I do not know for a fact that the president did not read James Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership. But that would not be surprising.
Many intelligent Americans, like myself, read only reviews. So we know just enough to hold our own should the subject come up at cocktail parties.
However POTUS found out about it, he apparently did not like it, especially the part about him.
He called the author “a slimeball.” Not only once, but twice in a three-day period (April 13–15, 2018).
As if that wasn’t hurtful enough, he called Comey “an untruthful slimeball” on his Twitter account, the official record of the Trump administration, whose tweets will be ensconced in the Library of Congress until the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library opens (Donations now being accepted).18
A “slimeball,” you should know, is a serious charge. Not as strong as “stupid putz,” perhaps, but nothing you can get away with on the sidewalks of New York, where the president learned English as a first language.
Basically, what the book suggests, as I gather, is that the president is unfit to govern. But what really upset him is the Steele dossier allegation that he attended a golden showers performance by two Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room in 2013 for his edification.
According to multiple sources, the Steele dossier alleges that the real estate mogul, who had come to Moscow on a nookie inspection tour as the czar of the Ms. Universe Contest, which he also owns, reserved the Ritz-Carlton’s presidential suite, had the prostitutes defile the bed previously slept on by Barack and Michelle Obama, a rite secretly recorded by the Kremlin for historic purposes unknown.
“Do I look like the kind of guy who needs to pay hookers?” he asked his soon-to-be fired FBI director.
Besides, as he explained before he ran for president, he’s germophobic. “There’s no way I’d let people pee on each other,” he informed his chief law enforcement officer.
Furthermore, he didn’t even spend the night in his room at the Ritz-Carlton. He had flown in, used the suite to change his clothes, and flown home to his wife at Trump Tower New York the same night.
The husband of the year wanted his FBI director to say those allegations about the urination bit were not true. It hurt his image as what a great guy he is, indulging in a perversion that was un-American, and made him sound, as he put it, “like a pee brain.”
If it happened, which it didn’t, as he said, he was only there to inspect plumbing facilities at your average Russian hotel.
Whatever.
Our commander in chief was already bummed out with the seeming breakup of his romance with Vladimir the Poisoner. For months before Comey’s book, Trump’s enemies had been alarmed at the bromance with the ex-KGB killer, making him look like some kind of Communist sympathizer or even a traitor. Just when we were about to learn that, as an act of friendship, our POTUS was planning to endorse the Moscow plan to set up Soviets in Lowell, Massachusetts, and elsewhere his friends the Russians were implicated in Syrian chemical warfare.
The president was being hammered on major issues like the size of his hands and what made his complexion so orange these nights on the TV news.19
And then that of the 155 missiles—including forty of the extended-range version of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, carried by Air Force B-1B Lancer stealth bombers—launched in the midst of Lyin’ Jim Comey’s media blitz: true weapons of mass distraction!
Violating his own policy of not telegraphing military action, our emotionally unhinged commander in chief had called the Operation Slimeball (unofficial nomenclature) weapons “nice, new . . . and smart.” As The Orangeman wrote on Twitter of record, “Mission accomplished!”
But it turned out they were not that smart, leaving the Russian-Iranian-Syrian axis of evil supply of poison gases untouched, a military action which left everybody, except the president with small hands, scratching their heads.
The escalation from hurling epithets to launching missiles, unpresidented in this pundit’s view, as a policy initiative will be debated by future chroniclers of the wild and crazy Trumpian epoch.
What worries me now is what the war of words between His Orangeness, a sensitive president more concerned about his image than saving the planet, and a self-righteous Dudley Do-Right lawman conducting a mea no culpa campaign, might accidentally provoke before winding up in the waste basket of history?
Like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow that is said to have knocked over the lantern in the family barn that caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, or the accidental assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914 that caused World War I, it would be ironic if the end of our world was a result of a hissy fit over literary criticism.
Go know, as they say in Serbo-Croatian.