Donald Trump’s pretend presidential campaign has been in the news a lot lately and there are a number of reasons for that: a desire to get Mitt Romney so angry he’ll tear up his magic underpants, Charlie Sheen’s crass commercialization of the upper portions of his manic depression having rendered the entire “tiger blood” exercise cynical and boring, the next season of Mad Men being delayed until 2012, or maybe everyone’s just trying to learn the secret of Trump’s mythical double comb-over.
Whatever the reason, it’s suddenly become important for the media to go through the motions of taking Trump’s post-modern media blitz for the new season of The Apprentice seriously and print his moronic scribblings in places like Vanity Fair and the New York Times.
Trump is a big name and everyone in San Francisco knows that wherever there are big names, Willie Brown will be there to drop them. In his most recent weekly column, “Things I Said Into A Tape Recorder While Sitting On the Toilet And Then Gave To My Secretary Phil Matier To Transcribe Without Giving Them A Second Look”, His Willieness dishes about his good buddy Donald Trump.
“Trump is a friend of mine,” he beams (which you should expect, because, as Trump likes to tell us, The Donald has “a great relationship with the blacks”), then goes on to tell a story that perfectly encapsulates the cartoon rich person tackiness Trump has made it his life goal to personify:
I remember one time Trump sent his private jet up to Boston to pick me up for lunch.The plane had a bedroom filled with paintings you would usually find in a museum. “How in the hell can you keep your great art in an airplane?” I asked when I saw him.”Why not?” he replied, “How often do you hear of somebody stealing a plane?”
As New Yorker scribe Zachary Kanin aptly put it, “Donald Trump has class the way ants have testicles.”
Fellow Chronicle columnist Andrew S. Ross took issue with Brown’s chumming around with the reality TV star. “As a friend, perhaps Mayor Brown could organize an intervention for Mr. Trump, who appears to have gone completely off the deep end,” writes Ross.
“Brown didn’t mention it – perhaps he didn’t know – that Trump recently made himself leader of the birther movement, expressing ‘real doubts’ (i.e. based on crackpot conspiracy theories) that President Obama is a U.S. citizen.”
Oh right, that’s why everyone paying attention to Trump–he’s taken to reading the nonsensical, racist emails, written in baby blue, 24 point Comic Sans everyone gets from their right-wing cousin about how Barack Obama was born in Kenya/Indonesia/Hitler out loud on TV and has thus firmly ensconced himself in the embarrassingly weak field of Republican presidential candidates. (Brown and Ross’s savvy colleague Carla Marinucci is quite skeptical of these ambitions, saying that “He’ll take himself out of the picture before real voters get a chance to say, ‘You’re fired.'”)
Nowhere in his column does Brown mention Trump’s position as the standard barer of the “birther” movement, which is an ideological outgrowth of the wing of the Republican party bitterly disappointed that simply pointing at the President and screaming the N-word isn’t enough to disqualify him from office. This omission has raised more than a few eyebrows around town.
While we applaud Ross’s shenanigans-calling of Brown, expecting Willie to deliver a decisive smack down to the King of the Douchebags just might miss the point of Da’ Mayor’s column. If Brown saw Trump’s nonsense as a legitimate threat he would say so, like he did after Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008 gave him a political panic attack.
While he was wrong about Palin’s ability to do anything for the McCain campaign other than spend boatloads of its money on lavish shopping sprees, his reading on Trump as “not anywhere close to…a serious candidate” is accurate.
The point of mentioning Trump in his column wasn’t to score political points or enlighten his readers to the inner workings of the celebrity-industrial complex. He’s just angling for another ride in Trump’s jet.
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