my political career,” Vladimir Putin conceded late Tuesday night that he had lost control of the United States House of Representatives.
Putin made his concession speech from the Kremlin, where he congratulated the Democrats for waging a “tough fight.”
“Maybe if Facebook and Twitter hadn’t banned so many of my fake accounts, the results would have been different,” Putin said. “But I don’t want to make excuses—I threw everything I had at these races, and I lost.”
Putin did, however, have harsh words for Donald Trump, who opted for a fear-mongering closing argument about immigration despite the Russian President’s objections.
“I warned him that that would kill us in the suburbs, and he ignored me,” Putin said. “I hope this teaches him never to disobey my orders again.”
11/5/18 (2:30 pm EDT) Midterm Elections Inspire Historic Levels of Early Drinking
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a seismic shift from earlier midterm elections, the 2018 midterms have inspired the highest levels of early drinking in modern history, a new study shows.
According to the study, which was conducted by the University of Minnesota, millions of Americans who would normally start drinking on the night of the midterms took advantage of early drinking and began consuming alcohol days and, in some cases, weeks or months before November 6th.
“We knew that there would be some early drinking, but the magnitude of that drinking is taking even experts by surprise,” Dr. Davis Logsdon, the author of the study, said. “To put it in terms that the layman can understand, we are seeing drinking that is off the Kavanaugh chart.”
Democrats have overwhelmed Republicans in the early drinking tallies, but Logsdon warned against “reading too much into” that disparity.
“Many Democrats started their early drinking on November 8, 2016,” he said. “Two years’ worth of early and in some cases heavy drinking is skewing their numbers much higher.”
11/5/18 (9:30 am EDT) Trump Warns That Democrats Would Drag Nation Back to Days of Tolerance and Decorum
CHATTANOOGA (The Borowitz Report)—Employing the fear tactics that have typified his midterm campaigning, Donald J. Trump told a rally audience on Sunday that electing Democrats would drag the nation back to the dark days of tolerance and decorum.
Trump made his closing argument to the Chattanooga, Tennessee, audience by raising the spectre of a return to the dignified and restrained discourse that plagued the nation during the regime of his predecessor, Barack Obama.
“We had eight years of talking about people of different genders, races, and nationalities as if they were human beings,” Trump warned. “Do we want to go back to that?”
“Do we want our public figures to consider the consequences of their words and actions?” he asked.
Appearing on Fox News, Vice-President Mike Pence defended Trump against charges that he was irresponsibly stoking his supporters’ worst fears about a return to compassion and civility.
“This election is about whether we, as a nation, want to move forward or backward,” Pence said. “And I have faith that the American people want to keep moving backward.”
11/4/18 Trump Now Says If Migrants Throw Rocks Military Will Respond with Paper or Scissors
PENSACOLA, FLORIDA (The Borowitz Report)—Backtracking from his earlier suggestion that the military should fire upon migrants if they throw rocks, Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he was ordering the military to respond to rocks with either paper or scissors.
Speaking at a rally in Pensacola, Florida, Trump said that the decision about whether to use paper or scissors to retaliate against rocks would ultimately be left up to military commanders at the border.
“If rocks come flying at them, they should go ‘paper, scissors’ until they have an answer,” Trump said.
He issued a stern warning to the migrants approaching the border, telling them, “The United States military sees your rocks and is raising you paper or scissors.”
At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary James Mattis insisted that Trump’s latest order was “not a stunt” but refused to answer how the military would come up with fifteen thousand pairs of scissors on such short notice.
11/1/18 Americans Would Feel Safer If a Huge Caravan of Angry White Men Left the Country
MINNESOTA (The Borowitz Report)—A vast majority of Americans would feel significantly safer if an enormous caravan consisting of angry white men left the country, a new poll indicates.
The poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, suggests that the concept of an angry-white-male caravan could be the most wildly popular policy proposal in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections.
In an indication of just how much support the proposal has, many Americans said that they would personally contribute gas money to help get the caravan on its way.
Despite the popularity of the caravan, however, there was disagreement over what the optimal number of angry white men to depart with it would be, with some suggesting a figure of twenty thousand and others preferring a number as high as forty million.
Additionally, the implementation of such a caravan could face major obstacles; the survey indicates that both Mexican and Canadian voters overwhelmingly oppose any influx whatsoever of angry white American males.
10/30/18 Trump Strips Citizenship from Children of Immigrants, Thus Disqualifying Himself from Presidency
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order stripping the children of immigrant mothers of their citizenship, thus disqualifying himself from being President of the United States.
The constitutional crisis came to light moments after the signing ceremony, when a fourth grader visiting the Oval Office on a school tour pointed out the far-reaching legal ramifications of the order.
“Hey, wait, wasn’t your mother from Scotland?” the student, Tracy Klugian, asked. “That means you’re not a citizen and you can’t be President.”
Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Trump and the author of the executive order, quickly grabbed the document from the Oval Office desk, panic spreading across his face as he reread it.
“Oh, my God,” Miller gasped. “What have I done?”
Trump immediately called Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh for help in voiding the executive order, but Kavanaugh was unable to take the call because he was “sleeping off a rough night,” an aide to the Justice said.
Asked to comment on Trump’s predicament, former President Barack Obama said, “I can’t imagine what it would be like not to be an American citizen. Of course, my mom was born here, so I’m good.”
10/29/18 Fox News Says Megyn Kelly’s Blackface Comments Not Racist Enough to Get Old Job Back
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The chief executive officer of Fox News said on Monday that Megyn Kelly’s nostalgic remarks about blackface were insufficiently racist for the right-wing cable channel to consider rehiring her.
“We at Fox have nothing but respect for Megyn’s achievements as a racist television personality,” Suzanne Scott, the Fox News C.E.O., said. “Having said that, we do not feel that her blackface comments represent her best work.”
Scott expressed concern that, by trying to tone down her racism for the morning-television audience on NBC, Kelly might have “gotten a little rusty, hate-wise.”
“We want to make it clear, though, that the door will always be open to Megyn Kelly at Fox News Channel,” the C.E.O. said. “If she’d like to put together an audition tape of racist screeds and dog whistles, we’d be more than happy to look at it.”
10/25/18 Spies Eavesdropping on Trump Complain He Is Speaking in Indecipherable Language
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Russian and Chinese spies who have been eavesdropping on Donald J. Trump’s unsecured iPhone calls complained on Thursday that he has foiled their efforts by speaking in a language that is infuriatingly indecipherable.
According to the spies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, what they had hoped would be a treasure trove of valuable intercepts has amounted to little more than unintelligible gibberish.
“Trump has been communicating in an impenetrable code entirely of his own creation,” a Chinese spy said. “These phone calls might as well be triple-encrypted.”
A Russian spy who has monitored Trump’s calls around the clock said that the only words that could be identified clearly were “I” and “me,” but that they were used so frequently that they became virtually meaningless.
Both the Russians and the Chinese have given their top cryptologists the task of decoding Trump’s utterances, but many of these experts have quit within days, complaining of burnout, headaches, and depression.
“Trying to decipher Trump’s calls has reduced some of our top codebreakers to tears,” one Russian spymaster said. “They all miss Obama.”
10/23/18 Saudi Crown Prince Freaks Out After Giuliani Offers to Go on TV and Explain What Happened
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, “totally freaked out” after Rudolph Giuliani offered to appear on television and explain “what really happened” inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Giuliani has confirmed.
Giuliani told reporters on Tuesday that he phoned the crown prince to make “an extremely attractive offer of my services.”
“I told him, ‘I can get this whole thing wrapped up in two weeks—three, tops,’ ” Giuliani said. “ ‘Just say the word and Rudy Giuliani can be your official TV spokesman.’ ”
“I would just get out there and clear up a lot of the questions people have,” he said. “Whose idea was the body double? Who paid for the bone saw? Let’s just tell everybody everything. I would do an amazing job of that.”
According to White House sources, the crown prince abruptly hung up on the former New York mayor and immediately called Donald J. Trump to demand that Giuliani be detained indefinitely in the White House basement.
Giuliani said that he was “saddened” that the Saudi royal reacted so negatively to his offer. “I haven’t been on TV in a while,” he said. “I really miss it.”
10/18/18 Trump Dispatches Sarah Huckabee Sanders to Saudi Arabia to Provide Lying Advice
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump has dispatched the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to Saudi Arabia to provide what the White House on Thursday called “essential lying advice and assistance.”
According to the counsellor to the President Kellyanne Conway, “The President was not happy with the quality of lies coming out of the Saudi royal family, and who better to fix that than Sarah Sanders?”
Sources close to Sanders said that the press secretary was “horrified” during her first meeting in Riyadh to discover that the crown prince’s lying skills were “rudimentary at best.”
“The absence of a free press in Saudi Arabia means that M.B.S.”—Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—“has had virtually zero experience lying to reporters,” Sanders reportedly told one of her aides. “The learning curve is going to be steep.”
In perhaps her most withering comment on the state of the Saudis’ lying, Sanders said, “These clowns could never have gotten Kavanaugh confirmed.”
10/17/18 Putin Furious at Saudis for Using His Puppet Without Permission
MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, is “absolutely furious” at the Saudi royal family for using his puppet without first obtaining his permission, an aide to Putin confirmed on Wednesday.
According to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Russian President has been “seething with anger” in recent days as he has observed the Saudis using his favorite puppet as if it were their own.
“At one point, Putin was watching the news and saw his puppet behaving in the kind of scraping, subservient manner toward the Saudis that he had previously reserved for him,” the aide said. “He pulled the TV out of the wall and hurled it across the room.”
According to diplomatic sources, the Saudis have reached out to Russia in the hopes of striking some sort of puppet-sharing agreement, but the enraged Russian President has refused to entertain such overtures.
“He’s my tiny puppet, and only I can make him dance,” Putin reportedly snapped.
10/16/18 DNA Test Reveals Donald Trump, Jr., Is Fifty Per Cent Idiot
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Donald Trump, Jr., has taken a DNA test that reveals that he is “fifty-per-cent idiot,” Trump confirmed on Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters at a press conference in Trump Tower, Trump said that he had undergone the DNA testing “to silence all of the haters who have been saying I’m a total idiot.”
Crowing about the test results, Trump said, “According to this test, I am fifty-per-cent idiot, which is way less than half.”
Trump’s results drew a skeptical response from the scientific community, with many leading geneticists questioning the integrity of his DNA sample.
According to Davis Logsdon, a genetic scientist at the University of Minnesota, “Any test of Don, Jr., that comes back lower than ninety-per-cent idiot is going to set off alarm bells, scientifically speaking.”
Trump, Jr., first boasted about his test results on Twitter, where he misspelled “DNA.”
10/12/18 Sympathetic Voters Hope to End Melania’s Suffering in 2020
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—One day after Melania Trump pronounced herself “the most bullied person in the world,” millions of American voters vowed to put an end to her suffering in 2020.
In interviews across the country, sympathetic voters promised to do everything in their power to insure that, as of November, 2020, Melania would no longer be the target of the vicious bullying that has made her the most persecuted human on the planet.
“I never realized just how much she was suffering as First Lady,” Carol Foyler, a voter in Lansing, Michigan, said. “It’s up to us as voters to rescue her.”
“It was devastating to learn about the torment Melania has been subjected to,” Harland Dorrinson, a voter in Scottsdale, Arizona, said. “I wanted to reach out to her and say, ‘Hang in there, Melania—in two years, no one will ever bully you again.’ ”
But Tracy Klugian, of Akron, Ohio, echoed the views of many voters by saying that she wished Melania’s ordeal could end “much sooner” than 2020.
“If only this nightmare could be over tomorrow,” she said. “As Melania would say, that would be best.”
10/9/18 Kavanaugh Disappointed to Discover Supreme Court Has No Happy Hour
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a setback for the newest Associate Justice on his first day at work, Brett Kavanaugh said on Tuesday that he was “very disappointed” to learn that the Supreme Court does not have a happy hour.
Kavanaugh told reporters that he made the horrifying discovery as the clock ticked down to 5 p.m. and “everyone was still in their offices working and stuff.”
“I mean, I couldn’t believe it,” Kavanaugh said. “I had been busting my tail for six hours, and I needed to blow off some steam.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the member of the Court who delivered the bad news to Kavanaugh. “When she told me, I guess I started crying a bit, which I now regret,” he said. “She just kind of closed her office door and went back to work or whatever.”
Kavanaugh’s unpleasant discovery that the Supreme Court has “absolutely no drink specials” has left him wondering if his bruising confirmation battle “was even worth it.”
“This place blows,” he said.
10/8/18 Andy Borowitz Investigates Brett Kavanaugh’s Drinking
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The F.B.I. wouldn’t conduct an investigation into Brett Kavanaugh’s drinking, so Andy Borowitz did it himself.
It's a video report, and includes guest Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence committee, representing California.
10/5/18 Nation’s Criminals Ask for F.B.I. Investigation Kavanaugh Just Got
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In the latest controversy to envelop the Supreme Court nominee, criminals across the United States are demanding that their cases receive the kind of F.B.I. investigation that Brett Kavanaugh just got.
From coast to coast, perpetrators of crimes ranging from arson to bank robbery are arguing that, if the F.B.I. investigates them at all, such investigations should be extremely limited in scope.
Harland Dorrinson, a criminal lawyer in Cleveland, said that his clients have followed the Kavanaugh probe “with great interest” and see it as “tailor-made” for the crimes for which they stand accused.
“My clients are asking that the F.B.I. investigate them for no more than five days and only talk to the witnesses I designate,” Dorrinson said. “We think this could be a huge time saver for everybody.”
One of his clients, Denton Faldo, currently faces twenty criminal counts of cooking and selling meth, but wants the F.B.I. to investigate only an unrelated speeding violation.
“It’s important that the F.B.I. wrap up this investigation by Friday and release me from jail in time for the weekend,” Faldo said. “A man’s life is in tatters.”
10/3/18 (10:30 A.M.) Trump Says It’s a Very Scary Time for Men, Because Women Can Vote Them Out of Office
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that “it’s terrible what’s going on right now,” Donald J. Trump told reporters on Wednesday that “it’s a very scary time for men, because women can vote them out of office.”
“It’s very scary right now to be a man,” Trump said. “You can do or say something that women don’t like, and suddenly millions of women will come out of the woodwork and vote against you. I think it’s a disgrace.”
“It’s getting to the point where men are not going to be able to ridicule women at their campaign rallies without being terribly afraid that women are going to vote against them,” he said. “It’s a very scary time.”
Trump said that, if women are allowed to get away with voting men out of office, “No one will be safe.”
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” Trump warned. “If it’s up to women to decide who’s in power and who’s not, men like me aren’t even going to run.”
Later in the day, Donald Trump, Jr., echoed his father’s words. “Last night, when I put my sons to bed, I had to tell them to be nice to girls,” he said. “It broke my heart.”
10/1/18 Twenty Million Witnesses Come Forward Claiming They Saw Kavanaugh Lie Under Oath
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—As the F.B.I. hurries to complete its supplemental background check of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, twenty million witnesses have come forward claiming that they saw Kavanaugh lie under oath.
According to the witnesses, they can remember the place where they saw Kavanaugh lie, a hearing room in the United States Senate, and the exact date and time, this past Thursday afternoon.
Despite the striking similarity of their stories, the twenty million witnesses to Kavanaugh’s mendacity said that they were having trouble getting in touch with the F.B.I., even though lying to the Senate is a federal crime and thus within the Bureau’s jurisdiction.
“I called my local F.B.I. office and was told to call the Bureau’s toll-free tip line,” Harland Dorrinson, a resident of Toledo, Ohio, said. “I did that, but the mailbox for Kavanaugh tips was full.”
Carol Foyler, a Mobile, Alabama, resident who said that she, too, witnessed Kavanaugh lie under oath, expressed frustration at the artificial deadline of the F.B.I.’s probe. “One week is not nearly enough time to interview twenty million people,” she said.
In Washington, Senator Lindsey Graham furiously rejected the witnesses’ version of events, arguing, “This is a classic case of he-said/twenty million said.”
“If lying in the United States Senate is a crime, none of us is safe,” Graham added.
9/30/18 Merrick Garland Says He Enjoys a Nice Lemonade Now and Again
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that he owed it to the American people to explain his drinking habits, Judge Merrick Garland said on Sunday that he enjoys “a nice lemonade now and again.”
“I have, from time to time, indulged in a frosty lemonade,” Garland told reporters. “Especially on a hot summer day, it can’t be beat.”
Garland, whom Barack Obama nominated as a Supreme Court Justice, said that, if he had been granted a confirmation hearing, “I would have spoken about my weakness for a nice lemonade as candidly and completely as possible.”
The judge said that he did not believe that his love of lemonade would have prevented him “in any way” from being an effective Supreme Court Justice.
“When I say I enjoy a nice lemonade, I mean just one,” he said. “I know my limit.”
9/28/18 Jeff Flake Announces Retirement from Humanity
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In an announcement that many saw coming, Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, announced on Friday that he would retire from humanity, effective immediately.
Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, Flake said that the demands of being a human being had “taken their toll,” and that it was “time to move on.”
“Having empathy and compassion for other human beings has been a thoroughly draining experience,” he said. “I for one am ready for something new.”
Flake said that, before making his decision, he consulted with others who had retired from humanity years earlier, such as Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Donald Trump.
“They all fully supported my decision,” he said. “It’s great to be one of them now.”
9/27/18 Obama Saddened That Kavanaugh Did Not Blame Him at Any Point
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Former President Barack Obama said Thursday evening that he was “saddened” and “hurt” that Brett Kavanaugh failed to blame him for his predicament at any point in his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier in the day.
“As he was rattling off all of the people who had victimized him, I was sure I was going to make the list,” Obama said. “It was more than a little deflating that I didn’t.”
Obama said that as Kavanaugh listed such nemeses as the mainstream media, a vast left-wing conspiracy, and the Clintons, he was “on the edge of my chair expecting my name to come up.”
“It’s not a good feeling to be forgotten like that,” he said. “It was a tough thing to watch.”
Obama said that it was “a little comforting” to know that he was not the only person Kavanaugh neglected to blame in his remarks. “I just got off the phone with George Soros, and he is bummed as well,” Obama said.
In an official statement released after the former President’s remarks, Kavanaugh said that his failure to blame Obama was “a simple omission,” and not a memory lapse due to excessive alcohol consumption.
9/25/18 Trump Brags That He Got Much Bigger Laughs at U.N. Than Obama
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Calling his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday “an unbelievable success,” Donald J. Trump bragged that he “got much bigger laughs than Obama.”
“When Obama spoke at the U.N. he did not get a single laugh—not one,” Trump told reporters. “I feel sorry for the people who had to sit through his speeches. They weren’t funny at all.”
In contrast, Trump said, “I killed at the U.N.”
“I had them rolling in the aisles,” he said. “Once I started hearing those big laughs, I thought, Poor li’l Obama, he’s going to be so jealous.”
Trump called the United Nations a “tough crowd” for comedy because the audience is composed of people from around the globe. “I’m sure the crooked media won’t give me credit for this, but I’m the only person who can make the whole world laugh,” he said.
9/25/18 Republican Party Declares Moral Bankruptcy
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The Republican Party officially filed for moral bankruptcy on Tuesday morning, a move that many in the nation considered long overdue.
In filing for moral bankruptcy, the Republicans will formally attest that they have no morals, standards, or ethics on their balance sheet, and will agree to cease all activity as a political party in exchange for indemnity from any and all legal actions.
Harland Dorrinson, a Washington attorney who specializes in moral bankruptcies, said that, by making its moral vacuum official, the G.O.P. could theoretically break itself up and sell off the parts, but, he warned, “There are no buyers.”
“From Lindsey Graham to Ted Cruz to Mitch McConnell to Chuck Grassley, all of the Republican Party’s assets could only be described as toxic,” he said. “Their breakup value is zero.”
Further complicating such a sale, Dorrinson said, is the fact that the lion’s share of the Republican Party is already owned by the National Rifle Association, Koch Industries, and the Russian government.
“All of those entities are going to take a major loss on their investment,” he warned. “The Kochs have been trying to sell Paul Ryan for months, and they can’t give him away.”
While bemoaning the demise of a once legitimate political party, Dorrinson did see one silver lining. “The bankruptcy of the Republican Party will be presided over by Donald Trump, and no one has more experience in this area,” he said.
9/24/18 Grassley Spends Weekend Practicing Pretending-to-Listen Face
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Facing the daunting challenge of appearing to pay attention to a woman’s utterances during a televised hearing, Senator Charles Grassley spent the weekend rehearsing what aides are calling his “pretending to listen” face.
In round-the-clock practice sessions that aides characterized as “excruciating,” the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee struggled to simulate even a trace of interest in what a woman had to say.
“Chuck has never pretended to listen to a woman before,” an aide said. “These are uncharted waters.”
According to the aide, Grassley’s fake-listening skills “are rudimentary at best,” and the senator was able to hold only a semi-attentive facial expression for seven seconds before it showed unmistakable signs of boredom, irritation, and contempt.
At one point, Grassley reportedly exploded with frustration, bellowing, “If I’d known that going into politics meant I’d have to listen to women, I’d have become a longshoreman.”
Complicating the mock sessions further was the absence on the Judiciary Committee of any Republican women to whom Grassley could pretend to listen, forcing Senator Orrin Hatch to step uncomfortably into the role of a woman.
9/20/18 Merrick Garland Admits to Cheating at Scrabble Once
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that “it’s time to face the consequences of my actions,” Judge Merrick Garland admitted on Thursday that he cheated at Scrabble one time, in 2003.
Garland, who recently informed the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was “still available” to be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, choked back tears as he confessed to the “disgraceful” Scrabble incident.
“In late 2003, I was playing a game of Scrabble with my wife and Googled a word while she was off using the bathroom,” Garland said. “I deeply regret my behavior, which was reprehensible and inexcusable.”
Garland revealed that the word he Googled, “muzjiks,” all but sealed his victory in the Scrabble contest.
“Although this was the only time I have ever cheated at any word game, I believe it disqualifies me to sit on the United States Supreme Court,” he said. “Therefore, I hereby withdraw my name from all future consideration.”
Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that Garland’s confession vindicated Republicans’ decision not to grant him a single meeting when he was Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.
“This revelation confirms our darkest suspicions about Merrick Garland,” Grassley said. “It looks like we dodged a bullet.”
9/17/18 Merrick Garland Says He’s Still Available
BETHESDA, MARYLAND (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that he would like to help the Senate Judiciary Committee “in any way I can,” Judge Merrick Garland announced on Monday that he is “still available” to be confirmed as a United States Supreme Court Justice.
“I haven’t heard from anyone on the Judiciary Committee,” Garland said. “But I just want to let them know that I’ve let bygones be bygones if they’d like to confirm me now.”
The judge said that he was “not surprised” that no one from the White House has called about his availability for the Supreme Court job. “I’ve been reading that Woodward book,” he said. “It sounds like things can get pretty hectic over there.”
Garland noted that, when he was first nominated to the Supreme Court, no Republican senator agreed to meet with him, but added, “Maybe they can find some time in their schedules now.”
“After what they’ve been going through for the past couple of days, the Republicans might want to give old Merrick another look,” he said. “I’m clean as a whistle.”
9/16/18 Americans Want Alert System Enabling Mueller to Text Them When This Emergency Is Over
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans do not want Donald J. Trump to text them that there is an emergency, but “very strongly” want Robert Mueller to text them when this current emergency is over, a new poll shows.
fema’s about-to-be-launched “Presidential alert” system drew a sharply negative reaction in the poll, with a majority of Americans saying that they would burn, smash, or otherwise pulverize their phones in advance of the first text that Trump attempts to send them.
By contrast, and by a wide margin, Americans said that they wanted an alert system that would enable Mueller to text them “the second he knows this shit show is over,” the poll indicates.
Poll respondents were amenable to a broad array of methods by which Mueller might deliver such news, including the one-word text “finito,” the phrase “orange crushed,” and emojis depicting a thumbs-up or smiley face.
9/14/18 Trump’s Calls to Manafort Going Straight to Voice Mail
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump placed “a large number” of phone calls to his former campaign manager Paul Manafort on Friday morning, and all of them went straight to voice mail, White House sources have confirmed.
The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the number of voice-mail messages that Trump left for Manafort was somewhere in the range of twelve to three hundred.
Trump reportedly continued to leave messages for Manafort until his mailbox was full, after which Trump hurled his phone across the room, narrowly missing Mike Pence’s head.
Speaking to reporters, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, downplayed the significance of Manafort’s failure to pick up after Trump called him several hundred times.
“Phones can be tricky sometimes,” she said. “You saw what happened when he tried to call the President of Mexico.”
While other Administration officials were mum on Manafort’s deal to coöperate with Robert Mueller’s investigation, Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said that it was “actually fantastic news,” because “it means I’ll get to be on TV a lot.”
Background about this next report: You can google Crazytown for more info on how that word's being flown around!
9/7/18 Trump Demands to Know Who Put “Entering Crazytown” Sign on Oval Office Door
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump demanded on Friday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions investigate who put a sign reading “Entering Crazytown, U.S.A.” on the door to the Oval Office.
Trump reportedly noticed the sign for the first time Friday morning, and became enraged after asking Kellyanne Conway, the counsellor to the President, to read what it said to him.
According to White House insiders, determining the creator of the sign could prove difficult, because between seventy and a hundred White House staffers have been known to use the word “Crazytown” to describe their work environment.
“Whoever put that sign on my door has committed treason against the United States,” Trump told reporters, before turning away and revealing that someone had put a Post-it reading “President Stupidpants” on his back.
9/6/18 Pence Blasts New York Times and Vows Never to Write for It Again
ORLANDO (The Borowitz Report)—Speaking to reporters on Thursday morning, Vice-President Mike Pence ripped the New York Times and vowed never to write for it again.
“I think the New York Times is reprehensible and disgraceful, and should apologize to the American people,” Pence said. “As for me, I’m going to show my disgust with the Times by never, ever submitting another piece of writing to it.”
Pence said that, in addition to the Times’ irresponsible decision to publish incendiary articles, “The editors over there are really hard to deal with if you’re a freelance opinion writer.”
“People see the New York Times as a biased publication with a blatant agenda to take down Donald Trump,” Pence said. “What people don’t realize is that the editors over there make a freelance writer’s life miserable—suggesting changes in words, moving paragraphs around, and cutting lines that you thought were really good.”
In addition to those criticisms, Pence said that the Times insists that writers sign a contract and submit a W-9 before they can get paid.
“The Times says that it pays writers promptly, but when I look at their behavior up to this point, color me skeptical,” Pence said. “I’ll believe it when I get the check.”
9/5/18 (6 pm) Nation Stunned That There Is Someone in White House Capable of Writing an Editorial
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans were startled by the revelation on Wednesday afternoon that there was someone working in the Trump White House capable of writing an entire editorial, reports indicate.
In a nation already rocked by a series of bombshells since Labor Day, the news that an anonymous senior White House official had the command of the English language necessary to compose a seemingly coherent Op-Ed piece suitable for publication in a major newspaper was perhaps the most improbable development of all.
Davis Logsdon, a professor of linguistics at the University of Minnesota, said that a team of language experts under his supervision has studied the Op-Ed word by word and is “in a state of disbelief” that someone currently working for Donald J. Trump could have written it.
“There are complete sentences, there are well-structured paragraphs, there is subject-verb agreement,” he said. “This does not appear to be the work of any White House staffer we’re familiar with.”
Stressing that he and his team of linguists are “not even close” to determining the author, Logsdon said that they were currently using the process of elimination to whittle down the list of possible scribes.
“Based on the mastery of language that we see here, it’s not Sarah Huckabee Sanders, John Kelly, Stephen Miller, or Kellyanne Conway, and it’s definitely not Jared,” he said.
9/5/18 Trump Furious That Woodward’s Book Is Written at Seventh-Grade Reading Level
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump obtained an advance copy of Bob Woodward’s new book Monday evening and was “furious” to discover that Woodward had written it at a seventh-grade reading level, a White House aide has confirmed.
The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Trump was convinced that Woodward wrote the book for seventh-grade readers to make its assertions impossible for Trump to refute.
“Trump was turning page after page, becoming increasingly angry at its gratuitous use of a seventh-grade vocabulary,” the aide said. “It was like it was written entirely in a secret code.”
At one point, Trump became so frustrated trying to decipher the word “imbecilic” that he hurled the book across the room.
“Book bad!” he reportedly shouted.
According to the aide, Trump’s daughter Ivanka is dreading that she will be called upon to read the Woodward book aloud to her father, as he has demanded she do with books by James Comey and Omarosa Manigault Newman.
“In the past, Ivanka has begged off by saying she was too busy running her company, but she can’t do that anymore,” the aide said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A fifty-three-year-old white man from Washington, D.C., is hoping to land a six-figure job for life without being subjected to a thorough background check, the man confirmed on Tuesday.
The man, Brett Kavanaugh, said that he was “pretty chill” about his upcoming job interview because he had been assured that “anything super damaging” had been removed from his H.R. file.
“There’s some stuff in my past—especially, like, from the nineties—that would be kind of heinous if anyone looked into it,” Kavanaugh said. “Fortunately, I know someone in H.R. and he took, like, a hundred thousand pages out of my file.”
The Washington native said that he had been assured that his job interview would be led by a group of other white men who “won’t ask me anything too hard.”
“They were, like, ‘Just smile a lot and nod your head and you’re in, dude,’ ” he said.
Kavanaugh said he was “blown away” when he learned about the benefits package that comes with his prospective job. “When my friend in H.R. told me it was $255,300 a year for life, even after you retire, and no background check, I was, like, ‘You have got to be shitting me,’ ” he said. “I don’t care who you are. That’s sweet.”
8/21/18 5:55 pm Ostriches Celebrate Manafort Verdict
AFRICA (The Borowitz Report)—Ostriches across Africa erupted into spontaneous celebrations on Tuesday over the guilty verdict of Donald J. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
As the verdict was read out in open court, jubilant ostriches broke into what was described as an orgy of running, squawking, and indiscriminate mating.
An emotional ostrich spokesperson called the verdict “a great day for the entire ostrich species.”
“Waiting for the verdict over the past few days has been incredibly nerve-racking,” the ostrich said. “Many of us have been glued to the TV. Some of us were too stressed to watch and kept our heads in the sand. But tonight we are all partying.”
According to wildlife officials, ostriches held celebratory rallies in dozens of African capitals, where they were joined by equally delirious pythons.
8/21/18 3:20 pm Michael Cohen Pleads Guilty After Giuliani Offers to Be His Lawyer
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Michael D. Cohen decided on Tuesday to plead guilty to a host of financial crimes shortly after Rudolph Giuliani offered to be his lawyer on a pro-bono basis, Giuliani confirmed.
In an interview with Jake Tapper, on CNN, the former New York City mayor said that he had offered to give Cohen “the kind of defense that only I am capable of giving.”
“The minute I said that, the blood drained from his face and he was out of there like a shot,” Giuliani said. “It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen.”
Giuliani gave CNN viewers a snapshot of what his defense of Cohen would have been like. “I would have said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client is guilty,’ ” he said. “ ‘Guilty as sin! But “guilty” rhymes with “not guilty,” and that’s what I’m asking you to find him today.’ I’m telling you, Jake, it would have been a killer.”
8/20/18 Putin Reportedly Close to Firing Giuliani
MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Vladimir Putin is reportedly “very close” to firing Rudolph Giuliani as Donald J. Trump’s attorney, a source close to the Russian President confirmed on Monday.
According to the source, Putin allowed Trump to hire Giuliani in the first place because “it’s important to let Trump think that he has some autonomy from time to time,” but now the Russian President has apparently determined that “enough is enough.”
Over the next few days, the source indicated, Putin is likely to replace Giuliani with a handpicked successor, Arkady Lubetkin, a criminal-defense attorney who has represented several prominent Russian Mob figures.
After hearing anecdotal reports of Giuliani’s appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Putin initially theorized that the nonsensical nature of Giuliani’s utterances had to be chalked up to “an error in translation,” the source said.
After reading an official transcript of Giuliani’s statements, however, the Russian President was apparently “flabbergasted.”
“Pravda is not pravda?” Putin reportedly said. “What is this bullshit?”
8/17/18 Pence Stages One-Man Parade in Honor of Trump
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Hours after the Pentagon announced that it would postpone a military parade that Donald J. Trump had requested, Vice-President Mike Pence staged a one-man parade in Trump’s honor.
Explaining his decision to mount the solitary parade, Pence told reporters, “It is the least I can do to pay tribute to the greatness and majesty of Donald Trump, a true American hero.”
Pence acknowledged, however, that marching alone “was a neat way to keep the budget down.”
“Obviously, if money were no object, I would have gone for a little more spectacle,” he said. “Maybe a flyover by Space Force.”
Marching proudly with his chest thrust forward and breaking out into a near-strut, Pence’s parade route took him down Pennsylvania Avenue, where he waved occasionally to confused-looking passersby.
“It was weird seeing him walking all by himself,” Carol Foyler, a tourist who witnessed the Pence parade, said. “I waved back because it was just so sad.”
Pence’s one-man march drew high praise from Trump, who took to Twitter to declare it the largest parade in history.
8/13/18 Trump Says White House Is No Place for Lying Lowlife from Reality Show
BEDMINSTER, New Jersey (The Borowitz Report)—Blasting his former colleague Omarosa Manigault, Donald J. Trump said on Monday that “the White House is no place for a lying lowlife from a reality show.”
“People were impressed by Omarosa because they saw her on a TV show,” Trump told reporters from his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. “Well, I’ve got news for you: being on a reality show does not qualify you to work in the government.”
Explaining why he considered her a “lowlife,” Trump said, “She’s rude, abrasive, and offensive. Having someone like that in the White House is an embarrassment to our country.”
But worst of all, Trump said, was Omarosa’s lying, which he called “constant.”
“She can’t go a day without lying, and what’s more, she’s narcissistic and paranoid,” he said. “A psycho like that shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Situation Room.”
Pronouncing himself pleased that Omarosa was no longer in his Administration, Trump concluded his scorching remarks by saying, “The sooner we can rid the White House of reality-show con artists, the better off the country will be.”
8/9/18 Pence Calls Space Force Necessary to Protect U.S. from Gay Aliens
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Making a major announcement at the Pentagon on Thursday, Vice-President Mike Pence said that the proposed United States Space Force was necessary to defend the U.S. from gay aliens.
“I stand before you today to say that this country is under attack from outer-space gays,” Pence told the military gathering. “Only Space Force can protect us from their unimaginable evil.”
Pence detailed a nightmare scenario in which “gay aliens by the thousands” land in the U.S. in “seemingly cute spacecraft” and “subvert life in America as we know it.”
“Let’s say, for example, that these gay aliens can assume human form,” he said. “What’s to stop them from infiltrating normal bakeries and baking cakes for gay weddings?”
“I’ll tell you what’s to stop them,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect. “Space Force.”
At the White House, CNN’s Jim Acosta asked the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, how, exactly, Pence had developed his theory about the existence of gay aliens.
“No one is more qualified to talk about life on other planets than Mike Pence,” Sanders snapped.
8/9/18 Republicans Projected to Pick up Seventy Seats in Prison
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a development that could dramatically change the composition of the federal penitentiary system, Republicans are projected to pick up as many as seventy seats in prison, a leading incarceration expert said on Thursday.
“Prognostication is an inexact science,” Davis Logsdon, who studies conviction rates of corrupt politicians for the University of Minnesota’s Guilt Project, said. “Having said that, if current indictment trends hold up, the Republicans could be flipping at least seventy key prison seats.”
Logsdon broke down criminal cases against Republicans into likely convictions, likely acquittals, and toss-ups, and found that the G.O.P.’s path to the magic number of seventy new prison cells was “very doable.”
According to his projections, Republicans are running for prison “especially well” in districts where the G.O.P. member of Congress was an early supporter of Donald J. Trump.
“In those districts, we’re seeing Republicans who did an incredible job of raising money,” he said. “All of that money is going to translate into a huge number of new freshman prisoners.”
All in all, Logsdon sees the prospect of seventy new Republicans in prison as “nothing short of seismic.”
“Prisons need to get ready,” he said. “A red wave is coming.”
8/818 Republicans Outspent Democrats in Ohio by a Hundred Million Rubles
COLUMBUS, Ohio (The Borowitz Report)—With Tuesday’s special election in Ohio still too close to call, Republican officials in the state acknowledged that they outspent Democrats to the tune of a hundred million rubles.
Harland Dorrinson, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party, told reporters on Wednesday that if the G.O.P. ekes out a win, it will have been worth all of the Russian currency the Party threw at the race.
“You can talk ground game all you want, but, at the end of the day, you can’t buy TV and radio ads without rubles,” he said.
Dorrinson credited the Republican congressional-campaign committee for what he called a “highly successful ruble-raising effort.”
“We were on the phone to oligarchs in our shadowy Kremlin-affiliated donor network up to the last minute,” he said. “Hopefully, it paid off.”
While Ohio Republicans are crossing their fingers that the final election results are in their favor, Dorrinson recognizes that their work is far from over. “We’re going to have a rematch in this district in November, and we don’t want to be caught a day late and a ruble short,” he said.
8/7/18 Californians Puzzled by Trump’s Failure to Blame Wildfires on Hillary
SACRAMENTO, California (The Borowitz Report)—Californians were baffled on Monday by a series of tweets by Donald J. Trump in which he utterly failed to blame the state’s current wildfires on Hillary Clinton.
In interviews with residents up and down the Golden State, Californians agreed with the assessment of Harland Dorrinson, a Modesto native, that Trump’s failure to pin the fires on Clinton was “nothing short of bizarre.”
“When he said that there wasn’t enough water to put out the fires, I naturally assumed he was going to accuse Hillary Clinton of sneaking into California and somehow stealing all of our water,” Dorrinson said. “It was so confusing when he didn’t.”
“I thought that the wildfires would be a perfect opportunity for Trump to accuse Hillary of being anti-water and pro-fire, but he didn’t even mention her,” Tracy Klugian, who lives in San Jose, said. “Maybe he’s really distracted by all this Russia stuff and he’s off his game.”
Carol Foyler, who lives in Monterey, said that Trump’s failure to accuse Hillary Clinton of single-handedly causing the wildfires left her shaken and appalled.
“At a time when many of us in California are suffering from historic wildfires, we look to the President of the United States to blame them on Hillary Clinton,” she said. “And he let us down.”
8/1/18 Millions of Americans Denied Groceries After Failing to Provide I.D.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans were foiled in their attempts to purchase groceries on Wednesday after failing to provide the proper government-issued I.D. cards.
From coast to coast, food-seeking scofflaws were turned away from supermarkets, convenience stores, and fruit markets as they tried to circumvent the nation’s long-standing grocery I.D. laws.
“Given that Americans have been required to show I.D. to buy food for years, it’s amazing that people still try to get away with this,” Carol Foyler, a supermarket cashier in Fresno, California, said. “It’s always, ‘Oh, I left my food I.D. in my other pants,’ or some B.S. like that. Believe me, I’ve heard it all.”
In Cleveland, Ohio, a man attempting to buy a loaf of bread, two yogurts, and a bottle of Fanta tried to use another consumer’s food I.D. to make the purchase, but was busted by sharp-eyed security personnel.
“It’s not just people using other people’s food I.D.s to get groceries,” Harland Dorrinson, the store’s security chief, said. “I can’t tell you how many fake food I.D.s we see in here on a daily basis.”
Dorrinson said that, although the nation’s food-I.D. laws have served it well, they “need to go further” to prevent rampant abuses of the system.
“Requiring people who want groceries to have a food I.D. is a good start, but there should also be background checks and a waiting period,” he said.
7/27/18 Trump Family Flees to Moscow
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Bringing a tumultuous chapter of American history to an abrupt conclusion, Donald J. Trump and three of his adult children fled to Moscow in the early hours of Friday morning.
Accompanied by Ivanka, Eric, and Don, Jr., Trump boarded a specially chartered Aeroflot plane to take him to his new home in Moscow, a nondescript apartment building that also houses the former N.S.A. employee Edward Snowden.
Trump reportedly was in a tremendous hurry to catch the plane and left behind only a one-sentence note, reading, “THERE WAS NO COLUSION [sic].”
At the White House, Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that the Trump family had fled to Moscow, telling reporters, “The Trump family has not fled to Moscow.”
The arrangements for the Trumps’ exit were finalized last week in the one-on-one conversation between Trump and Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki, a translator who was present during the conversation has confirmed.
According to the translator, Trump told Putin, “We’ll move to Moscow as soon as Ivanka winds down her crappy company.”
Those who witnessed Trump’s departure indicated that his wife, Melania, did not board the Aeroflot plane with him, but saw him off at the airport with a cordial “Be best.”
7/26/18 Republicans Accuse Rosenstein of Secretly Plotting to Uphold Constitution
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—House Republicans on Thursday accused the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, of “secretly and nefariously” implementing a plot to uphold the United States Constitution.
In a joint press conference, Representatives Mark Meadows, of North Carolina, and Jim Jordan, of Ohio, said that they had “ample evidence” that Rosenstein was prepared to protect the Constitution “by any and all means at his disposal.”
“There is only one way to describe Rosenstein’s obsession with putting the Constitution before all other concerns,” Meadows said. “Conflict of interest.”
“It is almost as if Rod Rosenstein had taken some kind of solemn oath to defend a centuries-old document,” Jordan said. “This should make every American very, very scared.”
Though the Republicans have shelved their articles of impeachment against Rosenstein for now, they hope that their impeachment threat will send a clear message to Rosenstein that his reckless allegiance to the Constitution will no longer be tolerated.
“If, going forward, Rosenstein uses his position at the Department of Justice to seek justice, he will be crossing a red line,” Meadows said.
7/25/18 Ivanka Trump Named Dean of Business School at Trump University
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it “an exciting new chapter in my amazing life,” Ivanka Trump has been named dean of the business school at the newly reconstituted Trump University.
“I’ve been incredibly blessed with stratospheric success as a businessperson,” Dean Trump said on Wednesday. “This is my chance to give something back, for only fifty thousand dollars in tuition and other fees.”
Trump said that students enrolling at the Trump University School of Business can look forward to gleaning wisdom not only from her but from another star faculty member, Jared Kushner.
“When it comes to business, Jared has been almost as incredible I have,” she said.
In online promotional materials for the school, Dean Trump promises “an unforgettable educational experience” for “students who want to learn business the Ivanka way.”
“Many people take years to get a business off the ground,” Dean Trump writes. “At the Trump University School of Business, I’ll show you how to open a business and close it down in four years flat.”
7/24/18 Trump Threatens to Yank Security Clearance from Frederick Douglass
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump’s crusade to revoke security clearances from perceived critics was on display again on Tuesday as he threatened to yank credentials from a man he had previously praised, Frederick Douglass.
It was unclear why Trump had turned on Douglass, because, unlike other targets of Trump’s security-clearance rampage, Douglass had not made disparaging comments about him on cable news in recent weeks.
Trump offered few clues as to the source of his unhappiness with Douglass, but he broadcast his disapproval of the abolitionist in a tweet that read, “HE IS NO LONGER DOING AN AMAZING JOB.”
The threat to revoke Douglass’s credentials put the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, in a tough spot, because, presumably, Kelly would be the staff member tasked with carrying out such an order.
“General Kelly could point out to Trump that Frederick Douglass never had security clearance, and, plus, he is dead,” an aide to Kelly said. “But neither of those things is likely to change Trump’s mind.”
7/23/18 Trump to Discontinue Obama-Era Practice of Using Lowercase Letters
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Charting a sharply different course from that of his predecessor in the White House, Donald J. Trump announced on Monday that he would discontinue the Obama-era practice of using lowercase letters.
In a series of early-morning tweets, Trump announced the ban on lowercase letters, calling them “SMALL” and “WEAK.”
“I WILL KEEP AMERICA STRONG BY USING ALL CAPS,” he tweeted. “THERE ARE NO SMALL LETTERS IN USA!”
“LITTLE LETTERS BAD!!!” Trump added, for emphasis.
Trump’s policy of zero tolerance for lowercase letters could have a sweeping impact on the federal bureaucracy if, as rumored, all government agencies are required to retrofit their computers and mobile devices with a permanent caps-lock key.
Additionally, civil-liberties groups argued that Trump’s war on lowercase letters flies in the face of the First Amendment, which implicitly protects the right to use letters of all sizes and fonts.
Amid the controversy, the White House appeared to walk back the new policy later in the day, as aides revealed that Trump will still use lowercase letters, in the style of the poet e. e. cummings, when communicating with Vladimir Putin.
7/22/18 Trump Demands That N.F.L. Players Stand During Russian National Anthem
Regarding this Report, Trump tweeted "The NFL National Anthem Debate is alive and well again - can’t believe it! Isn’t it in contract that players must stand at attention, hand on heart? The $40,000,000 Commissioner must now make a stand. First time kneeling, out for game. Second time kneeling, out for season/no pay!" I love Eric Winston's (president of the NFL Players Association) response: "Thanks for your thoughts, but we'll take it from here."
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a series of early-morning tweets on Sunday, Donald J. Trump demanded that the Russian national anthem be played before every National Football League game and that all N.F.L. players stand during the performance.
Trump asserted that playing the Russian anthem was a “necessary gesture of good will from the USA to our No. 1 ally,” and that “any player who refuses to stand for the Russian antem [sic] hates America!”
Seeming to double down on his demand, Trump tweeted that all N.F.L. players must remain standing while the color guard unfurls the flag of the Russian Federation.
Trump’s insistence that football players stand for the Russian anthem appeared to come as a surprise to the director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, who first heard about it while appearing at a security forum, in Bethesda, Maryland.
“What kind of fucking bullshit is this?” Coats said, later saying that he meant no disrespect by that remark.
7/20/18 Leaders of ISIS and Al Qaeda Puzzled Why Trump Has Not Invited Them to White House
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The leaders of isis and Al Qaeda said on Friday that they were totally perplexed as to why Donald J. Trump had not yet invited them to the White House.
The terror chiefs said that, as sworn enemies of the United States, they had certainly attacked the country enough to warrant an invitation for an official visit, and possibly a state dinner.
“Maybe we haven’t done anything to directly undermine their democracy—I get that,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of isis, said. “But we’ve been nemeses of America for years, and that ought to be worth something.”
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, said that he also feels snubbed. “No invitation. Not even a save-the-date,” he said. “At this point, I’d settle for the White House Easter Egg Roll, but I’m not counting on anything.”
Calling the absence of a White House invitation for Al Qaeda “the height of unfairness,” the evildoer added, bitterly, “The whole thing seems political.”
Hibatullah Akhundzada, the current leader of the Taliban, said that, like his terrorist colleagues, he was “dumbfounded” that Trump invited Vladimir Putin and not him to the White House. “At some point you have to wonder, what does Putin have on this guy?” he said.
7/19/18 “I Was Never This Blatant,” Says Benedict Arnold in Hell
HELL (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that he was “flabbergasted” by the events of this week, the Revolutionary War-era traitor Benedict Arnold offered a ringing defense of his own career in treason, asserting, “I was never this blatant.”
“I was brought up to believe that betraying your country was something you’d do very secretively,” Arnold, who now resides in Hell, said. “If you were going over to the enemy side, you’d do everything you could not to be detected. You wouldn’t go around announcing it to the world like a jackass.”
Although Arnold understands why commentators have been using the word “treason” to describe the alarming spectacle they have witnessed this week, he said, “Throwing the word ‘treason’ around like that is very unfair to traitors, and I would even say hurtful.”
“Traitors put a lot of thought, planning, and subtletly into every one of their actions and utterances,” he said. “When I look at these so-called acts of treason, I have to ask, Where’s the professionalism? Where’s the work ethic? The sloppiness and sheer idiocy of it all is jaw-dropping.”
Speaking of his treasonous colleagues in Hell, including Judas Iscariot, Vidkun Quisling, and the entire Vichy government, Arnold said, “Every traitor down here is shaking his head.”
7/16/18 Kim Jong Un Upset to Learn That Trump Is Seeing Other Dictators
PYONGYANG (The Borowitz Report)—The North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, is reportedly “upset” and “hurt” that Donald J. Trump is seeing other dictators, sources in Pyongyang have confirmed.
According to an aide close to the North Korean leader, Kim was “devastated” to see images of Trump warmly embracing another dictator in Helsinki on Monday, just one month after jetting off to Singapore to spend a memorable and intense five hours with Kim.
Shortly after their time together, aides close to Kim warned him against becoming emotionally attached to Trump, alerting Kim to press reports linking the American to many other dictators.
“He’s been quoted saying nice things about Xi Jinping and Rodrigo Duterte, to name just two,” one aide said. “Trump could never commit to just one dictator. When it comes to autocrats and strongmen, he’s a total player.”
Still, despite all the red flags, seeing Trump in the clutches of another dictator left Kim “deeply wounded,” aides said.
“Donald Trump said that he and I had a ‘special bond,’ ” Kim reportedly said, choking back tears. “I guess that meant something different to him than it did to me.”
LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Queen Elizabeth II has cancelled a scheduled Friday meeting with Donald J. Trump after complaining of a “flare-up of bone spurs,” Buckingham Palace has confirmed.
The announcement took many royal watchers by surprise, because in her sixty-six-year reign the Queen had never before complained of bone spurs.
But, according to the Queen’s spokesman, Peter Rhys-Willington, Elizabeth had intentionally kept her chronic bone-spur condition a closely guarded secret until now. “Her Majesty is a very brave woman, and has not wanted to unnecessarily worry her subjects,” Rhys-Willington said. “And so, for decades, she has suffered in silence.”
The Queen referred to her bone spurs obliquely in an official statement issued on Thursday. “We are sorry to have to cancel the engagement, but we feared that meeting Donald Trump would be most painful,” the Queen’s statement read.
BRUSSELS (The Borowitz Report)—The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, took a break from the nato summit in Brussels on Wednesday to ask the independent counsel, Robert Mueller, if there is anything she can do to help.
According to those familiar with the phone conversation, Merkel told Mueller that she would take a leave of absence as leader of the German government and move to Washington to work full-time for Mueller “if that would be of assistance.”
Touting her credentials, Merkel told Mueller that she was fluent in Russian and could be helpful in translating the thousands of Russian-language documents that the special counsel has in his collection of evidence.
“I will work for free and pay my for my own food,” Merkel said. “I just want to make this stop.”
Mueller reportedly thanked Merkel for her offer but told her he had to wrap up their conversation because he had “Emmanuel Macron on the other line.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A Washington, D.C., man has won a nationwide essay contest on the topic “Why Donald J. Trump Shouldn’t Go to Prison.”
The man, Brett Kavanaugh, received his award for the winning essay at a ceremony at the White House on Monday night.
Kavanaugh’s essay, which was distributed to the press shortly after he was announced as the winner, reads as follows: “Donald J. Trump should never go to prison because he is the President of the United States and the President of the United States is a very important person in the country. It would look bad if visitors from foreign countries came to the United States and asked, ‘Where is your President?’ and we had to say, ‘He is in prison,’ which in my opinion is another reason Donald J. Trump should not go to prison. For these reasons, if I am ever in a position to keep Donald J. Trump from going to prison, I will do that (keep him from going to prison).”
Shaking Kavanaugh’s hand, Trump heaped praise on him for his “very, very beautiful” essay, calling it “maybe the best essay that has ever been written.”
“I did not personally read it, but Ivanka read it aloud to me, and I thought it was fantastic,” Trump said.
Shortly after Borowitz posted this report, Trump nominated Kavanaugh.
MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly made his final choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Kremlin sources have confirmed.
According to those sources, Putin whittled down a lengthy list of possible candidates to just two, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Thomas M. Hardiman, before selecting the one he believes will best advance the interests of the Russian Federation.
Those familiar with the selection process said that the Russian President did not consult with Donald J. Trump before making his final decision.
“Putin didn’t want one of those ‘too many cooks’ situations,” one Kremlin source said. “He told Trump that he would e-mail him the name a good half hour or so before Trump has to announce it to the media.”
Surprisingly, the usually brash Putin found the responsibility of choosing the next Supreme Court Justice “daunting,” sources said.
“Nominating a Justice to the United States Supreme Court is one of the most important decisions a Russian President can ever make,” Putin reportedly said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In the latest salvo in its escalating trade war with the United States, China has slapped all tanning beds slated for export to the U.S. with a two-thousand-per-cent tariff.
By artificially hiking up the cost of its tanning beds, China succeeded in sending the price of tanning beds worldwide soaring in overnight markets.
In what some experts regarded as a related move, China also placed a four-thousand-per-cent tariff on all spray-tan products headed for the U.S., as well as instant-tanning lotions, makeup foundation, and several popular hues of orange paint, including butter rum and burnt sienna.
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, blasted China’s tariffs on its full range of tanning products, calling the move an “act of war.”
“What China doesn’t understand is that it is far from the only player in the tanning game,” Sanders said. “The United States stands ready and willing to import tanning beds from our friends in Canada.”
In Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to reporters’ questions about the prospect of Canada shipping tanning beds to the United States. “It doesn’t look good,” he said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Shortly after the United States Supreme Court upheld Donald J. Trump’s controversial travel ban, millions of people from other countries expressed puzzlement that anyone would want to travel to the United States at this juncture.
In interviews with people from around the world, respondents said that the travel ban struck them as unnecessary, because the United States was not currently on the list of the top hundred countries to which they would consider travelling.
When asked to name the reasons they felt that a travel ban was superfluous, many of those interviewed cited the United States’s gun violence and crumbling infrastructure, as well as its broken educational and health-care systems, while others singled out its President’s startling disrespect for democratic norms and human rights.
Given those views, most of the foreigners interviewed said they found the news of the Supreme Court’s decision baffling. “When I heard that the United States was having a travel ban, I assumed that was to keep people from leaving,” one respondent said, echoing the sentiments of many.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—As new details emerge from this week’s summit in Singapore, the White House has confirmed that Donald J. Trump unilaterally offered to let Kim Jong Un have Mike Pence as his personal manservant.
The offer reportedly came after Kim spoke glowingly to Trump about the Vice-President’s obsequiousness, sources said.
“Even by North Korean standards, Pence puts my toadies to shame,” Kim reportedly said.
Once the necessary paperwork is squared away, Pence could begin bowing and scraping in Pyongyang as early as next week.
Going forward, Pence’s duties as senior sycophant to Trump are expected to be performed by Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California.
Although State Department insiders were taken by surprise by Trump’s offering of Pence, for whom the U.S. will receive nothing in return, the deal has been met with nearly universal approval.
“At least Trump didn’t give away much this time,” one diplomat said.
SINGAPORE (The Borowitz Report)—One day before his summit with Donald J. Trump, the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, has offered to host peace talks between the United States and Canada.
Speaking to reporters at his hotel in Singapore, Kim said that the rising tensions between the North American neighbors were posing an “intolerable threat to world peace.”
In addition to offering to host U.S.-Canada talks in Pyongyang, Kim urged the immediate creation of a demilitarized zone along the border separating the two hostile nations.
“In exchange for Canadian Mounties agreeing to stand down on their side of the border, the United States, in turn, would dismantle its nuclear weapons,” Kim said.
Although stating that “North Korea stands ready and willing to be an honest broker” in peace talks between the two countries, he urged Trump to dial back the “inflammatory rhetoric” that he aimed at Canadians over the weekend.
“Violent language and threats have no place in international diplomacy,” Kim said.
LA MALBAIE, CANADA (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that they were “tremendously relieved” that Donald J. Trump is leaving the G-7 summit early, the leaders of France and Canada said on Friday that they had been planning not to tell Trump the location of the G-7 after party.
Speaking to reporters, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau said that there had been “total consensus” among non-U.S. participants to withhold information about the time, place, and existence of an after party from Trump.
“The plan was, if Trump asked about an after party, we were going to be, like, ‘Ask Angela Merkel,’ ” Macron said. “Angela was going to totally stonewall him.”
Merkel confirmed that she had planned to tell Trump that she “didn’t think anyone was planning to do anything” after the summit and steadfastly to deny “hearing anything” about an after party.
“I would have had no problem lying to him, despite our two countries going way back, to D-Day or whenever,” Merkel said, rolling her eyes.
Trudeau said that the after party will proceed as scheduled when the G-7 concludes, on Saturday, adding, “Now that Trump is out of here, we’ll really have something to celebrate.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Schools across the country have cancelled tours of the White House out of concern that a chance encounter with Donald J. Trump could lead to an attempt by the President to teach their students history.
In an advisory sent to the nation’s schools on Thursday, the American Educators Consortium urged teachers to scrap all scheduled trips to the White House in order “to prevent the hard work you and your students have been doing from being totally undone.”
Carol Foyler, a middle-school history teacher from Bethesda, Maryland, spoke of a “scary moment” during a White House tour last week when her class had a “near-miss” with Trump.
“We were walking by the Oval Office, the door was open, and I could see he was in there,” the educator said. “I just said to my kids, ‘Keep your heads down and walk fast.’ ”
Foyler said that she considers herself lucky to have protected her students from the devastating impact of Trump’s ignorance, and acknowledges that the situation could have been “much worse.”
“What if we had been walking through the West Wing and found ourselves face to face with Trump and Betsy DeVos?” she said. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In what they believe is a legal masterstroke, lawyers for Donald J. Trump are now claiming that he cannot be impeached because he was never actually elected.
In a lengthy memo sent to the special counsel, Robert Mueller, the lawyers pushed back vehemently against any allegation that Trump was legally elected President.
“Because Russian interference made the election of Donald J. Trump wholly illegitimate, any attempt to remove him from an office that he does not legally hold is clearly impossible,” the memo asserted.
The memo claimed that the Constitution contains “no provision for removing a person from office when that person was installed there by a foreign power.”
The memo went on to argue that, if a subpoena is sent to the White House, it will be returned to Mueller and stamped “addressee unknown.”
“A person referred to in a subpoena as ‘President’ Donald J. Trump simply does not exist,” the memo claimed.
Minutes after the memo was leaked, the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani appeared on “Fox & Friends” and proudly announced that he was its author.
“Sometimes I have to just step back and say, ‘Damn it, Rudy, you’re good,’ ” he said, beaming.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President Donald J. Trump made Vice-President Mike Pence watch him issue pardons for several hours to see how it is done, a White House source confirmed.
According to the source, Trump pardoned a number of disgraced political figures and former reality-show cronies for the sole purpose of training Pence in the art of issuing pardons.
After signing pardon after pardon while Pence looked on intently, Trump commanded the Vice-President to sign a “practice pardon” to prove that he “wouldn’t mess anything up,” the source said.
Before trying his hand at issuing a pardon, Pence heaped praise on Trump for the pardoning demonstration he had just given.
“Mr. President, as in everything you do, your mastery of pardoning has been a wonder to behold,” he said. “I pray to God that, if I am ever called upon to issue a pardon, I do it with one-tenth of the skill and grace you have just displayed.”
“Stop sucking up and sign it,” Trump reportedly snapped.
NASHVILLE (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump held a rally in Nashville on Tuesday night and addressed his most ardent supporters, people who take the sleep medication known as Ambien.
Trump served up a hefty helping of fiery rhetoric guaranteed to appeal to Ambien users, whose votes propelled him to the White House, in 2016.
Trump defended his use of the word “animals” to describe some undocumented immigrants, earning a huge ovation from the Ambien-dosed crowd.
He also said that Mexico would pay for a wall on its border with the U.S., a claim that he has repeatedly made while under the influence of Ambien.
Although some have criticized Trump for using code words and dog whistles guaranteed to appeal to the worst instincts of his Ambien-using base, Carol Foyler, who attended the Nashville rally, disagreed.
“Donald Trump says what I think when I’m messed up on Ambien,” she said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House was reportedly in panic mode Tuesday afternoon, shortly after news broke that a television star with a racist Twitter feed had been fired.
According to a White House source, Donald J. Trump immediately huddled with close advisers to discuss the firing, which, staffers agreed, “set an ominous new precedent.”
“We’ve been living under assumption that a TV personality could tweet out as many racist things as he or she wanted with no consequences,” the source said. “Now, all of a sudden, our worst nightmare has come true.”
White House staffers are reportedly combing through Trump’s thirty-seven thousand tweets, searching for ones that could be deemed fireable offenses, and have so far flagged more than thirty-six thousand of them.
Many on Trump’s team are urging calm, however, claiming that the dismissal of one racist TV star could be an “isolated example.”
“The only people who can fire Donald Trump right now are congressional Republicans, and they don’t have the high moral standards that TV executives have,” the source said.
There are articles all over the internet about this since he canceled the June 12th Kim Jong Un meeting.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump was reportedly furious after the Nobel committee informed him on Thursday that he would not receive a Nobel Peace Prize but would get a participation trophy instead.
In Oslo, a Nobel spokesman said that Trump would have the distinction of becoming the first world leader to receive such a trophy, also known as the Nobel Consolation Prize.
The spokesman displayed the prize, a gold-painted plastic trophy measuring eleven inches in height and featuring a small man at its pinnacle, holding a tiny laurel wreath over his head.
Announcing the award, the Nobel representative said, “Although Donald Trump did not actually achieve peace, he did talk a lot about it, and that should be worth something.”
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The National Football League has expanded its list of banned substances to include the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the league confirmed on Wednesday.
Although the N.F.L. has long banned substances such as anabolic steroids and growth hormones, the First Amendment is believed to be the only right guaranteed by the Constitution to be included on the list.
Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, said that, by adding the First Amendment to the list of banned substances, the N.F.L was establishing a “policy of zero tolerance on tolerance.”
In order to enforce the ban, Goodell said that players would be tested periodically to determine whether they had used words, gestures, or facial expressions that are strictly prohibited under the new rule.
Speaking at the White House, Donald Trump applauded the league for banning the approximately seventeen hundred N.F.L. players from exercising freedom of speech, and expressed hope that the ban could eventually be expanded to include the other three hundred and twenty-five million Americans.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Seemingly downplaying the importance of his planned June 12th summit with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday that there were “many other Koreas” he could meet with.
“I know Kim Jong Un thinks North Korea deserves my attention, but the fact is that there are many, many other Koreas,” he said.
Trump made his comment while seated next to the South Korean President, Moon Jae-in, who appeared startled by the remark.
“There are so many fine Koreas right now,” Trump went on. “Big Koreas. Little Koreas. Beautiful, shiny Koreas. New Koreas are being discovered every day.”
In an apparent jab at Kim, Trump said that he planned on meeting with “only the best Koreas.”
“I’m going to have my people draw up a list of the finest Koreas, and, quite frankly, I don’t know if North Korea would make the top ten,” Trump said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump said on Monday that he is “a-hundred-per-cent positive” that an F.B.I. informant infiltrated his 2016 campaign but that he has “absolutely no idea” who that mole might be.
“I’ve been trying to figure out who would have the opportunity and the motive to do something like this,” he said. “But I keep coming up empty.”
“Opportunity-wise, you’d need to be someone who’s in my inner circle and who could get close to me without raising suspicions,” he said. “But, then again, the person would have to be able to suddenly disappear for periods of time and report back to the F.B.I. I can’t think of anyone in a position to do that.”
“As for motive, you’d really have to be out to get me,” Trump added. “Now, I have enemies like anyone else. But I can’t think of anyone I’ve given a reason to really, really hate me.”
Trump said that he would “keep trying to figure out who it is,” but he admitted that, at this point, the informant’s identity was “a total mystery.”
“I’m kind of an amateur detective,” Trump said. “I watch ‘Law & Order,’ I watch all the ‘Law & Order’s. I watch all the shows. But, I’ve got to say, this one has me stumped.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans are demanding an investigation into why, if F.B.I. operatives managed to infiltrate the 2016 Trump campaign, they utterly failed to prevent a nightmarish despot from being elected.
In interviews across the country, Americans expressed dismay and, in some cases, despair at the news that F.B.I. infiltrators might have had a golden opportunity to prevent the nation’s current unspeakable nightmare from unfolding but did not get the job done.
“The thought of F.B.I. infiltrators being inside the Trump campaign but not sabotaging it is, in a word, devastating,” Carol Foyler, of Akron, Ohio, said. “If it turns out to be true, I will totally lose my faith in F.B.I. infiltrators.”
Harland Dorrinson, of St. Petersburg, Florida, agreed. “If F.B.I. infiltrators were in a position to derail the most heinous threat to democracy in American history but didn’t succeed for some reason, that would be bigger than Watergate,” he said.
Tracy Klugian, of Denver, Colorado, said that a “full and exhaustive investigation” is needed to “determine why our system of F.B.I. infiltrators preventing a horrific proto-fascist menace from taking office somehow broke down.”
“We need to find out what went wrong and fix it before the 2020 election,” he said. “I won’t be able to sleep at night until I know that F.B.I. operatives are infiltrating Trump’s reëlection campaign and irreparably crippling it.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump has ordered a replica of the Nobel Peace Prize and is displaying it prominently on his desk in the Oval Office, the White House confirmed on Wednesday.
The replica of the Nobel medallion is mounted on what the White House described as a “tasteful black-velvet background” with an engraved plaque reading, “Donald J. Trump, 2018 Winner.”
At the daily White House briefing, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that Trump “took the initiative” to award himself the Peace Prize rather than “waiting around” for the Nobel committee, in Oslo, to bestow it on him.
“What with his successes in Syria, Iran, North Korea, and whatnot, the President already knows he’s a lock for the Nobel,” she said. “It’s just a formality at this point."
The fake Nobel was first spotted by Henry Klugian, a student who was on a White House tour with his seventh-grade class from Bethesda, Maryland.
“I thought it was kind of weird that he’d have something like that made up for himself, but whatever,” he said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it “maybe the worst deal ever,” Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he is considering pulling the United States out of the United States Constitution.
“I’ve seen a lot of bad deals in my life, but this Constitution is a total mess,” he said. “We need to tear it up and start over.”
Trump was scathing in his remarks about the two-hundred-and-twenty-nine-year-old document, singling out for special scorn its insistence on three branches of government. “The branches thing is maybe the worst part of this deal,” he said. “The first thing we do when we pull out of the Constitution is get rid of two of those branches.”
He also called the First Amendment “something that really has to go.”
“No one in his right mind would put something like that in a Constitution,” he said. “Russia doesn’t have it. North Korea doesn’t have it. All the best countries don’t have it.”
He stopped short of accusing his predecessor, Barack Obama, of writing the United States Constitution, but said, “He’s working hard behind the scenes trying to save it, because he knows that the Constitution is very, very bad for me.”
Vowing to replace the Constitution with “a new, much, much better Constitution,” he acknowledged that there might be some elements of the original document worth salvaging. “We’re going to keep the Second Amendment,” he said, “and definitely the Fifth.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a move that has stirred controversy in both legal and medical circles, Donald J. Trump removed Rudy Giuliani from his legal team on Monday by naming him the new White House doctor.
The decision to appoint the former New York mayor to such a key medical position raised eyebrows, in no small part because Giuliani would become the first White House doctor in history not to possess a medical degree.
But, in an official White House briefing to announce the decision, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, pushed back against the criticism of Giuliani’s nonexistent medical credentials. “Rudolph Giuliani is every bit as qualified to be a doctor as he is to be a lawyer,” she said.
Dr. Giuliani hit the ground running in his new job, immediately scheduling an hour-long appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program to discuss the state of Trump’s health.
“Is the President’s mental health good?” Giuliani asked on the air. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Is he all there? You really have to define what you mean by ‘all.’ If he’s out of his mind, so what? That’s nobody’s business. The important thing is, I’m on TV again talking a lot, and I’ve never felt so alive.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The special counsel, Robert Mueller, is actively considering what would be the most appropriate thank-you gift to send to the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a source close to Mueller’s team has confirmed.
According to the source, Mueller and his team were behind closed doors on Thursday morning to discuss the gift and appear to be close to a decision.
“They’ve been around and around on this, but a consensus seems to be forming on a bottle of single-malt Scotch,” the source said.
Moments after the news of Mueller’s gift to Giuliani leaked, however, Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’s lawyer, indicated that he had already sent Giuliani a single-malt Scotch on Thursday morning and advised Mueller to select an alternative gift, such as Dom Pérignon champagne or beluga caviar.
Responding to Avenatti’s comments, federal prosecutors investigating Michael Cohen issued a statement asserting that they had, in fact, sent Giuliani an entire case of champagne last night, which would appear to leave caviar as Mueller’s only remaining gift option.
The source close to Mueller said that, no matter what gift the special counsel ultimately chooses, it will be an inadequate token of gratitude. “You can’t put a price tag on what Rudy has done for Bob,” the source said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump deleted nine tweets early Wednesday morning in a failed attempt to spell the word “subpoena,” a White House source confirmed.
According to the source, Trump spent more than an hour angrily trying to spell the legal term before giving up in disgust.
“I’ve never seen him so enraged,” the source said. “He hates the word ‘subpoena’ more than the E.P.A. hates the words ‘climate’ and ‘change.’ ”
Having been flummoxed in the past while trying to spell such words as “heel” and “tap,” Trump now believes that the word “subpoena” is “out to get him,” the source said.
Speaking to reporters later in the morning, Trump called the word “subpoena” “disgraceful” and said that it had treated him “very unfairly,” but stopped short of threatening to fire it from the dictionary.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The National Rifle Association’s decision to ban guns during Mike Pence’s speech at its annual meeting in Dallas this week “leaves him totally vulnerable to a bear attack,” the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, warned on Monday.
Speaking to reporters at the Education Department, DeVos said that she was “deeply concerned” that the N.R.A. was underestimating the danger posed to Pence by “the savagery of one rogue bear.”
“All it would take is one angry bear to ruin what otherwise promises to be a really nice gun event,” she said.
She added that, after contacting the N.R.A. leadership, she was alarmed to discover that there would be no bear detectors at the entrance to the Dallas venue.
“A bear can simply waltz in there,” she said, shaking her head. “This is madness.”
DeVos urged the gun organization to rethink its plan and insure that every member of the audience for Pence’s speech is fully armed.
“If there are no guns, that is sending a very dangerous message to bears,” she said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Americans who were watching television on Wednesday morning witnessed the startling spectacle of an English-speaking President, viewers have confirmed.
All of the major cable news networks interrupted their regularly scheduled programs to cover the phenomenon, as a man who was identified as “President” spoke in complete, grammatically correct English sentences with no visible sign of strain or discomfort.
Just minutes into the telecast, thousands of viewers called the networks to inquire if they were witnessing a hoax.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Carol Foyler, a viewer in Akron, Ohio, said. “It had to be special effects or something.”
While the spectacle might have appeared jarring to many, cable news insiders reported that the networks had in fact aired several hundred speeches by an English-speaking President between the years 2009 and 2017.
SEATTLE (The Borowitz Report)—Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, announced on Tuesday that when the purported “pee tape” becomes available it will be offered free to all Amazon Prime members.
Speaking to reporters in Seattle, Bezos said that the pee-tape offer was “consistent with Amazon’s mandate to offer the highest-quality content to our customers.”
Bezos acknowledged that the tape had not surfaced yet, but said that Amazon was “working around the clock to make that happen.”
Bezos’s offer drew a mixed response from Prime members, with some begging Amazon not to offer the pee tape to them.
Over all, though, interest in the tape was robust, as pre-orders for the item quickly made it the highest-ranking product on the entire Amazon site.
According to its product page, customers who bought the pee tape also bought “A Higher Loyalty” by James Comey.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The independent counsel, Robert Mueller, told reporters that, prior to news reports on Thursday, he had “almost forgotten” to investigate the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
“Like most Americans, I had totally forgotten about Rudy Giuliani’s existence,” he said. “But then when he popped up on the news I was, like, ‘Hold on—shouldn’t we be investigating him?’ ”
Mueller was at a loss to explain why he had failed to investigate Giuliani earlier. “I have no idea how it could have slipped my mind,” he said. “His role in Trump’s campaign was as fishy as all get-out.”
He said that other members of his team were “poking fun” at him for not deciding to investigate Giuliani before Thursday. “I mean, think about it: how do you do a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign and leave Rudy out of it?” he said. “I’ve got to say, I’m pretty darn embarrassed about the whole thing.”
When asked for an estimate of when the Russia inquiry might wrap up, Mueller responded, “I honestly can’t say. I was hoping to bring it to a close in the next month or two, but now that we’re also investigating Rudy Giuliani, God only knows how long it’ll take.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House announced on Thursday that Donald Trump had successfully secured the services of Rudolph Giuliani, after an exhaustive search for an attorney with fewer clients than Michael D. Cohen.
“President Trump had become concerned in recent days that Mr. Cohen might be too distracted to pay full attention to his case, what with him having two other clients and all,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said. “So the search was on for a lawyer with zero clients, and with the hiring of Mayor Giuliani, the President believes he has hit the jackpot.”
Speaking to reporters, Giuliani agreed that, by virtue of having three fewer clients than Cohen, he was uniquely qualified to give Trump his full attention. “There is absolutely no chance of my ever putting him on hold,” Giuliani said.
While the former New York mayor’s hiring got high marks from Trump’s inner circle, it drew a bitter reaction from Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who angrily pointed out that he had not been considered for the job despite having as few clients as Giuliani. “Not only do I have absolutely no clients, I have even less going on, career-wise, than Rudy Giuliani,” Christie said. “Once again, I’ve been screwed.”
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans were stunned and incredulous on Monday after learning of a possible incident of bias at Fox News Channel.
At a time when so many American institutions have been under attack, the possibility that Fox, one of the nation’s most respected news organizations, might be susceptible to hidden agendas was too much for many to take.
In interviews across the country, Fox viewers expressed disappointment, confusion, and shock that a news network known for its exacting standards had imperilled its hard-earned reputation for fairness.
“I’m devastated by this,” Carol Foyler, a viewer from Scottsdale, Arizona, said. “If we can’t trust Fox News, who can we trust?”
Tracy Klugian, a viewer from Akron, Ohio, said that he had been “walking around in a state of disbelief” since he learned of possible bias at the network. “I’m trying to be strong, but it’s tough,” he said. “I know I speak for a lot of people when I say that today was the day that America lost its innocence.”
But some Fox viewers, like Harland Dorrinson, of Topeka, Kansas, warned of a “rush to judgment” against Fox, urging people to remember the network’s stellar record of journalistic accomplishments.
“Whenever there was a national emergency, whether it was Benghazi, Hillary’s e-mails, or Obama’s birth certificate, Fox News was there,” he said. “One little mistake doesn’t wash all that away.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—One week after lambasting the F.B.I.’s raid on Michael D. Cohen’s office as a “fishing expedition,” Sean Hannity said that he “totally forgot,” when he made those comments, that Michael D. Cohen was his lawyer.
“When I called the raid on Michael D. Cohen’s office a ‘fishing expedition’ last week, it completely slipped my mind that my lawyer is, in fact, Michael D. Cohen,” the Fox News host told his viewers. “My bad.”
“If I had remembered at the time that Michael D. Cohen was my lawyer, and that some of the documents that were seized most likely involve me, I would of course have mentioned those things on the air,” he said. “But honestly, the name ‘Michael D. Cohen,’ and the address of his office, just did not ring a bell.”
Hannity said that his wife would “have a field day” with his forgetting Michael D. Cohen’s name, because she always teases him for “having a brain like a sieve.”
“I’m always forgetting things,” he said. “My phone password. My keys. The name of my lawyer who did private stuff for me. That’s old Sean for you. I’m hopeless.”
In closing, he said that his newly uncovered connection to the F.B.I. investigation would “in no way” affect his coverage of the probe.
“I promise you, my viewers, that I will be fair and balanced, even though my lawyer is—what’s his name again?” Hannity said. “I had it on the tip of my tongue.”
Click the link above to see the photo of Melania.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Melania Trump said on Monday that she did not understand the controversy swirling around James Comey’s new memoir, because the book she is writing is “so much meaner.”
Speaking to reporters at the White House, she said that she had obtained an advance copy of Comey’s book because she “couldn’t wait to read it,” but said that she found its tone and contents disappointingly mild.
“It felt like he was pulling his punches,” she said. “No one will say that when they read my book.”
She said that, as a fellow-author, she had sympathy for Comey. “Clearly, he was trying very hard to be nasty, and he deserves credit for effort,” she said. “But I will show him how it is done.”
When reporters expressed surprise at the news that Trump was writing a book, she replied, “I am alone much of the time. That is ideal for a writer. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to my desk.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it a “regrettable accident,” Amazon apologized on Thursday for shipping ten thousand advance copies of James Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty,” to the White House.
Cartons of the book arrived early Thursday morning and kept coming throughout the day, until stacks of the book clogged virtually every hallway and office in the building.
Reportedly, Donald J. Trump was so incensed by the book situation that he screamed at Mike Pence while the Vice-President was in the middle of praising him, one source said.
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called any speculation that Trump had ordered Comey’s book “absurd,” adding, “The President does not order reading material.”
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said that he had “absolutely no idea” how the ten thousand Comey books made their way to the White House, but advised Trump to follow the procedures on the Amazon Web site for returning unwanted merchandise.
“You can print up the return labels at home,” he said. “The books should be picked up and out of there in two weeks, three weeks, max.”
Bezos said that shipping the ten thousand books back to the company’s warehouse would not be overly costly for Amazon. “We get an amazing deal on postage,” he said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a fit of pique, David and Charles Koch have unceremoniously listed House Speaker Paul Ryan for sale on the auction site eBay.
The Kochs, who reportedly had purchased Ryan for a sum estimated in the tens of millions, now seem likely to lose their entire investment.
According to Ryan’s listing on the auction site, the Kochs set a five-hundred-dollar asking price for the used congressman, a figure that, in light of the tepid bidding for him, seems optimistic.
“Granted, owning Paul Ryan doesn’t have the benefits that it’s had for David and Charles for all of these years, but the status of owning a former Speaker of the House has to be worth something,” one Koch associate said. “Certainly more than the current high bid of seventeen dollars.”
The eBay listing suggested several possible uses for the former House Speaker, including as a Halloween ornament or garden gnome.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Fox News Channel announced on Monday that it would decide what Donald J. Trump’s Syria response will be in the next forty-eight hours.
At a press conference at the network’s headquarters, Sean Hannity, Judge Jeanine Pirro, and the “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy said that, as the people who have been entrusted with the decision of whether to use military force, they were not taking their responsibility lightly.
“The U.S. military is the mightiest force in all the world,” Hannity said. “However we decide that President Trump will use that force in Syria, we promise that it will be a decision he will be proud of.”
Pirro said that she and her colleagues were taking “full advantage of the entire Fox News brain trust” to craft Trump’s Syria response. “The American people should sleep well at night knowing that we are keeping Tucker Carlson in the loop,” she said.
Ending the press conference on an urgent note, Doocy spoke directly to President Trump. “Mr. President, we’ll have a decision for you in the next forty-eight hours,” he said. “Don’t change the channel.”
MEXICO CITY (The Borowitz Report)—Hoping to resolve the seemingly intractable conflict over immigration, Mexico surprised the world on Thursday by agreeing to pay for Donald J. Trump’s psychiatric care.
Speaking to reporters, the Mexican President, Enrique Peña Nieto, said that he had authorized funding for the psychiatry and proclaimed, “Work on Donald Trump could begin tomorrow.”
Peña Nieto displayed several photographs showing prototypes of therapists, including a bearded Freudian analyst whom he said came highly recommended.
While some Mexican taxpayers argued that a full course of psychiatric treatment could prove more costly than a border wall, Peña Nieto warned against skimping on such a necessary expense.
“When the safety and security of the world is at stake, eight hundred dollars an hour is a bargain,” he said, but added that Mexico would try to find a therapist who takes insurance.
MADISON (The Borowitz Report)—Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, said on Wednesday that he was “dismayed and alarmed” that people in his state had somehow become smarter despite substantial cuts in education.
“Ever since I took office, I have slashed education with the goal of making the voters of this state markedly dumber and incapable of critical thinking,” he told reporters. “Instead, what I am looking at is a doomsday scenario.”
Walker said that his cuts were based on a theory known as “trickle-up stupidity,” in which students in Wisconsin’s schools would become less informed and their ignorance would eventually infect their voting-age parents.
“Clearly, what looked like a can’t-miss plan on paper has not panned out,” he said.
Although Walker said that “it’s not time yet to press the panic button,” he warned that a so-called Smart Wave could be coming in his state.
“If Wisconsin voters continue to get smarter, that will be the end of me,” he said.
AKRON, OHIO (The Borowitz Report)—Viewers of the Sinclair station in Akron were startled on Monday when a longtime news anchor, Carol Foyler, inexplicably began reading the evening news report in Russian.
Foyler, who is not of Russian heritage, greeted her audience with a hearty “Zdravstvuyte,” and then read the evening’s top stories entirely in her newly adopted language.
After racing through the local coverage, Foyler abruptly segued to footage of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, admiring the launch of his nation’s highly touted new Satan-2 missile.
Viewers flooded the station with complaints, with many expressing alarm that, in the words of one audience member, “something was up with Carol.”
“Maybe she’s taking Russian classes in her spare time, or something like that,” Harland Dorrinson, a loyal viewer of the Sinclair station, said. “Still, it made it really hard to understand the weather.”
Responding to the outpouring of concern about her, Foyler later issued the following English-language statement: “I am being treated well here. My loved ones need not worry.”
HOUSTON (The Borowitz Report)—Former White House staffers who were fired by Donald Trump held their first reunion on Easter Sunday in Houston’s Astrodome.
The event, which drew a crowd of approximately sixty-five thousand people, had been organized by the recently axed Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson.
“The turnout is just outstanding,” a beaming Tillerson told reporters. “Of course, most of these people didn’t have anything else to do.”
The reunion was a veritable Who’s Who of dismissed Trump staffers, with such luminaries as Anthony Scaramucci, Sean Spicer, H. R. McMaster, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon spotted side by side at a make-your-own-taco station.
While the event ran smoothly for the most part, there was one minor hiccup when David Shulkin, the former Secretary of Veterans Affairs, was briefly denied entry until he could prove that he had actually been fired rather than having resigned.
“We made it very clear from the outset that this party was for fired staffers only,” Tillerson said. “But once David walked us through exactly how he got canned we were, like, O.K., you can come in.”
Given the success of the reunion, Tillerson said that it was “more than likely” that he would schedule a similar gathering for next year, but added, “We’re going to need a bigger stadium.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Hours after an armed teacher in a Northern California classroom fired a gun and injured a student, the head of the National Rifle Association proposed placing a second armed teacher in every classroom, to shoot the first armed teacher before he or she can do harm.
“Had there been a second armed teacher in the classroom to shoot the first armed teacher, this regrettable incident would never have occurred,” Wayne LaPierre said. “The only thing that stops a bad teacher with a gun is a good teacher with a gun.”
The N.R.A. executive vice-president said, “In a perfect world, you would have a third armed teacher, in case the second one messes up, but right now I’d settle for two.”
He blamed anti-gun activists for blocking measures that would allow multiple teachers with guns to shoot at one another and thus keep the nation’s classrooms safe. “It’s time to stop the madness,” he said.
MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Calling the result “close but no cigar,” Vladimir Putin has conceded defeat in Tuesday night’s special congressional election in Pennsylvania.
Speaking to reporters at the Kremlin, Putin thanked the many Russian campaign workers who tried but failed to propel the Republican candidate, Rick Saccone, into the winner’s circle.
“Our social-media trolls did some of their finest work to put Rick over the top, but, in the final analysis, we were a day late and a ruble short,” the Russian President said.
Putin had high praise for the Democratic candidate, Conor Lamb, who, he said, “managed to win in a district that I easily delivered to Donald Trump in 2016.”
But he belittled the attempts of Republican officials like the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, to sugarcoat the Pennsylvania defeat.
“Last night should be a wake-up call for Republicans everywhere,” Putin warned. “The midterms are less than eight months away. Let’s get to work.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a freewheeling conversation with reporters after his departure from the State Department on Tuesday, Rex Tillerson said that he “really hopes” that Donald Trump finds out that he is being impeached on Twitter.
“I mean, the way I see it playing out, he’s up at 3 a.m., starting a new feud with Oprah or someone, and that’s when he finds out,” Tillerson said. “My only regret is that I won’t be there to see it.”
Tillerson started laughing in what some witnesses described as a demonic manner as he imagined Trump learning of his impeachment on Twitter.
“I mean, you have to picture him with his BlackBerry in his itty-bitty hands, and that’s how he finds out,” Tillerson cackled. “It would serve the bastard right.”
Composing himself, Tillerson added, “Let me make something clear. I’ve done well for myself. I’ve lived a full life and, by any measure, a successful one. But, if there’s one last thing I have on my bucket list, it’s that Donald Trump finds out he’s being shitcanned on Twitter. I mean, you want to talk about sweet.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Furious about her treatment on the CBS news-magazine program on Sunday night, Betsy DeVos spoke to reporters on Monday, and called “60 Minutes” a “total waste of a half hour.”
“I had never watched ‘60 Minutes’ before, but I can tell you this, I will never watch it again,” the Education Secretary said. “I have better things to do with a half hour of my time.”
Calling her interviewer, Lesley Stahl, a practitioner of “gotcha journalism at its worst,” DeVos said that it was “very unfair of her to ask me so many questions about education.”
“She asked me one thing about schools, and then another, and another,” she said. “If I had to answer every question she had about schools, I would have had to bone up on education for a month.”
DeVos said that she was “frustrated” that Stahl neglected to ask her about any of her “really good ideas” for the nation’s schools, such as “purchasing guns for teachers with money that is currently being wasted on books.”
“If a bear comes into your classroom, throwing a book at him will only stun him momentarily, at best,” DeVos said.
PYONGYANG (The Borowitz Report)—Kim Jong Un has revealed to close associates that he has offered to meet Donald J. Trump only as a means of achieving his real goal: meeting the former adult-film star Stormy Daniels.
A confidant of the North Korean dictator said that Kim revealed his true intentions behind the Trump invitation at a high-level government meeting on Thursday night. “Kim said that he was a big fan of Stormy’s, and he decided that meeting with Trump would be a ‘necessary evil’ if he wanted a chance to meet her,” the confidant said.
According to the confidant, Kim first attempted to arrange a meeting with Daniels through his close friend, the former N.B.A. player Dennis Rodman, “but, when Dennis said that he didn’t know Stormy, Kim was, like, ‘Oh, well, I guess I’ll have to go through Trump, then.’ ”
Kim reportedly is prepared to use whatever leverage is necessary to force Trump to broker the meeting with the erstwhile porn performer. “If Kim doesn’t get to meet Stormy, the missile tests resume,” the confidant said.
When told about Kim’s real reason for offering to meet with Trump, a White House aide initially expressed shock, but then added, “Now everything makes sense.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Just days after losing his top security clearance at the White House, Jared Kushner could soon be eligible to enter another high-security government facility, legal experts believe.
According to Davis Logsdon, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, Kushner could be on the verge of obtaining “long-term clearance” at this separate facility, which, like the White House, is owned and operated by the federal government.
Logsdon said that, although such a facility lacks some of the prestige of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Kushner would have access to government benefits there that far exceed what he has received as an unpaid adviser at the White House.
“All of his meals and housing would be fully paid for by the taxpayer,” Logsdon said. “And, if things play out the way some believe they will, Jared Kushner could be receiving these benefits for decades to come.”
While gaining entry to another government facility so soon after losing security clearance at the White House would represent an extraordinary comeback for Kushner, it would not come without a price, the law professor warned.
“Jared Kushner might have to put his plans to bring peace to the Middle East on hold,” he said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Wednesday that she was organizing a “Million Liars March” to support her co-worker Hope Hicks.
Calling on “American liars from every walk of life” to march, Sanders said that she had already received commitments from hundreds of liars in the White House, the Cabinet, and Congress.
“These people realize what’s at stake,” she said. “It’s not just Hope Hicks’s career—it’s the lying life style itself.”
“White lies like Hope’s were the lies of a promising beginner,” she said. “If Hope had been allowed to grow as liar, I have no doubt that someday she could have been as consistent a dispenser of ginormous whoppers as I am.”
She said that, if Hope Hicks is villainized, “where will the next generation of liars come from?”
Sanders said that the Million Liars March would address other issues of importance to the nation’s liars, such as a ban on lie detectors and a mandatory waiting period before statements can be fact-checked.
At the end of her announcement, Sanders appeared to choke back tears as she swore loyalty to her embattled colleague. “I believe in the mendacity of Hope,” she said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—With Jared Kushner losing his top security clearance, Donald J. Trump is concerned that there will be no one to read classified documents aloud to him anymore, White House aides have confirmed.
The aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Kushner’s recitation of top-secret documents had become something of a bedtime ritual for Trump.
“Jared would kind of tuck him in and then start reading aloud a document about, say, North Korea’s nuclear program or whatnot,” one aide said. “It got to be something that the President would look forward to.”
Whenever Kushner was away on business trips to the United Arab Emirates, China, or other foreign countries, other members of the White House staff would try to fill in for him at bedtime, but Trump would always petulantly reject them.
“He’d be, like, ‘You’re no good. I want Jared,’ ” the aide said.
According to the aide, Kushner had a “special way” of reading classified documents to Trump, “very slowly and leaving out any long words.”
“He’d read in kind of a high, whispery voice that the President found soothing,” the aide said. “Within seconds, he was fast asleep.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a moment of high drama at the White House on Tuesday morning, Donald J. Trump dove under his desk after a can of Diet Coke opened with an unexpectedly loud sound.
Moments earlier, Trump had pressed a button on his desk, summoning Vice-President Mike Pence to the Oval Office to serve him the frosty beverage.
According to one aide, when Pence opened the can, it made “an unusually loud noise,” sending Trump ducking under his desk in a millisecond.
At a news conference, minutes later, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, attempted to tamp down speculation that Trump had acted in a cowardly manner during the Diet Coke incident. “The President prudently repositioned himself under his desk in an aggressive crouch,” she said. “He was ready for anything.”
Pence agreed with her assessment. “The President was putting himself in a position where, if need be, he could defend the entire country against an attack,” he said. “I, for one, am honored to serve a man of such valor.”
The White House physician, Ronny Jackson, also had high praise for Trump. “He has the ability to flee a loud noise of a man half his age,” the doctor said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Shortly after he declared that he would have run into a Florida high school unarmed to thwart a mass shooting, Donald J. Trump announced that he was planning a parade in Washington, D.C., to celebrate his hypothetical act of heroism.
“Anyone can act with bravery in the moment,” Trump told reporters in the White House. “But it takes a very special kind of hero to tell people about the incredibly brave thing he would have done weeks after the thing happened.”
He added that it was one of his greatest regrets that bone spurs prevented him from serving in the Vietnam War, “because the really courageous things I would have done during that war would have been off the charts.”
“As soon as the Tet Offensive happened, I would have run unarmed right into that mess,” he said. “We probably would have won the war right after I did that.”
Trump said that the parade he was ordering would honor not only him but all of America’s “last responders.”
According to a new poll, Trump’s assertion that he would have run into the Florida high school unarmed was believed by his daughter Ivanka.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump was reportedly “furious” on Wednesday morning after a purge of right-wing bots by Twitter left him with a total of fourteen remaining followers, aides have confirmed.
Rising at 3 a.m. to engage in one of his trademark early-morning tweetstorms, Trump was incensed to discover that his Twitter following had plummeted from more than forty-eight million to a little more than a dozen.
At Twitter headquarters, in San Francisco, a company spokesman confirmed that Trump had indeed lost 48,076,920 followers in the bot purge. “It turned out that over forty-six million of the President’s followers came from a single troll farm in Macedonia,” the spokesman said.
As of Wednesday, Trump’s fourteen remaining Twitter followers included his daughter Ivanka; his sons Eric and Donald, Jr.; several White House aides; and someone named Heinrich Himmler III.
“We’re praying that Heinrich is a real person,” a White House aide said. “The President can’t afford to lose another follower.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans on Wednesday demanded that Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, issue them checks in the amount of $130,000 for not having sex with Trump.
After Cohen revealed that he had issued such a check to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who he claims never had intimate relations with his client, there was widespread outrage among other Americans who had also not had sex with Trump but had not been paid for not doing so.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Stormy Daniels,” Tracy Klugian, a florist in Santa Rosa, California, said. “I just want my check, too.”
Harland Dorrinson, a bank teller in Akron, Ohio, said that he had already e-mailed Cohen to demand payment. “I have never come close to having sex with Trump, and that should be worth something,” he said. “Specifically, $130,000.”
But, even as millions of Americans clamored to be compensated for abstaining from sex with Cohen’s client, others, like Carol Foyler, of Tallahassee, Florida, took a different view. “Never having sex with Donald Trump should be a reward in itself,” she said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a televised event that many deemed unnecessarily cruel, millions of Americans were briefly reminded on Monday that they once had a President.
Unsuspecting Americans who turned on cable news Monday morning were suddenly assaulted with the memory of a time when the country’s domestic affairs, international diplomacy, and nuclear codes were entrusted to an adult.
CNN, one of the networks that televised the event, immediately said that it regretted doing so, and acknowledged that reminding Americans that they recently had a President had caused widespread bereavement and distress. “CNN deeply apologizes for the error,” a network statement read. “It will never happen again.”
Compounding the cruelty of the televised event, the networks lingered unnecessarily on a speech that only served to remind viewers that the nation once had a President who rigorously obeyed rules of grammar and diction.
Finally, the reminder that the country recently had a chief executive who loved and respected his wife was deemed “too much” by many viewers, who felt compelled to change the channel.
“It was horrible,” Carol Foyler, a viewer who was traumatized by the broadcast, said. “It’s like when you stumble on a photo of an ex on Facebook and they unfortunately look amazing.”
PYONGYANG (The Borowitz Report)—In a week when Donald J. Trump suffered the worst hair day of his Presidency, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un taunted his American nemesis by releasing a photo of his own hair easily withstanding a gale-force wind.
The photo showed a broadly smiling Kim, his hair seemingly unperturbed by what the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) claimed were winds gusting up to fifty miles per hour.
According to KCNA’s news release, “Dear Leader’s mighty wind-resistant raven mane easily overmatches the American dotard’s sparse bleached strands.”
Perhaps in response to Kim’s taunt, the White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, held a hastily scheduled press conference to give an upbeat assessment of Trump’s hair.
“I have thoroughly examined the President’s hair, and in my medical opinion it is substantially thicker, lusher, and more luxuriant than Kim Jong Un’s hair,” he said, adding, “I hate myself.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The Pentagon has turned down Donald J. Trump’s request for a grand military parade in Washington, D.C., citing a sudden outbreak of bone spurs that would prevent men and women in uniform from participating.
Harland Dorrinson, a Pentagon spokesman, said that, within an hour of Trump’s request, more than a hundred thousand military personnel complained that they were suffering from acute cases of bone spurs that would make marching in such a parade a painful ordeal.
“In the history of the U.S. military, we have never experienced a bone-spur epidemic of this magnitude,” the spokesman said. “Regrettably, however, we have no choice but to issue thousands of deferments.”
A statement from the bone-spur sufferers said that they would continue to valiantly serve their country around the world in a non-marching capacity, and offered an alternative to their participation in Trump’s proposed pageant.
“President Trump is welcome to march in the parade all by himself if he would finally like to enlist,” the statement read.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—One day after the Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity blamed him for the historic plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, former President Barack Obama agreed to stop making stocks tumble.
“Sean Hannity has accused me of making the stock market go down,” Obama told reporters on Tuesday morning. “All I have to say is, ‘Guilty as charged.’ ”
A visibly chastened Obama said that, at first, he thought that he had gotten away with making the stock market crash, but when he saw Hannity blame him on Fox, “I knew I had been busted.”
Obama offered scant explanation for why he had made stocks crash on Monday. “I guess since leaving the White House I haven’t really found enough ways to fill my time, so tanking the stock market seemed like something to do,” he said. “But I know that’s not a good excuse. The fact is, I caused a lot of folks a lot of pain yesterday, and for that I am very, very sorry.”
He said that he would “get to work right away” to return stocks to their previously lofty levels. “I made the stock market go down, and, darn it, I can make it go up again,” he said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—After watching it suffer its worst losses since he became President, Donald Trump is “seriously considering” firing the Dow Jones industrial Average, aides have confirmed.
According to the aides, Trump is “furious” at the D.J.I.A. for going down so precipitously and believes that it has treated him “very unfairly.”
“Increasingly, the President has become convinced that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is not on his team,” one aide said. “Seeing the negative Dow numbers in the corner of the TV screen has been wrecking eleven hours of every day for him.”
Reportedly, Trump is mulling replacing the Dow with a new system, in which Sarah Huckabee Sanders would appear every day at 4 p.m. to announce how high stocks had skyrocketed.
En route to an appearance in Ohio, Trump stopped short of saying that he would ask for the stock market index’s resignation, but his contempt for the Dow was palpable.
“The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a disgrace, and it should be very, very ashamed of itself,” he said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Former hippies across the United States have been put in the unbearable position of rooting for the F.B.I., hippies have confirmed.
From Vermont to California, erstwhile hippies bemoaned a nightmare scenario that has forced them to side with a law-enforcement agency they have despised since the Summer of Love.
“I always dreamed I’d spend my retirement surrounded by my grandchildren, telling them that the F.B.I. were fascist pigs,” Carol Foyler, a former hippie who lives in Santa Cruz, said. “That dream has been shot to hell.”
Her husband, Mick, nodded his head in sad agreement. “We were so happy when pot was legalized in California,” he said. “But the fact that we’re now on the same side as the F.B.I. has ruined even that.”
Now in their seventies, the Foylers are spending their days doing things they never dreamed possible when they traipsed through the mud at Woodstock: going door to door in Santa Cruz, asking other former freaks to sign a pro-F.B.I. petition.
“Donald Trump has wrecked America’s standing around the world, spread misogyny and bigotry, ravaged the environment, and endorsed a child molester,” Carol said. “But making people like us support the F.B.I. is the most unforgivable thing he’s done.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump collapsed from exhaustion after approximately ninety minutes of pretending to be a human being with empathy, the White House doctor has confirmed.
Shortly after Trump spent a gruelling ninety minutes pretending to care about immigrants, the unemployed, and other people whom he normally dismisses as losers, aides noticed that he was turning from a bright orange to a slightly paler orange before crumpling to the ground in a giant heap.
“If you have never spent a moment thinking about a human being besides yourself, imagine trying to pretend you are doing that for a solid ninety minutes,” Jackson said. “It’s physically punishing.”
Immediately following his collapse, Trump was rushed to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where a brain scan showed that his brush with human feelings did no permanent damage.
“I just visited with him, and he was sitting up in his bed, trashing Jay-Z on Twitter,” Dr. Jackson said. “It was such a relief to see that.”
Vice-President Mike Pence, who reportedly reacted to Trump’s collapse by leaping to his feet and exclaiming, “Am I President now?,” was not available for comment.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is proofreading the text of tonight’s State of the Union address one last time to remove any remaining facts, Sanders confirmed on Tuesday.
While a team of wordsmiths led by the senior adviser Stephen Miller has attempted to craft an entirely fact-free address, “It’s good to have a fresh set of eyes to root out any stray accuracies that might have crept in,” Sanders said.
The press secretary said that, for example, while purging the speech of truths, she noticed a reference to the African-American unemployment rate standing at 6.8 per cent, a statistic that she deemed “unacceptably correct.”
“I read that and my Sanders sense started tingling,” she said.
Taking her blue pencil to the text, Sanders changed the number to a “better-sounding” 2.3 per cent. “That may seem like a tiny detail, but it’s stuff like that that separates the professional liars from the mere amateurs,” she said.
Once Sanders is confident that she has obliterated any lingering traces of reality from the script, she will forward it to Donald J. Trump, who will insert misspellings. “It makes him more comfortable reading it on the teleprompter if things are spelled his way,” she said.
The prospect of delivering tonight’s speech appears to have energized Trump, who tweeted early Tuesday morning that he was “very much looking forward to the Steak of the Onion.”
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—With just one day until Donald J. Trump’s first State of the Union address, the cast of “Fox and Friends” is working furiously on the final draft of the speech, members confirmed today.
“We’ve really been burning the midnight oil,” Steve Doocy, the host of the Fox program, said. “We have so much to say tomorrow night, and we want to get it all in there.”
Doocy said that when he read the first draft of the State of the Union address last week, he “kind of flipped out” when he realized that there was “absolutely no mention of Hillary Clinton’s Hydra-like tentacles controlling the Deep State.”
“The State of the Union address is the President’s chance to tell the American people where the country is and where it’s going,” Doocy said. “You can’t do that without talking about how Crooked Hillary is funnelling her Russian-uranium riches directly into Bob Mueller’s bank account in the Seychelles.”
While Trump reportedly has had input from other sources, including the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and several neo-Nazi Twitter accounts, Doocy said that the cast of “Fox & Friends” has final approval of the version that Trump will read Tuesday night.
“Someone has to have the last word,” Doocy said. “There are a lot of voices in President Trump’s head, and that’s not including the actual voices that are always in his head.”
Photograph on NewYorker is of Trump taking the oath at his inauguration.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—One day after Donald J. Trump offered to testify under oath for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, a newly discovered video of Trump lying under oath has sent shock waves through Washington.
In the video, which experts believe was recorded approximately one year ago, Trump places his left hand on a Bible and raises his right hand before uttering a stream of falsehoods.
“The video shows him lying in front of what appears to be a substantial number of witnesses, including his wife and a Supreme Court Justice,” Davis Logsdon, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said. “It does raise questions about what, exactly, testifying under oath means to him.”
At the office of the special counsel, Mueller’s team was reportedly considering having Trump swear on something that was more meaningful to him than the Bible, such as a rolled-up copy of Forbes.
But, while Washington mulled the implications of the explosive video, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, questioned the authenticity of the video itself. “The person in this video is not the President of the United States,” she said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Amid reports that Donald Trump might soon be summoned to appear before Robert Mueller, the White House doctor wrote a note on Wednesday indicating that Trump was too sick to talk to the special counsel.
“Donald Trump is not well,” Dr. Ronny Jackson wrote.
The doctor’s note offered a laundry list of ailments afflicting Trump, including flu-like symptoms, upset stomach, headaches, dizziness, confusion, and what Jackson called a “wartime foot injury that appears to be acting up.”
Jackson acknowledged in the note that his current assessment of Trump’s health was at odds with the robust picture he painted last week, but added, “Every patient is entitled to a second opinion, and this is mine.”
Minutes after the White House doctor issued his note, the special counsel responded by indicating that if Trump is too ill to come to Mueller’s office, then Mueller would be “more than happy” to interrogate Trump at his sickbed.
The White House doctor, however, quickly rebuffed this offer. “The strain of being under oath and giving truthful answers could kill him,” the doctor said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it “the least I can do for my country,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Saturday morning that she would lie for free during the government shutdown.
“Now more than ever it’s important that the stream of falsehoods and distortions from this White House continues to flow in a steady and uninterrupted fashion,” Sanders said. “To achieve that, for the duration of the government shutdown I will be lying on a pro-bono basis.”
Sanders said that Donald Trump had asked that she keep a full accounting of the lies she told during the shutdown so that she could be reimbursed for them later, but she turned down that offer. “I’ve often said that I like to lie so much I would do it for free,” she said. “This is a chance to put my money where my mouth is.”
The press secretary said that her offer had already inspired other top Administration figures to lie for free during the shutdown, including Vice-President Mike Pence, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and White House doctor Ronny Jackson.
After making her announcement, Sanders moved on to a broad range of other topics, including her assertion that the government had not shut down.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump is “scared to death” that the 2020 Presidential election will be decided by Americans, an aide to Trump has confirmed.
The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Trump is panicking over a doomsday scenario in which Americans, sidelined during the 2016 election, play a dominant role in influencing the 2020 contest.
“It sounds paranoid, but, as we speak, representatives of the United States are already plotting to remove him from office in 2020,” the aide said. “They are determined to replace him with someone who takes a move favorable view toward their country.”
The aide said that the Americans, frustrated by Trump’s open hostility to the United States since taking office, will “stop at nothing” to achieve their ultimate goal: installing an agent of the U.S. in the Oval Office.
“It’s pretty clear what the Americans are up to,” the aide said. “They want a puppet who will do the bidding of the United States of America.”
While Trump has reportedly ordered his staff to do everything in its power to prevent Americans from meddling in the 2020 election, the prospect of U.S. nationals deciding the next Presidential race has clearly left the White House rattled.
“Americans are going to use voter registration, social media, and anything else at their disposal to hand the election to someone who will advance their interests,” he said. “That’s what keeps Trump up at night.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A microwave oven that was present at last Thursday’s contentious White House meeting on immigration has confirmed that Donald J. Trump did, in fact, use the word “shithole,” as has been reported.
The microwave, which Trump uses to heat up popcorn, pizza rolls, and a variety of other snacks, offered its account in an official statement released on Tuesday afternoon.
“As a microwave oven in the Oval Office, I am in a unique position to hear what is said by the President in all of his meetings,” the microwave said. “There is no doubt in my mind that he used the word ‘shithole’ in the way described by Senator Richard Durbin and others.”
The microwave said that it had no partisan axe to grind in making its statement but was coming forward merely as a “concerned appliance.”
Minutes after the microwave’s statement, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, sneered at the oven’s assertion that it was impartial in the debate over immigration. “Like most microwave ovens, it came from another country,” she said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump demanded on Thursday that the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty be revised immediately to exclude nations he considered “shithole countries.”
Speaking to reporters, Trump said that the poem as it currently stands “is basically an open invitation that says, like, if you come from a shithole country, welcome aboard.”
“I don’t know the entire poem, but it’s something like ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your yadda yadda yadda,’ ” he said. “We could keep all that but then put in, right at the end, in big letters, maybe, ‘except if you’re from a shithole country.’ ”
“I think if a boat from a shithole country came and saw that poem with those words at the end, they would turn around and go right back to wherever they came from,” he said.
Shortly after Trump made his remarks about “shithole” countries, representatives of the countries he designated as such released a joint response.
“We do not understand President Trump’s aversion to so-called ‘shithole countries,’ since he is doing his best to turn the United States into one,” the statement read.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump issued a stark warning to the nation on Monday that, if elected President, Oprah Winfrey would force Americans to read.
“This is a woman who, every chance she got, told people to join her book club,” Trump told reporters. “If she were President, you better believe that she would make every single American join that book club.”
Claiming that Winfrey “never met a book she didn’t like,” Trump accused her of planning to institute an “individual book mandate,” which would require non-reading Americans to pay as much as two thousand dollars a year for refusing to read a book.
“People were worried about Obama coming to their homes and taking away their guns,” Trump said. “Oprah will come to your homes and leave books there, which is far, far worse.”
Joining Trump in his remarks was the Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, who warned about the dangers of Winfrey’s pro-book agenda.
“I am a firm believer in school choice,” DeVos said. “And central to that is the choice not to read.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump doubled down on his claims of being a genius on Saturday by surrounding himself with the most intelligent people he knows and proclaiming himself “the smartest person in the room.”
Referring to the associates gathered in the Oval Office as “my Brain Trust,” Trump said, “Every one of these people is a stable genius, and I am by far stabler and more geniuser than any of them.”
Trump said that the collective brain power of the other people in the room was proof of how smart he was. “Anyone who was insecure about his own intelligence wouldn’t surround himself with such smart people,” he said. “That’s why you never saw people like this in the Oval Office when that dummy Obama was President.”
Having conclusively proved how smart and stable he is, Trump said that he would spend the rest of the day proving how mature he is. “I’m, like, the most mature person in the country,” he said, “and anyone who says I’m not can suck it.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump, legendary among U.S. Presidents for his aversion to reading, demanded on Thursday that members of his White House circle act out Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury,” in a command performance in the Oval Office.
According to those who witnessed the dramatic presentation, Jared Kushner played the role of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump played the role of Ivanka Trump, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders played Steve Bannon.
Sources who sat through the private performance of “Fire and Fury” said that Sanders’s portrayal of Bannon was particularly impressive.
“Sarah’s a natural,” one source said. “At the end of the day, acting is just lying.”
But the performer who “stole the show,” according to one source, was Eric Trump, who was cast in the role of his father.
“Eric played his dad like a bumbling, spoiled idiot who couldn’t do anything right,” the source said. “It was the role of a lifetime for him.”
The President, who sat stone-faced as the spectacle unfolded, became increasingly angry and agitated, especially as he witnessed Kellyanne Conway’s scathingly sarcastic portrayal of herself.
Reportedly, after Conway mimed putting a finger gun to her head for the fifth time, Trump grabbed his remote and tried to turn her off.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Furious over a very public breakup with his former adviser Steve Bannon, Donald Trump on Wednesday angrily threw a copy of “Mein Kampf” that Bannon had inscribed to him in the trash.
The book, which Bannon had given to Trump as a token of his love and friendship during the 2016 campaign, had been among Trump’s most prized possessions, aides said.
“Trump loved that book, but now he feels that having Bannon’s name on it ruins it,” an aide said.
Another aide, however, cautioned not to make too much of the fact that Trump discarded the Bannon-signed Hitler book. “He’s still got plenty of other copies,” the aide said.
While most of Trump’s aides reflexively took their boss’s side in the dustup with Bannon, one staffer could not help expressing some sympathy for the exiled former adviser. “To be called mentally ill by Donald Trump—that’s got to hurt,” the aide said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was caught crouching under Donald J. Trump’s Oval Office desk on Wednesday, in an attempt to discon
The button, reportedly measuring a massive eight inches in diameter, has been a subject of considerable alarm for Trump’s national-security team since he had it installed on his desk, earlier in the week.According to White House sources, Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and the national-security adviser H. R. McMaster drew straws late Tuesday night to determine who would carry out the high-stakes disconnection mission.After Tillerson drew the shortest straw, he decided to enter the Oval Office surreptitously Wednesday morning while Trump took a bathroom break.
The Secretary of State had crawled under the desk and was on the verge of disconnecting the gigantic button when he was surprised by the sudden entrance of Vice-President Mike Pence, who had arrived to deliver his daily praise of Trump.
Flustered, Tillerson muttered something about “looking for my glasses” and quickly exited.
Tillerson, who suffered a gash to the head when he bumped it on Trump’s desk, was resting comfortably at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he was heard repeatedly mumbling the words “button” and “moron.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Starting 2018 with a political bombshell, House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Tuesday that he will retire once he is satisfied that he has completely wrecked the country.
“I came to Washington with the goal of destroying life in the United States as we know it,” Ryan said in an emotional press conference. “Once I look around me and see nothing but smoldering ruins, I’ll call it a day.”
Asked by a reporter whether, by passing the Republican tax bill, he had not in fact already wrecked the country, the House Speaker responded, “That was an important step in the right direction, but, make no mistake, there is much havoc left to wreak.”
“There’s a lot of talk about the millions of people who will lose their health care, but no one one talks about the tens of millions who still have it,” he said. “That just shows how much work I still have to do.”
Speaking solemnly about the challenging path of destruction that lies ahead of him, Ryan said, “I have many lives to wreck before I sleep.”