The Dopey Awards

The winner of the dumbest person of the year award is…

Without further ado, and despite the multiplicity of candidates on the short list of hundreds, the winner of the dumbest person of the year prize… the envelope, please…

Is Donald Trump Jr.

It may sound disrespectful to the first family, but the lucky winner of this year’s coveted Dopey, as the award is known, had an unfair advantage, genetically.

History may tell yell us yet that the 2016 prize-winner’s father is the dumbest president ever, if you can believe history, which is filled with fake news and alternative facts. Dumber even than the last Republican businessman president, Warren Harding? He was another really dumb cluck.

With all due respect, the president has had a long record of stupidity, first winning acclaim in the field for doubting a previous president’s legitimacy for seven years, questioning the authenticity of a mere birth certificate.

Also to his credit were his four bankruptcies, nine failing business with his brand name, none of which prevented him from claiming to being a business genius.

Trump Junior, the president‘s namesake and hair apparent, always struck some of us students of stupidity as dumb as a golf bag. He made his father look like a rocket scientist in comparison, a chip off the old blockhead.

What impressed the judges most recently was the secret meeting Donald the Younger took with the shady Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was said to have contacts with the Kremlin, if not the Big Stroganoff himself (Putin), but maybe just some peasant vodka shot glass washer in the Politburo.

Every day, it seemed, there were revelations in the fake press about the number of mystery guests in the Russian tearoom, as this observer thought of the executive offices in Trump Tower, judging by the number of Russian lawyers, bankers, oligarchs, and embassy officialdom with access to the Trump Inc. samovar.

It had reached eight, according to NBC News, when I stopped following the body count. But I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn participants included the Russian Women’s Olympic Beach Volley Ball team. Perhaps even an undercover FBI agent or two.

The way the media was covering what the president called “the Russian thing,” a hoax, like global warming – especially by the New York (“All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print”) Times and the Washington Post, the most trusted name in fake news, in a battle for the Pulitzer Prize in fake news-- it was beginning to sound like Trump Tower had become the home one of those pre-war Soviet-American Friendship Societies, which sometimes had as many undercover FBI members as co-existence dupes.

You could tell them apart by their three-button suits, fedora hats, and black shoes, the disguises they also used at later Vietnam War protest rallies, taking down hippie car license plates for J. Edgar Hoover’s subversive files.

The Trump cell meeting with Comrade Natalia and her delegation included almost all of the future president’s men, such dignitaries as campaign manager Paul Manafort, the noted Ukraine election manipulator and, of course, the control freak, Jared Kushner. Just the other day the president’s right hand son-in-law was throwing his brother-in-law under the bus by telling Congress that he was only passing by, in effect, on his way to the men’s room, not really taking the meeting.

What was the meeting about?

“Nothing,” Trump the Younger initially told reporters covering the case. “Is it as cold in Siberia in winter, as they say?”

Then it was all about the Russian ban on baby adoption by U.S. citizens, in retaliation for Congress passing the Magnitsky Act.

Before we could wipe the tears from our eyes about the babies, emails came to light suggesting Trump Jr. expected the meetings to be about the transfer of damaging information against Horrible (“ Lock her Up”) Hillary, which could affect the election outcome.

Holy Trotsky! That sounded like collusion.

Here was the clincher for the Dopey award committee deliberations.

In the spirit of full transparency, and because the New York Times was breaking the story about the secret meeting the next morning young Trump released the full email skein.

The prospect of sharing information with the Rooskies thrilled him in the emails. He was dancing the kazatsky down the halls of the 26^th floor.

As smart as he is, Mister Transparency still hadn’t learned that while emails were not as public as a billboard in Times Square innermost thoughts on The Internet could be a smoking gun.

There is no free lunch in dealing with the Commies. What might a Kremlin expect in return for aiding a Trump administration? The price might be Sanction removal?

Nevertheless, the Clown-in-chief expressed full confidence in whatever dumb thing his son, the joker, had done.

I could regale stupidity fans with the title winner’s other exploits in stupidity. Suffice it to say here, and to keep this citation on a higher cultural level, it reminds me of another iconic American family, the Corleones. Donald Junior is the Fredo of the Trump family, which is unfair to Fredo, if you know your “Godfather.”

You can understand why Father Trump keeps daughter Ivanka by his side at all those big meetings at his day job as president.

I am not suggesting that Fredo Trump register as a foreign agent or lobbyist, although it might not be such a bad idea for the whole family as a precaution.

And I don’t care if the Trumps invite the Red Army Chorus to serenade them with “Meadowlands” at the next meeting they take with people close to the Kremlin. But it looks and smells bad to some of us, if not the base.

A poll the other day showed that a high percentage of those who voted for Trump do not believe that Donald Jr. even attended the meeting he arranged. As Tony Insolia, my old editor at Newsday observed, “we have always known that ignorance is bliss.”

30

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Marvin Kitman
July 27, 2017