Ourland

This article originally appeared in the Augusta Free Press.

It seems like pretty much everyone in America, save South Park and Gavin Newsom, is bending to Donald Trump’s will, so in honor of the zeitgeist, I’ve come to the rash decision to abandon my decade-long stance of anti-Trumpism and go all aboard on the Trump train. I don’t want to miss out on all the full-frontal winning happening right now, because there’s nothing Daddy hates more than a loser, and all I want is for him to like me, now that he’s got the throat of this country in his tiny han…er, sorry Donald, you don’t have tiny hands. That was the old me talking, the brain-dead snowflake who followed the lamestream media like a very low-IQ person. You have massive hands, bigly hands, really, and your hair is totally immaculate and real. Also, you’re not overweight at all, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone were wrong to portray your genitalia as underwhelming. You’re very well endowed, everybody knows it, everyone’s talking about it. Your friend, he called you up last week and said, Donald, we’ve never seen genitalia this big. We’re going to put it on a billboard in Manhattan! Why else would Melania be with you? How else to explain your massive underwear? 

I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to complete my metamorphosis from Never Trumper to Forever Trumper. Thankfully, the Trump store has me covered. I’ll start with a bottle of Trump’s official fragrance, known as VICTORY 45-47, which I assumed was going to smell like a compost pit, but according to a review in GQ, is “rather quiet, office-safe, with a sweetish and smooth amber-woody finish.” It should be noted, though, that this scent is only for “patriots who never back down,” which I think means you can only buy it if you assaulted a police officer on January 6th. At $249 per bottle (shipping not included), it’s a steal, considering it comes in a miniature Trump statue that depicts him as he sees himself: 150 pounds skinnier, with a stronger jawline, and made of pure gold. This is how I see him now, too, because that’s how he really looks: all the pictures and videos in the lamestream media have been doctored to make it look like he ate the Donald Trump from the ‘80s (well-done, with ketchup) and has been bathing in orange Shasta for decades. Fake news. 

After coating every inch of my skin in VICTORY 45-47, the next step is to overhaul my wardrobe, which up until this point has consisted mostly of gay pride jorts and Bernie Sanders ‘16 shirts. I’ll start with a MAGA hat, because that’s the most recognizable way to prove my allegiance to Daddy. I want one of those edgy black ones that Elon Musk wore in the Oval Office while sporting a shiner and tweaking on Ketamine, back before he threw a hissy fit and called Trump a pedophile, because black is the color of death, nihilism, and coal, which we’re bringing back, baby. Coal now and coal forever! 

Trey Parker and Matt Stone were wrong to portray your genitalia as underwhelming. You’re very well endowed, everybody knows it, everyone’s talking about it. Your friend, he called you up last week and said, Donald, we’ve never seen genitalia this big. We’re going to put it on a billboard in Manhattan! Why else would Melania be with you? How else to explain your massive underwear? 

Then I’ll have to settle on a shirt, which’ll be difficult, because there are so many great ones out there. I adore this “Daddy’s Home” one, not only because it’d pair well with my coal-black MAGA hat, but also because Trump looks super cool on it with his sunglasses and pink tie, and also because Trump is the Platonic ideal of a father figure, if you believe that all good fathers make hush money payments to a porn star they’ve had an affair with and say weirdly sexual things about their own daughters. Which is something I do actually believe now.  I’m also going to buy this Alligator Alcatraz shirt because nothing says Land of the Free like proudly displaying a migrant detention center across my chest. Maybe I’ll even travel to Florida and take a picture with the Alligator Alcatraz sign while wearing my awesome new shirt. That would be tasteful.

The shorts are a no-brainer: I’ll proudly sport these daddies, which feature Trump wearing an American flag bandana like he’s Willie Nelson performing on the Fourth of July. The shoes, too, are equally obvious: I’ll be the envy of my friends when I show up to a late summer cook-out wearing these gold high-top “TRUMP 2028” sneakers, which the official Trump Sneakers website called “pure fire. These are the gold sneakers every true Trump fan and collector has been waiting for.” I can confirm, as a newly-minted Trump fan, that I’ve been waiting for them with bated breath. And at only $799 a pair ($999 for two pairs!), they’re utterly affordable for the average working-class man who doesn’t mind missing a mortgage payment. You can’t put a price on winning, owning the libs, or openly mocking the Constitution by announcing, via reasonably-priced golden footwear, that you support a third Trump term. As the guys at Trump Sneakers put it on their homepage: “You can’t blame us for hoping and dreaming!” No, by God, you can’t, nor can you put a price on eating a hot dog alone at a cookout, wondering why all your friends snuck back inside when they saw you lumbering toward them decked out in Trump apparel. Freakin’ snowflakes. Why do they hate this country so much?

Speaking of friends and acquaintances: Trump has taught me the importance of culling these people for total, undying loyalty. He’s informally assigned this task to Laura Loomer, that rhinoplastic social media crusader who once applauded the deaths of 2,000 Syrian refugees, some of whom were children, claiming that she hoped another 2,000 would die. I wanted to find my own version of Loomer, so I went to the local circus one Friday night and approached the first carnival barker I could find drinking Jim Beam from a Slurpee cup and shouting racial slurs at passing children. His name was Larry, and he told me, between puffs of an unfiltered Marlboro, that he’d received a doctorate in espionage from Trump University, but that aliens had stolen his license to practice. I offered him a job as my personal whistleblower, instructing him to sniff out anyone who wasn’t totally on board with my nascent Trumpism. 

Dr. Larry quickly became one of my most valuable assets. I brought him to trivia night at a nearby pub, and he immediately went to work, belligerently calling out three of my long-time friends for having ties to progressivism, claiming that one had a great uncle who owned a Prius, another had a second cousin who lived in California, and the third once wore a blue shirt. Dr. Larry was arrested later that night, when he jumped on top of the bar and started hollering about how the Parkland school shooting had been staged, but I paid his bail the next morning, and we were gleefully reunited. I have the utmost respect for Dr. Larry’s brash tactics: his courage to croak the truth at the top of his cigarette-riddled lungs, even when it results in three officers violently pinning him to a barroom floor, proves that he’s dedicated to an America-first agenda. Thanks to him, I now know those so-called friends of mine were actually socialist traitors. Who needs friends when you have Dr. Larry? 

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It’s not enough to merely change my wardrobe and vet my friend group, because Trumpism is, if nothing else, about ideals over appearances, and if I don’t embody those ideals, can I really call myself a Trumper? First, I want to every police officer to know I Back the Blue™, that the rule of law is supreme and should never be compromised…unless, of course, those officers were defending the Capitol on January 6th, at which point I’ll scold them for interfering with a beautiful day of love, then cheer whenever the righteous patriots who beat them senseless are pardoned from their sentences. Also, most undocumented immigrants are rapists and drug dealers, as Daddy so eloquently put it, and it’s important to deport these criminals, which is why I support the brave ICE agents fighting the good fight by detaining people, many of whom have no criminal record whatsoever, at their immigration hearings.

But wait, there’s more: I think this country should embrace its history, not erase it, like the easily-triggered libs did when they attacked those pesky Confederate statues publicly standing in a predominantly black city. However, if the history in question conflicts with what Trump deems appropriate, I’ll fully support his decision to call for the removal of exhibits at one of our nation’s most revered institutions, exhibits that include, for some reason, a portrait of Fauci the Terrible and a sculpture of the Statue of Liberty holding a tomato. Woke is broke, and also a joke, a virus that has poisoned the blood of this great nation, and I trust Daddy to set the record straight: after all, he has a much more nuanced perspective on our country’s complicated history than know-nothing “scholars,” “historians,” and “artists.” Woke is so destructive, in fact, that I’m fine with cutting cancer research funding so long as it means that no studies use the word “diverse” anywhere in their text. Where are we at as a society when we’re forcing the toxicants in our air to be diverse? Is there anything DEI won’t ruin?

I want to every police officer to know I Back the Blue™, that the rule of law is supreme and should never be compromised…unless, of course, those officers were defending the Capitol on January 6th, at which point I’ll scold them for interfering with a beautiful day of love, then cheer whenever the righteous patriots who beat them senseless are pardoned from their sentences

Another thing I’ve learned since decamping to Trumpism is that most of life’s problems can be solved by either suing or firing someone. For instance, when my accountant told me my tax return wouldn’t be as robust as I hoped, I promptly canned her, because the only explanation is that she was conspiring to undermine my financial reputation. When she tried to explain that the numbers were the numbers, and that there was nothing she could do, I shouted “FAKE NEWS” directly into her face, then wrote a rambling ALL-CAPS post on Truth Social, that bastion of free speech and common sense, about how her numbers were “RIGGED” and that she was a “LAME VERY LOW-IQ PERSON WHO DOESNT UNDERSTAND NUMBERS LIKE I DO EVERYONE SAYS MICHAEL YOU KNOW NUMBERS BETTER THAN ANYONE IVE EVER SEEN YOUR [SIC] A GENIUS COVFEFE.” As far as my maximalist approach to litigation goes, I sued a local sandwich shop for forgetting to put a pickle on the side of my turkey reuben, seeking $500 million in damages. I sued a guy for refusing to hold the door open for me at McDonald’s, causing it to smack me in the face, which made me drop three Big Macs and an extra-large Pepsi onto my brand-new Never Surrender sneakers. “These shoes ruined my credit!” I shouted, before seeking $5 billion in damages. I also sued my dog because she won’t look at me anymore.

One of the most important lessons Trump has taught me is that I should bend the rules when it looks like things might not go my way. For instance, I was playing Monopoly with my two remaining friends the other night, one of whom was Dr. Larry. I’d already bought all of the red properties, but was envious of my friend, James, who owned all of the blue properties. I convinced Dr. Larry to demand James give me all of his properties, because I was paranoid about losing, and besides, there was nothing in the rules that explicitly stated I couldn’t bully James into giving me everything he owned. James left the room and started eating chicken wings in the kitchen, refusing to return until Dr. Larry and I agreed to play fairly, so once again I took to Truth Social, writing “I CALL HIM ‘JUMPY  JAMES’ BECAUSE HES TOO SCARED TO COME BACK INTO THE ROOM AND PLAY BY THE RULES I AM MAKING MONOPALY [SIC] GREAT AGAIN AND JUMPY JAMES CANT STAND IT!” 

James eventually went home, claiming he wanted to see his wife and kids (lame), and that he thought it was pretty stupid that three grown men, one of whom was a carnival barker who smelled like “actively decomposing beefsteak,” as he put it, had agreed to play Monopoly on a Tuesday night. After James left, Dr. Larry and I stood around looking at each other, until he blurted out, while picking a piece of red meat out of one of his three remaining teeth: “You didn’t want to be friends with that communist bastard, anyway. He used to live next to a wind farm.” Then Dr. Larry started questioning the fact that he’d been working for me for over a month and still hadn’t received a paycheck, at which point I assured him the money was coming, to just give me a freakin’ minute, for chrissakes, because the golden sneakers and victory cologne weren’t cheap. The night culminated with Dr. Larry storming out of the house, shouting about “going back to the circus, where he was respected” while tossing in a seemingly unrelated insult about how a Kamala Harris presidency would’ve caused the White House to “smell like curry.” 

There I was, all alone in an empty house, with a dog who wouldn’t look at me and the gold cologne statue of skinny Trump (is it actually Eric Trump?) leering at me from the mantle. I gazed down at my gold-dipped Trump sneakers, then deep into the beady eyes of that svelte golden effigy, and thought, for a fleeting and  misguided moment, that maybe, just maybe,  Trump was selling all of this merchandise to further enrich himself. Then I remembered what Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt once said: it was ridiculous to even think that Trump would do anything for himself, and that he’d actually lost money by becoming president. This eased my mind, because the admirable Ms. Leavitt, like George Washington before her, cannot tell a lie.

Then I remembered what Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt once said: it was ridiculous to even think that Trump would do anything for himself, and that he’d actually lost money by becoming president. This eased my mind, because the admirable Ms. Leavitt, like George Washington before her, cannot tell a lie.

It’d been a long, hard day, and Dr. Larry’s decomposing beefsteak smell was clinging to my skin, so I resolved to take a bath while reading a few excerpts from my newly purchased President Donald J. Trump Signature Edition Bible, which cost only $1,000 and another missed mortgage payment. It does, however, feature a copy of the chorus of “God Bless the USA” handwritten by Lee Greenwood, and I got a free singing tote bag, though I had to purchase two Bibles for that, which caused my credit to drop into the 400s. My personal economic ruin is a small price to pay for the joy I feel from expressing my total allegiance to Daddy Trump.

I settled into my hot bath, queued up a playlist featuring Kid Rock and the Village People, and started reading some of my favorite Bible verses.

I read Proverbs 12:22, which says “the Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.”

I read Romans 12:19: “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.”

I read Romans 16:17: “Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them.” 

I read Hebrew 13:4: “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.”

I read Matthew 5:44: “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.”

I read Philippians 2:3: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”

Then I thanked God for saving Trump’s life so he could save America. Dr. Larry was gone, and so were all of my friends, but I’d always have Daddy, and with him, every day felt like another wonderful secret.