| Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Media Syndicate. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. |
Donald Trump is poolside at Mar-a-Lago, waving to guests as they go by.
GUEST #1: Mr. President!
TRUMP: See you at the fundraiser for J.D. Vance tonight. Have the steak.
GUEST #2: Stop the steal!
TRUMP: Have the steak!
An aide walks up to inform him he has a telephone call and hands him a cell phone.
AIDE: It’s Kevin McCarthy.
TRUMP: Again? Should I tape it?
He takes the phone.
TRUMP: My Kevin! You should call more.
McCARTHY: So, Mr. President, now they’ve subpoenaed me.
TRUMP: The Academy Award.
McCARTHY: I’m not accepting it.
TRUMP: Don’t go up there and slap them. You tell me, which is worse and which is more dishonest, the Oscars or the Emmys? Should have won the Emmy. A con game. An irrelevant show. Can you believe that The Apprentice lost to The Amazing Race? No credibility. Low ratings. A joke. Should have gotten it. Stolen.
McCARTHY: They want to ask me about what I said on that tape.
TRUMP: Just say it’s fake.
McCARTHY: I did already. When it came out, I said, “The New York Times’ reporting on me is totally false and wrong.”
TRUMP: You’re on the tape saying, “What Trump did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it.” And you told Liz Cheney you were going to tell me to resign. It’s on the tape.
McCARTHY: I told Fox News, “I never told the president to resign.”
TRUMP: And what else?
McCARTHY: I told Fox, “It was a conversation that we had about scenarios going forward.”
TRUMP: Kevin, you know what your problem is?
McCARTHY: But I told Fox, “What was brought to me, it said I called the president to say that – to resign. I never called the president to say ‘resign.’” Now they say I’m a liar.
TRUMP: They only believe you’re telling the truth if you’re lying.
McCARTHY: But I said I never told you to resign.
TRUMP: Don’t kid a kidder. You couldn’t lie your way out of a traffic ticket.
McCARTHY: So, what do you suggest?
TRUMP: You want some lessons, my Kevin? Let’s go to the tape. First thing, you say the New York Times reporting is wrong. Right?
McCARTHY: It’s two New York Times reporters with a tape.
TRUMP: That’s your first mistake. The tape is a phony, it’s fake, it’s made up, somebody forged it, it’s a counterfeit.
McCARTHY: Deny the tape? With my voice on it?
TRUMP: Until they’re willing to say who gave it to them, it’s a fake. And, guess what, they’ll never say where they got it, never name their source. You win, it’s a fake.
McCARTHY: And resign, asking you to resign?
TRUMP: Resign? Nobody was on that call but you and me. You tell me what you said. So, you’re not lying if I say you’re not lying. What do you think I should say? I’m your friend, aren’t I, Kevin? But there are others who are not your friends.
McCARTHY: Liz says she didn’t leak the tape.
TRUMP: Listen, Pollyanna, it’s someone else who wants to put a knife in your back, wants to shove your corpse to the gutter so they can be Speaker. It’s replacement theory. Liz can’t be Speaker. Didn’t you love it when Elise Stefanik blamed the Democrats as “pedo grifters” for the baby formula shortage? A gift for words. A girl after my own heart.
McCARTHY: Are you suggesting Stefanik leaked that tape?
TRUMP: She’s got purity of heart. Not a dropout, like, well, not personal. You know, I like Matt Gaetz. I like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Don’t forget Jim Jordan. He’s subpoenaed, too. No tapes with him so far. But Elise, she went to Harvard. If I were you, Kevin, when I sit down, I’d make sure my back is against the wall. Make sure you can see who’s coming and going.
A guest walks by.
GUEST #3: Let’s go Brandon!
Trump gives a thumbs up.
TRUMP: Get the steak!
McCARTHY: Yeah, I’ll have a steak tonight, rare.
TRUMP: Well done.
McCARTHY: Thanks.
TRUMP: I mean the steak.
McCARTHY: And I’m not going to testify.
TRUMP: If you do, they’ll refer you for perjury.
McCARTHY: Not if I tell the truth—not that I’m testifying.
TRUMP: Nobody believes you’re telling the truth unless you lie all the time. When you lie all the time, that becomes the truth. Then people will believe you. But if you tell the truth and then lie, nobody will ever believe you if you tell the truth, or believe you when you lie. And for the people who don’t believe you, if you lie all the time, they have to say that you think that you’re telling the truth—“on the one hand, on the other hand.” If you get to be “on the other hand,” that’s the truth. The pundits can say “on the one hand,” but if you’re “on the other” you’re just as true. If it’s two truths, you’re still the truth. If you lie all the time, you’re “on the other hand” at the worst, which means that it’s true. Maybe “on the one hand” is true, but maybe it’s a lie, but because of “the other hand” is true. If you lie all the time, that’s the reality, and reality is true, it’s reality, so that’s the truth, but only if you’re lying, that is, all the time.
McCARTHY: I’m trying to follow.
TRUMP: On the one hand, you said something on that tape, and on the other hand you said it’s false. Might be too late for you, my Kevin. Flunked acting. The problem is you have to lie all the time.
McCARTHY: But I am subpoenaed. If I talk and I lie, they’ll say I’m lying. What do I do now?
TRUMP: Don’t talk.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln:A Self-Made Man,Wrestling With His Angel ,andAll the Powers of Earth. His play This Town, about a scandalous White House dog, was produced in 1995 by LA TheatreWorks. This is the fourteenth in his "Trump Cycle" series of one-act plays published in The National Memo, including The Pardon, Epstein's Ghost, Ivanka's Choice, Sunset Boulevard, The Exclusive, The Role Model, A Modest Proposal, The Exit Interview, The Hitler Gospel, Father Knows Best,The Gold Medal Winner, All I Want For Christmas Is Melania’s Non-Fungible Token, and Puppet Theater.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) didn’t pull any punches when she laid into House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on CNN over last week’s New York Times report of leaked audio in which McCarthy privately blamed then-President Trump for the January 6 insurrection and suggested that he resign.
In her Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Warren didn’t mince words when CNN anchor Dana Bash sought her reaction to the unfolding situation. “Kevin McCarthy is a liar and a traitor,” Warren exclaimed.
“That is really the illness that pervades the Republican leadership right now, that they say one thing to the American public and something else in private," Warren added, referring to McCarthy and GOP lawmaker’s willingness to support former President Trump publicly after the insurrection he incited.
Warren expressed her outrage at Trump’s allies in Congress, all of whom, she said, “understand” that Trump’s “attempt to overthrow our government” was wrong.
“The Republicans instead want to continue to try to figure out how to make the 2020 election different instead of spending their energy on how it is that we go forward in order to build an economy, in order to make this country work better for the people who sent us to Washington. Shame on Kevin McCarthy,” Warren added.
Warren’s CNN Interview on Twitter
Warren’s fierce rebuke comes at a time McCarthy is struggling to put out political fires in the Republican party after he is heard on tape admitting he’d “had it” with Trump and opining that the former president should take responsibility for the January 6 attack.
“Well, let me be very clear to all of you, and I’ve been very clear to the president — He bears responsibility for his words and actions. No if’s, and’s or but’s. I asked him personally today, ‘Does he hold responsibility for what happened? Does he feel bad about what happened?’ He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened and he needs to acknowledge that,” McCarthy said in a clip obtained by CNN.
Hours before the audio clips were made public, McCarthy and his spokesperson vehemently denied the Times’ reporting of his conversion, claiming that McCarthy had, at no time whatsoever, made or shared any suggestion that Trump resign.
“The New York Times’ reporting on me is totally false and wrong. It comes as no surprise that the corporate media is obsessed with doing everything it can to further a liberal agenda. This promotional book tour is no different. If the reporters were interested in truth why would they ask for comment after the book was printed?” McCarthy said in a statement.
Although Trump forgave McCarthy for the comments, some staunch Trump-allies, including indicted Steve Bannon and disgraced Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FLA), have ripped into the minority leader.
McCarthy will need Trump’s support to have a chance at the coveted House Speaker title if Republicans win back the House.
In January, DirecTV announced that it would not renew its contract with the far-right conspiracy theory network. Although OAN provided years of virulent bigotry and right-wing misinformation, including one reporter’s on- and off-screen attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the announcement came after a massive public backlash to a Reuters report which revealed that DirecTV’s owner, AT&T, played a critical role in creating OAN and supplied 90% of its income.
Once news broke of its DirecTV contract expiration, OAN filed a breach of contract lawsuit against AT&T and briefly solicited viewers for “dirt” on AT&T’s board chair. Meanwhile, OAN programming has gotten worse since January, as the network doubled down on old staples like anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election, as well as irresponsible coverage of new topics like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The OAN line on COVID-19 vaccines, as delivered by correspondent Pearson Sharp, is that the vaccines are “turning into DNA” to become “part of your body’s genetic code,” meaning that “there’s a good chance they could … kill you.” None of this is true, but in February, Sharp took these abject lies about vaccine mortality in a genocidal direction, telling OAN viewers that the survival of the United States depended on COVID-19 vaccines killing liberals. Sharp also appeared on Infowars, where he hypothesized that COVID-19 restrictions could spark a justified revolution.
Though she was not OAN’s only misinformer about the 2020 election, former host Christina Bobb became the network’s face of its attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. She fought for, reported on, and fundraised for the Arizona “audit,” and before she left OAN in March to work for former President Donald Trump, Bobb had begun a new phase of her pressure campaign against state-level Republicans to begin new “audits.”
OAN also attached its brand of unhinged conspiracy theories to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Multiple OAN figures have suggested or stated that the Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, was what Sharp called a “false flag operation” connected to billionaire George Soros.
But few OAN personalities took as much of an interest in spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine as prime-time host Dan Ball, who repeatedly spread Russian government propaganda about nonexistent “biochemical weapons plants” in Ukraine, and seems to fervently believe that the war somehow involves President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and the 2020 Trump campaign’s old, desperate allegations against Biden and a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. In one segment about Ukraine, Ball even agreed with a guest that the U.S. military should invade and occupy northern Mexico because of immigration.
OAN also spent the past few weeks directing viewers’ ire toward Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. Like much of right-wing media, OAN is enthralled by the false narrative that Jackson “lets pedos out of jail early,” according to Ball, who also called the accomplished jurist “scum” based on this smear. OAN programming has called Jackson part of “the pedophilia problem that is currently happening in the left,” an unmistakable reference to QAnon lies (previously seen during the pre-QAnon Pizzagate era) that liberal elites participate in the systematic sexual exploitation of children.
In what may be OAN's waning days, as DirecTV essentially replaced it with Fox Nation and some of its more visible “talent” have fled the sinking ship, OAN launched its own streaming service in an attempt to stay alive. While subscriber numbers are not publicly known, it seems unlikely that “OANN Live” will make up for the financial loss of OAN’s DirecTV contract.
More importantly, OAN’s conduct since losing DirecTV -- suing its former carrier, spreading Russian propaganda, convincing viewers that not only will vaccines kill people but some of them have to die, to say nothing of its shockingly hateful anti-LGBTQ content -- should make it clear to any TV provider that this litigious, conspiratorial disaster of a channel is simply not worth the trouble.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
The National Memo is a political newsletter and website that combines the spirit of investigative journalism with new technology and ideas. We cover campaigns, elections, the White House, Congress, and the world with a fresh outlook. Our own journalism — as well as our selections of the smartest stories available every day — reflects a clear and strong perspective, without the kind of propaganda, ultra-partisanship and overwrought ideology that burden so much of our political discourse.
