Дональд Трамп - Triggered

Odds against being the nominee: 25 to 1.

Beto O’Rourke.Reasons to not vote for him: Irish guy who uses a Hispanic first name for effect. Waves his arms around too much. Fading badly. Wrote short stories about running over kids with his car. Was arrested for trespassing. Tried to leave the scene of a drunk-driving wreck that he caused, according to officers who were on the scene. Thinks he’s Batman.

Okay, so maybe not the last one. But did you really need anything else after the murder fantasy about children? I didn’t even think you’d read the next ones.

Odds against being the nominee: 25 to 1.

Cory Booker.I don’t think Senator Booker has much of a chance, but I’ll give you a good reason not to vote for him anyway: he has an imaginary friend. Not kidding. Look it up. On stump speeches and other occasions, he’s fond of telling people about a guy named T-Bone whom he met when he first moved to Newark. At the time, Booker was attending Yale Law School. That’s after he went to Stanford, of course, and after having grown up on the tough streets of Harrington Park, New Jersey. Not. Harrington Park is one of the nicest suburbs in the state. Anyway, T-Bone, according to the senator, is a “drug lord.” Call me crazy, but I don’t think they use the term “drug lord” in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Newark. T-Bone, Booker tells his audience, once promised to “bust a cap in his ass,” which sounds like dialogue from the 1991 movie New Jack City . Look, it’s as simple as this: Booker almost certainly made T-Bone up. He created him, I guess, to burnish his “street cred.” After all, when you grow up in a town where the biggest crime is low-foam cappuccino, you need all the street cred you can get. But don’t feel sorry for the senator from New Jersey. There might be big things ahead for him. I’m thinking a TV series: T-Bone and Booker . Got a ring to it, right?

Odds against being the nominee: 30 to 1.

Amy “Minnesota Nice” Klobuchar.Like Booker, Beto, and Mayor Pete, the senator from Minnesota is an also-ran, so I won’t give her much ink. But I do have a word of advice for anyone who goes to work for her: Duck.

Odds against being the nominee: 50 to 1.

The Field.I’m not going to go through every candidate because I love the outdoors and I don’t want to see trees go to waste. So in the interest of conservation, I’ll just put them into one big pile, which I’ll call, let’s see… Oh, I’ve got it! I’ll just use their polling numbers! You’ve heard of the 1 percent? Drumroll, please… let’s give a big conservative welcome to the none percent! SteveBullockJuliánCastroJohnDelaneyMichaelBennetTulsiGabbardWayneMessamTimRyanJoeSestakTomSteyerMarianneWilliamsonAndrewYang.

If you’ve been following the Democratic presidential primary race closely—and I don’t know why you would—you might have noticed someone missing from my name mash. That’s because I wanted to save the best for last.

Bill de Blasio.Worst. Mayor. Ever.

One of de Blasio’s first public events as New York City mayor came on Groundhog Day 2014. All he had to do was go to a zoo on Staten Island, meet the groundhog (whose name was Chuck), tell the people whether or not Chuck had seen his shadow, and go home. Easy, right? Not if you’re Bill de Blasio. When the zookeeper handed the animal to him, the mayor promptly dropped it on its head. Because de Blasio is about twelve feet tall, the fall was fatal. I’m not kidding; a veterinarian had to put the animal down a week later. So the first thing he did as mayor of New York was kill a groundhog. And things only got worse from there.

The police in New York City absolutely hate the guy, and I don’t blame them one bit. He has done nothing but undermine them and make it impossible for them to do their jobs. He told his biracial son to be afraid of cops! When a police officer named Miosotis Familia, a mother of three, was shot in the head by a cop-hating parolee, instead of going to the vigil in the precinct, de Blasio took a trip to Germany. Just recently, New York cops have been targeted by people who throw buckets of water on them. Under any other mayor, those people would have been charged for assaulting a police officer. But not under this mayor. Police officers, who put their lives on the line every day, are publicly humiliated, and de Blasio shrugs his shoulders.

By every single metric he’s a failing mayor. His school system consistently ranks as one of the worst in the country. Recently, he contemplated doing away with classes for gifted children. So he wants to put the next Einstein in with the Welcome Back, Kotter kids? Smart, Bill, really smart!

Along with being a terrible mayor, de Blasio is a very bad politician. So while cops are being assaulted, serious crimes such as murder and rape are spiking, and his constituents live in rat-infested public housing, where do you think the mayor is? In Iowa having a corn dog. According to the New York Post , de Blasio worked from City Hall for a grand total of seven hours in the month of May 2019, earning an effective salary of $3,080 an hour. There are probably people who spent more time waiting in line at City Hall to get married than the mayor spent working there.

Last May, he thought he would pull a fast one with a surprise event at Trump Tower announcing his version of the Green New Deal. I guess it never crossed his mind that there might be pro-Trump people in Trump Tower or that word of the event might leak out beforehand. By the time his pop-up presser was ready to go, we had the sound system cranked playing Tony Bennett’s “Stranger in Paradise” and Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Meanwhile, dozens of protestors, including a pro-Trump lesbian group, rode up and down the escalators holding signs and chanting “Worst. Mayor. Ever!”

Now, if you’re like me, you might be asking yourself why in the world de Blasio would think he could be president. Maybe it’s because his head is so high in the atmosphere that he’s not getting enough oxygen. Luckily, his odds aren’t great. According to the polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight, the mayor has a negative favorability rating. That mean he has a less-than-zero chance to win the nomination.

Odds of being the nominee: less than zero.

Unless my publisher gets hacked by Russians, this book should be on the shelves of your favorite bookstore in early November 2019, eight months before the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. In that time, candidates will make countless references to racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, and whatever the new giveaway of the day is. All they’ll do is prove that nothing has changed, that the Democrats are still obsessed with identity politics over real progress, proposing harebrained socialist plans instead of real solutions, and pandering to the fragile emotions of social justice warriors.

It’s the same old story.

17.

TRUMP 2020

IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T NOTICED, I’m not exactly a Hallmark card type of guy. I’ve never thought there was much value in sentimentality, in getting all misty about the past or whatever. Bleh.

But every once in a while, I do look back at what my father—and the rest of my family and friends—have managed to accomplish these past few years, and even I am taken slightly aback. Together, we took on the most corrupt political machine in the history of the United States and won. It was the greatest upset in the history of American politics, and I got to be the tip of the spear, or at least the tip of one of the spears. Then we weathered a political storm unlike anything this country has ever seen before, from the fake collusion allegations to biased reporters combing through every moment of our lives, to an investigation that seemed to go on longer than Game of Thrones , and we came out the other side leaner, meaner, and stronger than ever. Even for a not-so-sentimental guy like me, that’s pretty impressive. It’s definitely something I’ll be telling the grandkids about (if they’re not taken away from me by the gender-neutral AOC administration because I believe in binary genders).