2. The Most Famous Swede of All
Among the achievements the president did not list in the State of Disunion 2018 message—some of which dated to the first year of the Hoover administration (1929) and not including having the greatest number of wife-beaters, per capita, on staff in the history of the White House—was his most recent contribution to civic discourse.
I am referring to the remarks he made during a discussion with congressional leaders regarding immigration reform. As you recall, the greatest statesman of the century, in his mind, questioned why USA should accept immigrants from Haiti and shithole countries in Africa.
Many parts of the world were shocked at the greatest statesman of the century’s vulgar insult of underachieving friendly nations who meant well, taking further umbrage at the codicil to his message that we should be bringing in more Norwegians.
Some picky critics wanted to know what self-respecting Norwegian would want to come to a shithole country like ours that didn’t even have national health insurance and that made students leave university with $100,000 or more worth of debt and still unable to find suitable jobs?
As the shithole hit the fan around the world, our chief executive, as is his custom when it gets too hot in the kitchen, denied he had said the offensive word.
The senators taking that meeting in the Oval Office didn’t hear right, argued the Leader of the Free World (LFW).
What he actually said, the president explained, was not shitholes but shithouses.15
Like many incendiary pronunciamentos in his first years in office, there is an illogic about immigration that is so Trumpian. As I recall, there seemed to be some confusion about the Trump family immigration status.
Readers of the official campaign autobiography The Art of the Deal learned the Trumps came from Sweden, as the most famous Swede of them all attested.16
That reminded me of the Saturday Night Live transcendental classic family sketch series, “The Coneheads.” Whenever nosy next-door neighbors inquired where they were from, Papa Conehead replied, “We are from France.”
What might have been a misspeaking or mishearing, whatever, had the additional advantage of briefly changing the national conversation. Instead of collusion with the Russians, everybody I know was playing a new parlor game. It began with the question, “And what shithole country did your grandparents come from?”