Trump’s Gym Class

At least he didn’t wear a red tie and kept his suit coat buttoned. I guess you could call that “presidential” given it was Donald Trump, who is usually as presidential as any London cutpurse who went unhung, to quote Dylan Thomas.

I know that the State of the Union address is required by the Constitution, but I don’t think that document says anything about people – lemming Republicans last night – having to jump up every 20 seconds and applaud like their political lives depended on it. Or that Democrats must sit as stony-faced as those Easter Island statues.

There is something terribly unseemly about old men in bad suits and worse neckties endlessly jumping to their feet to applaud a lying fraud who thinks they are all assholes to begin with. It is more than unseemly – it is pathetic.

But that is the true state of our once-proud union at this point in time – pathetic. Pathetic when a cheap grifter with a stupid, gravity-defying comb-over can bring seasoned politicians to their feet after almost every sentence he utters like he was Moses reading a first edition of the Ten Commandments. It was like a presidential aerobics class and it’s a wonder none of these geezers keeled over with a stroke or heart attack after all this unaccustomed exertion.

Oh, yeah, as a sideshow to  the bullshit flowing from the podium – fact-checkers are still parsing all the lies – there was Ms. Melania, fresh from a solo ride from the hotel where she is reportedly camped out – in a white pant-suit she might have borrowed from Hillary Clinton, another cuckolded wife (if that is the term … well, it is now).

Melania has gone further than any courtesan in history, including Napoleon’s Josephine, and is proving that silence is indeed golden when it comes to being the First Lady of a First Man who would make a locomotive take a dirt road. I can’t wait to read the book she’s going to write as sure as God made little green apples – green as in money.

Melania was looking well rested after a quick trip to a day spa in Florida that cost taxpayers 70 grand while Donnie was killing them in Davos. I guess the D.C. day spas don’t pass First Lady muster. She was as animated as I’ve ever seen her when she was congratulating some little kid who’d been responsible for putting 40,000 American flags on veterans’ graves. I guess that puts him in line for a cabinet position when he grows up.

And there was old Ivanka, the Second First Lady, looking particularly weird in some kind of suit deal that looked like it was made from the plaid slip covers you see on South Philly couches. She’s almost as tall as Jared, who seems to have only one suit and one shirt and tie – except when he’s wearing a Brooks Brothers flak jacket.

Sorry if there isn’t much State of the Union political analysis here, but that would make me a pundit, which is actually a Hindu word for “guesser.”

I do guess, though, that there are a lot of tired and aching old Republican knees today after Donald Trump’s gym class last night.